The h sound in middle Chinese shifted to sh in modern Mandarin (also attested to by cognates in Japanese and Korean). Sound shifts tend to recur the same way across the world. But I hadn’t encountered any languages wherein this happened, until now. Oddly, the shift appears to have happened in reverse happened when Akkadian evolved into West Semitic languages (Aramaic, Hebrew, Arabic).
Akkadian is generally considered to be older than Aramaic. Akkadian is an ancient Semitic language that was spoken in Mesopotamia, primarily in the region of ancient Sumer and Babylon, dating back to the third millennium BCE. It is one of the earliest known written languages and was used in the cuneiform script on clay tablets for various administrative, religious, and literary purposes.
Aramaic, on the other hand, is also an ancient Semitic language but emerged later than Akkadian. Aramaic is believed to have originated in the 11th century BCE and was spoken in a wide geographic area, including parts of modern-day Syria, Iraq, Iran, and beyond. It became a lingua franca in the ancient Near East and was widely used for trade, diplomacy, and communication among different peoples.
So, to summarize, Akkadian predates Aramaic in terms of its historical attestation and use.
Or, maybe it was “h” in Proto-Semitic and only Akkadian shifted.
Yeah, you didn’t write x or ɕ though, you just used sh and followed that up with Modern Chinese. It’s kind of hard to guess you meant ɕ.
In that case, you are talking about the bottom route of g/q > k > kh > h > ɕ > s
I find it difficult to imagine ɕ or ʃ could turn into h, so I would guess in the case of Semitic languages, the ones with h have the more conservative feature.
When the Ming empire collapsed, the Guanhua (Chinese koine) at the time was based on the Nanjing accent, and that was evident in Matteo Ricci, Ferdinand Verbiest and Johann Adam Schall von Bell’s records.
The current form of Mandarin wasn’t widely used in Beijing’s outer city even by 1815 when Robert Morrison wrote his Chinese dictionary.
So the current form of Mandarin probably didn’t gain its current status until the 1850s. Based on that, the current form of Mandarin is probably at most 200 years old, and grew out of the Manchu-Old Pekingese pidgin adopted by the Manchus living in the Inner city.
I wrote a much more detailed post on this subject here:
