Archive for Language and kinship

The E-V22 haplogroup and its East Asian congeners, ancient and modern

[This is a guest post by Matthew Marcucci]

Population genetics is proving to be astonishingly useful in aiding the study of history, linguistics, archaeology, anthropology, and other disciplines.  One means of studying ancient human migrations is analysis of the so-called yDNA haplogroup.  In reviewing the modern-day distribution of my own yDNA haplogroup, I have come upon a fascinating contemporary Chinese lineage that may ultimately derive from an ancient or medieval Iranian or Caucasian source population.

Briefly, yDNA haplogroups result from the following basic process:  All men inherit Y-chromosomal DNA from their own fathers.  Random mutations in this yDNA are then passed on to the sons of those in whom they first occurred, and the process repeats ad infinitum.  (An analogous process occurs in women's mitochondrial DNA, which is transmitted to both sons and daughters.)  Through the approximate dating of these mutations, men can be differentiated into groups一so-called “haplogroups”一demarcated by their most-recent shared paternal-line ancestor.  Here, for example, is a recent paper published in the Journal of Human Genetics that analyzes the yDNA haplogroup frequencies among modern Japanese men.  A handy way to represent this pattern of genetic inheritance that ultimately links all men back to a “Y-chromosomal Adam” is by means of a phylogenetic “family” tree.

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Know your relatives in Chinese

Randy Alexander reports that during a guitar lesson, he asked his student:

Māmā de dìdi de nǚér shì biǎomèi ma?

妈妈的弟弟的女儿是表妹吗?

"Is your mother's younger brother's daughter your younger maternal female cousin?"

The student replied:

wǒyě bútài qīngchǔ děngyíxià

我也不太清楚等一下

"I don't quite know either, wait a minute."

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Serial blind dates

This story (referencing Australian ABC News [1/13/22], with video)  has been doing the rounds in the Taiwan media:

"Chinese bachelorette locked in blind date's apartment after Henan's snap lockdown:

Woman says her date's performance under lockdown left much to be desired"

By Liam Gibson, Taiwan News (1/14/22)

This extraordinary report begins thus:

An unmarried Chinese woman surnamed Wang (王) had her blind date dramatically extended by several days after authorities announced an immediate lockdown.

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Singlish "lah", with a possible deep connection to colloquial Arabic

A prominent feature of Colloquial Singaporean English (Singlish) is sentence-final "la", in which it has more nuances and innuendoes than you can shake a stick at.  Anyone who has heard Singaporeans talking freely cannot fail to be struck by the frequency and variety of sentence-final "lah". This ubiquitous particle "lah" (/lá/ or /lâ/), sometimes spelled as "la" and rarely spelled as "larh", "luh", or "lurh", may possibly have been absorbed into Singlish from a similar word in Malay.  See David Deterding, Singapore English (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2007), p. 71.

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A word for parents who lose an only child

It is well known that the PRC had a one-child policy from 1979-2015.  This means that, for most Chinese children born during this period, they would have no brothers and sisters.  As such, they were inestimably precious in a country that lacks adequate social benefits for people to live on after retirement, but who — in large measure — had to rely on their lone offspring to support them.  Such a practical consideration was matched by the psychological devastation experienced when a couple lost their sole, beloved child.

"Chinese parents who lose their only child — a tragedy so common there’s a word for it",

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More on Persian kinship terms; "daughter" and the laryngeals

Following up on "Turandot and the deep Indo-European roots of 'daughter'" (3/16/20), John Mullan (student of Arabic, master calligrapher, and expert chorister) writes:

As someone who’s studied a bit of Persian and a few other Indo European languages, I’ve always found it odd that most all of the kinship terms in Persian—mādar, pedar, barādar, dokhtar, pesar (cf. ‘puer’ in Latin and ‘pais’ in Greek, I assume)—have easy equivalents to my ear, /except/ ‘khāhar,’ sister. Wiktionary suggests it’s still related.

One quite recent finding of mine in PIE. As you probably know, 'Baghdad' is not an Arabic name, but a Persian one. It's composed of 'Bagh,' God (not the word used today), and 'Dād,' Given/Gift. Now I'm familiar with Bagh, ultimately, from listening to way too much Russian choral music and hearing Church Slavonic 'Bozhe.' Similarly, in the deep corners of my Greek student mind I remember names like 'Mithradates'—gift of Mithra or something along those lines—popping up as rulers/governors of city states in Classical Anatolia. What I /didn't/ pick out was the exact same construct as 'Baghdad' hiding in front of my eyes all along. There are two active NBA players named 'Bogdan(ović).' It's the same name as the city, only it's popped up in Serbo-Croatian. Funny stuff.

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