Cantonese as old and pure: a critique
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[This is a guest post by Robert S. Bauer in response to the video and paper featured in this recent Language Log post: "Cantonese is both very cool and very old" (4/1/25)]
After I read the paper the first word that came to mind was “Cringeworthy” in regard to the author’s phrase “purer descent”; and the second word was “Superficial” in regard to the author’s knowledge of Cantonese and Chinese linguistics. For instance, the author who has narrowly focused on just those items that support his claims doesn’t seem to know that the Ancient Chinese tone category of Rusheng/Entering Tone which has disappeared from Mandarin was not a particular tone contour; the distinctive feature of Rusheng was that the monomorphosyllables belonging to it had as their finals or endings the three stop consonants -p, -t , -k, all of which have been retained in Cantonese, as well as in various other Chinese topolects of South China.
Yes, while it is certainly true that the Cantonese lexicon has retained some words from older stages of Chinese, it has also been historically influenced by its contact with the non-Han languages of Tai, Austro-Asiatic, and others in South China. One common example of the Tai substratum in Cantonese is ni1 “this; here” (Bauer 1987a, 1987b, 1996). More recently, over the past 300 years Cantonese has borrowed hundreds of English words which have enriched the Cantonese lexicon, syllabary, and phonological system (Bauer 2003, 2006, 2010; Bauer and Wong 2010; Wong et al. 2009). Just because Cantonese has kept more words from Ancient Chinese than Mandarin has that does not make it “purer”.
As for the development of Mandarin away from its Ancient Chinese roots (“due to the influence of the northern nomadic peoples”, and so “diluting [its] pure Chinese ancestry”), Mantaro Hashimoto (1986) has referred to this as the “Altaicization of Northern Chinese”.
Finally, characterizing Cantonese as a “fossil” is both weird and inappropriate, as it implies the language had become extinct and so ceased evolving in the minds and on the tongues of its speakers a long time ago – and of course that is completely untrue.
More comments could be made on this paper but I think I should stop here.
Some Relevant Reference
Bauer, Robert S. 1987a. Kadai loanwords in southern Chinese dialects. Transactions of the International Conference of Orientalists in Japan 32:95-111.
__________. 1987a. In Search of Austro-Tai strata in southern Chinese dialects. Computational Analysis of Asian & African Languages 28:53-65.
__________. 1996. Identifying the Tai substratum in Cantonese. Proceedings of the Fourth International Symposium on Languages and Linguistics, Pan-Asiatic Linguistics V:1806-1844. Bangkok: Institute of Language and Culture for Rural Development, Mahidol University at Salaya, Thailand.
__________. 2003. The Impact of English loanwords on the Cantonese syllabary. In David Bradley, Randy LaPolla, Graham Thurgood, and Boyd Michailovsky, eds. Language Variation: Papers on Variation and Change in the Sinosphere and in the Indosphere in Honour of James A. Matisoff. Canberra: Pacific Linguistics. Pp. 275-284.
__________. 2006. The Stratification of English loanwords in Cantonese. Journal of Chinese Linguistics 34.2:172-191.
__________. 2010. The Graphemic representation of English loanwords in Cantonese. In 載張洪年 Cheung Hung-nin Samuel and 張雙慶 Song Hing Chang, 主編 eds., 《歷時演變與語言接觸 — 中國東南方言, Diachronic Change and Language Contact — Dialects in South East China》. Journal of Chinese Linguistics Monograph Series Number 24. Hong Kong: Chinese University Press of Hong Kong. Pp. 227-246.
__________. and Cathy S.P. Wong. 2010. New loanword rimes and syllables in Hong Kong Cantonese. 載潘悟云 In Pan Wuyun and 沈鐘偉 Shen Zhongwei, 主編 eds.,《研究之樂, 慶祝王士元先生七十五壽辰學術論文集, The Joy of Research II, A Festschrift in Honor of Professor William S-Y. Wang on His Seventy-fifth Birthday》. 上海: 上海教育出版社 (Shanghai: Shanghai Education Publishing). Pp. 1-24. ISBN 978-7-5444-2627-5.
Hashimoto Mantaro. 1986. The Altaicization of Northern Chinese. In John F. McCoy and Timothy Light, eds., Contributions to Sino-Tibetan Studies. E. J. Brill. Pp. 76–97.
Wong, Cathy S.P., Robert S. Bauer, Zoe W.M. Lam. 2009. The Integration of English loanwords in Hong Kong Cantonese. In Mark Alves and Paul Sidwell, eds., Journal of the Southeast Asian Linguistics Society, Volume 1. Canberra: Pacific Linguistics. Pp. 251-265.
Joe said,
April 8, 2025 @ 5:24 pm
I suspect by "fossil" they actually meant to say "living fossil" (the paper uses the word so centrally that someone probably should have looked it up), a controversial term for a biological species that has supposedly remained unchanged while its sister species have evolved more dramatically in the same timespan. And the controversy around that term might make it even more appropriate. Wikipedia:
"Popular literature may wrongly claim that a 'living fossil' has undergone no significant evolution since fossil times, with practically no molecular evolution or morphological changes. Scientific investigations have repeatedly discredited such claims.[1][2][3]
"The minimal superficial changes to living fossils are mistakenly declared as an absence of evolution, but they are examples of stabilizing selection, which is an evolutionary process—and perhaps the dominant process of morphological evolution.[4]
"The term is currently deprecated among paleontologists and evolutionary biologists."
Chas Belov said,
April 9, 2025 @ 12:35 am
I don't know enough about Cantonese or Mandarin to comment that much but…
Even if they did mean living fossil, it's not true, especially when it comes to slang. I remember a Cantonese-speaking co-worker telling me many years ago about going back to Hong Kong for a visit and could not make heads nor tails of the then-current slang because it had changed so much since when they lived there.
Ron Vara said,
April 9, 2025 @ 3:39 am
One common example of the Tai substratum in Cantonese is ni1 “this; here”
nV proximal demonstrates are widespread in Mainland Southeast Asian languages and arguably it is a very weak claim that a Tai substratum, so I presume you be wrong here. Even Austroasiatic languages far away deep inside interior India like Korku, nij means "this". In Santali there are even more elaborate systems of proximal, distal, and remote demonstrates that clearly distinguish singular, dual, and plural, animate and inanimate.
nii – "this" for animate singular
nikin – this but for dual animate
neko – for plural animate
niə – for singular inanimate
niəkin – dual inanimate
niəko – plural inanimate
Santali is the third most widely Austroasiatic language with 7.6 million native speakers, after Vietnamese and Khmer. Santali verbs are inflected for tenses, aspects, moods, voices, valencies, possessions, subjects, and objects.
Yves Rehbein said,
April 9, 2025 @ 4:28 am
Icelandic is a standard example of a conservative language, but it is not old. Because of generational collapse in a small population it may be argued that its most recent (common on the community level) ancestor is indeed fairly young. Although Hong Kong is an island, it is not nearly as isolated as Iceland is, so the analogy is not very meaningful.
Heggarty has stressed that language change and divergence are different topics:
blockquoteWhat external forces do determine, meanwhile, is whether those changes (whatever
linguistic form they take) either develop independently and differently, or come to be shared,
from one region to the next. That is, real-world contexts dictate not so much which particular
changes occur, but which patterns of divergence may emerge from any changes. External
processes determine how coherent are the populations that speak any given language lineage
through time and geographical space. They further govern which population groups or
cultural characteristics, language among them, spread at which times, and in which ways and
directions.
(Heggarty 2015:600)
This was also circumscribed by VHM, but differently:
(Mair 1998:836; emphasis mine)
The next page follows up with a comments on various language groups' influence on Chinese languages. Incidentally, one of Hock's textbooks discusses Altaic briefly, and the sections have been changed a lot between editions. Ch. 18.5. Phyla and isolates: degrees of relatability speaks of "shared aberrancy" (2nd ed. 1991), ch. 14.1.3. "Unrelated" languages and "long-distance" relationships (3rd ed. 2021) is more focused on the rather polemic Nostratic debate, including Altaic; disappeared have the terms "phyla" and "aberrancy". However, the chapter Linguistic change: Its nature and Causes is as relevant as before, as it begins: "The oldest and, outside linguistic circles, still most prevalent view on linguistic change is that it is an indication of decay, […]" (Hock 2021: 905; emphasis mine).
Not a linguist by any means, I tend to agree?!
Heggarty, Paul (2015). “Prehistory through Language and Archaeology,” The Routledge Handbook of Historical Linguistics. 598–626.
Hock, Hans H. (2021). Principles of Historical Linguistics. 3rd, revised and updated ed.
Mair, Victor H. (1998). “Die Sprachamöbe: An archeolinguistic parable,” The Bronze Age and Early Iron Age Peoples of Eastern Central Asia, 2 vols. 835–855
David Marjanović said,
April 9, 2025 @ 9:23 am
Biologist here, happy to answer any questions about "living fossils". :-)
Is there any chance that they're a feature the Austric superfamily has in common?
The last common ancestor of all extant varieties of Icelandic is very young indeed – there is almost no variety in Icelandic.
The first exclusive ancestor of Icelandic and only Icelandic is a thousand years old. Icelandic is a long branch, in other words, and it shows in the weird & wonderful things it has done to its phonology.
Absolutely, that happens – but do such languages have a higher chance of spreading and splitting to produce a whole new family of descendants?
Victor Mair said,
April 9, 2025 @ 9:34 am
Wonderful comments!
Thank you, all!
Language Log at its best.
KIRINPUTRA said,
April 10, 2025 @ 3:00 am
It’s only with the so-called Chinese languages — or is it? — that competent, well-established specialists bother to forward, discuss & refute incompetent, belief-based nationalistic pop scholarship.
The Dark Avenger said,
April 10, 2025 @ 8:59 am
I’ll just use 20% of my Cantonese here: Ai-yah!
~flow said,
April 11, 2025 @ 11:09 am
Re VHM via Yves Rehbein: "I have come increasingly to believe that ancestral languages, more often than not, are the products of interaction spheres. In other words, the core of a language family may initially arise as a sort of Mischsprache. The very hybridity of this new entity is what differentiates it from being merely another daughter language of some preexistent parent language"
Whether or not ancestral languages are more often than not Mischsprachen I have no idea, but crucially the fact that languages can and do arise from mixture has been relegated to secondary status in linguistics, I feel.
Especially in the public mind the stubborn insistence on the Stammbaum / pedigree model is often the cause for misguided claims on aspects like linguistic purity and age of languages. (I'd cut the author of the video and blog post discussed here a little slack if only because I myself find Cantonese more 'original' (?) than Mandarin because it has retained consonantal rusheng syllable codas which Mandarin has, sadly, lost…)
Interestingly even in biology and taxonomy times have marched on. Once upon a time the "March of Progress" showing a linear, seemingly goal-oriented progress from monkey to chimp to cave-man to modern man was considered the correct model (and often still is except for evolution deniers). Later when evidence for many, many extinct divergent hominid lineages surfaced this was replaced with a Stammbaum model where e.g. the Neanderthals are one fairly recent side branch that ended several tens of thousand years ago. This, interestingly, has meanwhile been supplanted by a model that looks more like a web (see e.g. a PBS Eons video around this timestamp: https://youtu.be/WqcoMOxGWfs?t=626) which takes into account that distinct but not too distantly related populations can successfully interbreed.
Needless to say such web-like models make it much harder to meaningfully answer questions like "how old is that language?", so not a welcome development for people thinking in headlinese. But when we just think about how European languages have continually been influencing and pushing each other for the past 2000+ years that we have good evidence for, it's clear that a complete history of these languages can not just draw a tree-like diagram and call it a day.
Jonathan Smith said,
April 11, 2025 @ 7:19 pm
re KIRINPUTRA's remark certainly in the Chinese case we find a surfeit of emotional/politicized/pseudo-scientific commentary representing both the ascendant "pan-Sinitic" and various opposing "regionalist" POVs… wrt Cantonese, wierdly, much of it (e.g. the earlier video) is somehow simultaneously pan-Sinitic AND regionalist: "Cantonese is both shpecialer and more Chinese than u"
~flow said,
April 12, 2025 @ 1:16 am
@Jonathan Smith
Obviously we can not reasonably discuss the question whether PIE and other ancestral proto-languages were more or less mixed than your garden-variety average smallish language with some kind of methodology, sane metrics and stuff like that. I'm deeply unqualified to do that, so let's go on with some spitballing.
Personally I've long had the idea that successful cultural spheres and their language(s) are both crossroads and melting-pots, meaning that people can and perhaps must travel where these cultures and languages are (crossroads), and these "friends from far-flung places" also *want* to participate linguistically for cultural, economic and practical reasons (melting pot). China, Europe and North America are such big 'meta-agglomerations' in modern times.
It stands to reason that—since we do not believe that purely linguistic reasons are what causes languages to be widely learned, such as an easy, regular grammar—it's the geographical situation and the material and cultural affluence that makes such population centers big and, in the course of events, also linguistically diverse. In the case of what we now know as Germany, its geographic situation should have been a great contributing factor—you couldn't transport trade goods between eastern and western or northern and southern Europe without crossing through the HRE because it was smack in the middle. In the case of post-Roman England I suspect it was the Roman heritage that had created an advanced and rather well-to-do society that caused people to go to the trouble of emigrating there by boat when they could have easily walked (on mainland Europe) or sailed around it.
This means that we do have reasons to think that "big", i.,e. populous, languages are more diverse than smaller, more peripheral ones, and because they have a larger population with a concomitantly bigger territory, the chances that they split into descendant diverging daughter languages and / or draw more neighboring communities into their gravity well are also bigger than they are with more peripheral communities.
All of which is meant to say that yes, if you see a language with many speakers and go back to its roots, chances are you'll find diversity, immigration, prestige and expansion in the past—unsurprisingly, these are the factors that *make* a language populous and tenacious.
~flow said,
April 12, 2025 @ 2:59 am
obvious mistake in the above, "smallish language with some kind of methodology" should've been "smallish language without some kind of methodology"