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Min Chinese

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Min
閩語/闽语
Geographic
distribution		China: Fujian, Guangdong (around Chaozhou-Swatou and Leizhou peninsula), Hainan, Zhejiang (Shengsi, Putuo and Wenzhou), Jiangsu (Liyang and Jiangyin); Taiwan; overseas Chinese communities in Southeast Asia and North America
Linguistic classificationSino-Tibetan
Proto-languageproto-Min
Subdivisions
Language codes
ISO 639-6mclr
Glottologminn1248
Distribution of Min languages in Taiwan and China.
Min Chinese
Bân gú / Mìng ngṳ̄ ('Min') written in
Chinese characters
Traditional Chinese閩語
Simplified Chinese闽语
Hokkien POJBân gú
Transcriptions
Standard Mandarin
Hanyu PinyinMǐn Yǔ
Southern Min
Hokkien POJBân gú
Eastern Min
Fuzhou BUCMìng ngṳ̄
Pu-Xian Min
Hinghwa BUCMáng-gṳ̂
Northern Min
Jian'ou RomanizedMâing-ngṳ̌

Min or Miin[a] (simplified Chinese: 闽语; traditional Chinese: 閩語; pinyin: Mǐn yǔ; Pe̍h-ōe-jī: Bân gú; BUC: Mìng ngṳ̄) is a broad group of Chinese varieties spoken by over 70 million people in the southeastern Chinese province of Fujian as well as by migrants from this province in Guangdong (around Chaozhou-Swatou, or Chaoshan area, Leizhou peninsula and Part of Zhongshan), Hainan, three counties in southern Zhejiang, Zhoushan archipelago off Ningbo, some towns in Liyang, Jiangyin City in Jiangsu province, and Taiwan. The name is derived from the Min River in Fujian. Min varieties are not mutually intelligible with any other varieties of Chinese.

There are many Min speakers among overseas Chinese in Southeast Asia. The most widely spoken variety of Min outside Fujian is Hokkien (which includes Taiwanese and Amoy).

History

The Min homeland of Fujian was opened to Chinese settlement by the defeat of the Minyue state by the armies of Emperor Wu of Han in 110 BC.[1] The area features rugged mountainous terrain, with short rivers that flow into the South China Sea. Most subsequent migration from north to south China passed through the valleys of the Xiang and Gan rivers to the west, so that Min varieties have experienced less northern influence than other southern groups.[2] As a result, whereas most varieties of Chinese can be treated as derived from Middle Chinese, the language described by rhyme dictionaries such as the Qieyun (601 AD), Min varieties contain traces of older distinctions.[3] Linguists estimate that the oldest layers of Min dialects diverged from the rest of Chinese around the time of the Han dynasty.[4][5] However, significant waves of migration from the North China Plain occurred:[6]

Jerry Norman identifies four main layers in the vocabulary of modern Min varieties:

  1. A non-Chinese substratum from the original languages of Minyue, which Norman and Mei Tsu-lin believe were Austroasiatic.[7][8]
  2. The earliest Chinese layer, brought to Fujian by settlers from Zhejiang to the north during the Han dynasty.[9]
  3. A layer from the Northern and Southern Dynasties period, which is largely consistent with the phonology of the Qieyun dictionary.[10]
  4. A literary layer based on the koiné of Chang'an, the capital of the Tang dynasty.[11]

Subgrouping

Min dialect groups according to the Language Atlas of China:

Min is usually described as one of seven or ten groups of varieties of Chinese but has greater dialectal diversity than any of the other groups. The varieties used in neighbouring counties, and in the mountains of western Fujian even in adjacent villages, are often mutually unintelligible.[12]

Early classifications, such as those of Li Fang-Kuei in 1937 and Yuan Jiahua in 1960, divided Min into Northern and Southern subgroups.[13][14] However, in a 1963 report on a survey of Fujian, Pan Maoding and colleagues argued that the primary split was between inland and coastal groups. A key discriminator between the two groups is a group of words that have a lateral initial /l/ in coastal varieties, and a voiceless fricative /s/ or /ʃ/ in inland varieties, contrasting with another group having /l/ in both areas. Norman reconstructs these initials in Proto-Min as voiceless and voiced laterals that merged in coastal varieties.[14][15]

Although coastal varieties can be derived from a proto-language with four series of stops or affricates at each point of articulation (e.g. /t/, /tʰ/, /d/, and /dʱ/), inland varieties contain traces of two further series, which Norman termed "softened stops" due to their reflexes in some varieties.[16][17][18] Coastal varieties also feature some uniquely Min vocabulary, including pronouns and negatives, where inland varieties use forms cognate with vocabulary in Hakka and Yue.[19] All coastal varieties have complex tone sandhi systems, whereas inland varieties have little or no tone sandhi.[20]

Pan and colleagues divided the coastal varieties into three groups:[21]

Pan and colleagues divided the inland varieties into two groups:[21]

The Language Atlas of China (1987) includes three additional groups besides the five identified by Pan et al.:[24]

Writing system

See also: Written Hokkien

When using Chinese characters to write a non-Mandarin form, standard practice is to use characters that correspond etymologically to the words being represented, and to invent new characters for words with no evident ancient Chinese etymology or in some cases for alternative pronunciations of existing characters, especially when the meaning is significantly different. Written Cantonese has carried this process out to the farthest extent of any non-Mandarin variety, to the extent that pure Cantonese vernacular can be unambiguously written using Chinese characters. Contrary to popular belief, a vernacular written in this fashion is not in general comprehensible to a Mandarin speaker, due to significant changes in grammar and vocabulary and the necessary use of large number of non-Mandarin characters.

A similar process has never taken place for any of the Min varieties and there is no standard system for writing Min, although some specialized characters have been created. Given that Min combines the Chinese of several different periods and contains some non-Chinese vocabulary, one may have trouble finding the appropriate Chinese characters for some Min vocabulary. In the case of Taiwanese, there are also indigenous words borrowed from Formosan languages, as well as a substantial number of loan words from Japanese. The Min spoken in Singapore and Malaysia has borrowed heavily from Malay and, to a lesser extent, from English and other languages. The result is that cases of Min written purely in Chinese characters does not represent actual Min speech, but contains a heavy mixture of Mandarin forms.

Attempts to faithfully represent Min speech necessarily rely on romanization, i.e. representation using Latin characters. Some Min speakers use the Church Romanization (Chinese: 教會羅馬字; pinyin: Jiaohui Luomazi). For Hokkien the romanization is called Pe̍h-ōe-jī (POJ) and for Fuzhou dialect called Bàng-uâ-cê (BUC). Both systems were created by foreign missionaries in the 19th century (see Min Nan and Min Dong Wikipedia). There are some uncommon publications in mixed writing, using mostly Chinese characters but using the Latin alphabet to represent words that cannot easily be represented by Chinese characters.

See also

Notes

  1. ^ The double ii represents the dipping tone in Mandarin, as in the province of Shaanxi.

References

  1. ^ Norman (1991), pp. 328.
  2. ^ Norman (1988), pp. 210, 228.
  3. ^ Norman (1988), pp. 228–229.
  4. ^ Ting (1983), pp. 9–10.
  5. ^ Baxter & Sagart (2014), pp. 33, 79.
  6. ^ Yan (2006), p. 120.
  7. ^ Norman & Mei (1976).
  8. ^ Norman (1991), pp. 331–332.
  9. ^ Norman (1991), pp. 334–336.
  10. ^ Norman (1991), p. 336.
  11. ^ Norman (1991), p. 337.
  12. ^ Norman (1988), p. 188.
  13. ^ Kurpaska (2010), p. 49.
  14. ^ a b c d Norman (1988), p. 233.
  15. ^ Branner (2000), pp. 98–100.
  16. ^ Norman (1973).
  17. ^ Norman (1988), pp. 228–230.
  18. ^ Branner (2000), pp. 100–104.
  19. ^ Norman (1988), pp. 233–234.
  20. ^ Norman (1988), p. 239.
  21. ^ a b Kurpaska (2010), p. 52.
  22. ^ Norman (1988), pp. 232–3.
  23. ^ Li & Chen (1991).
  24. ^ Kurpaska (2010), p. 71.
  25. ^ Norman (1988), pp. 235, 241.
  26. ^ Lien (2015), p. 169.

Sources

  • Baxter, William H.; Sagart, Laurent (2014), Old Chinese: A New Reconstruction, Oxford University Press, ISBN 978-0-19-994537-5.
  • Bodman, Nicholas C. (1985), "The Reflexes of Initial Nasals in Proto-Southern Min-Hingua", in Acson, Veneeta; Leed, Richard L. (eds.), For Gordon H. Fairbanks, Oceanic Linguistics Special Publications, vol. 20, University of Hawaii Press, pp. 2–20, ISBN 978-0-8248-0992-8, JSTOR 20006706.
  • Branner, David Prager (2000), Problems in Comparative Chinese Dialectology — the Classification of Miin and Hakka, Trends in Linguistics series, vol. 123, Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, ISBN 978-3-11-015831-1.
  • Chang, Kuang-yu (1986), Comparative Min phonology (Ph.D.), University of California, Berkeley.
  • Kurpaska, Maria (2010), Chinese Language(s): A Look Through the Prism of "The Great Dictionary of Modern Chinese Dialects", Walter de Gruyter, ISBN 978-3-11-021914-2.
  • Li, Rulong 李如龙; Chen, Zhangtai 陈章太 (1991), "Lùn Mǐn fāngyán nèibù de zhǔyào chāyì 论闽方言内部的主要差异" [On the main differences between Min dialects], in Chen, Zhangtai; Li, Rulong (eds.), Mǐnyǔ yánjiū 闽语硏究 [Studies on the Min dialects], Beijing: Yuwen Chubanshe, pp. 58–138, ISBN 978-7-80006-309-1. {{citation}}: Invalid |script-title=: missing prefix (help)
  • Lien, Chinfa (2015), "Min languages", in Wang, William S.-Y.; Sun, Chaofen (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Chinese Linguistics, Oxford University Press, pp. 160–172, ISBN 978-0-19-985633-6.
  • Norman, Jerry (1973), "Tonal development in Min", Journal of Chinese Linguistics, 1 (2): 222–238, JSTOR 23749795.
  • —— (1988), Chinese, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ISBN 978-0-521-29653-3.
  • —— (1991), "The Mǐn dialects in historical perspective", in Wang, William S.-Y. (ed.), Languages and Dialects of China, Journal of Chinese Linguistics Monograph Series, vol. 3, Chinese University Press, pp. 325–360, JSTOR 23827042, OCLC 600555701.
  • —— (2003), "The Chinese dialects: phonology", in Thurgood, Graham; LaPolla, Randy J. (eds.) (eds.), The Sino-Tibetan languages, Routledge, pp. 72–83, ISBN 978-0-7007-1129-1. {{citation}}: |editor-given2= has generic name (help)
  • Norman, Jerry; Mei, Tsu-lin (1976), "The Austroasiatics in Ancient South China: Some Lexical Evidence" (PDF), Monumenta Serica, 32: 274–301, JSTOR 40726203.
  • Ting, Pang-Hsin (1983), "Derivation time of colloquial Min from Archaic Chinese", Bulletin of the Institute of History and Philology, 54 (4): 1–14.
  • Yan, Margaret Mian (2006), Introduction to Chinese Dialectology, LINCOM Europa, ISBN 978-3-89586-629-6.
  • Yue, Anne O. (2003), "Chinese dialects: grammar", in Thurgood, Graham; LaPolla, Randy J. (eds.) (eds.), The Sino-Tibetan languages, Routledge, pp. 84–125, ISBN 978-0-7007-1129-1. {{citation}}: |editor-given2= has generic name (help)
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