Talk:Chu language
What language?[edit]
The sole reference, Park Haeree's talk "Dialect borrowings in Old Chinese", examines the character forms used in late Warring States period-manuscripts recovered from Chu on the assumption that they reflect the Chu dialect of Old Chinese, in an attempt to understand dialectal variation in OC. The whole enterprise rests on the closeness of these dialects, i.e. that it is not a separate language, and the script is another example of the local divergence of the Chinese script in the Warring States period. And it turns out that very little can be said with certainty about this dialect. Moreover, there is no evidence that distinctive features of Xiang can be traced to this OC dialect. Kanguole 14:27, 2 August 2017 (UTC)
- I have again reverted. There are no sources discussing a "Chu language".
- Park has been completely misrepresented. She does not talk about a precursor to Xiang, "Para-Sinitic" or of a Chu language having its own script. She is studying idiosyncracies in the way Old Chinese was written in Chu.
- Similarly, Behr is singling out a few words that point to a substrate in the Old Chinese texts from Chu.
- In both cases the fact that the texts under study are written in Chinese is key to their work. There is no basis for the claim of an unclassified language. Kanguole 17:10, 10 September 2021 (UTC)