Zhou adopted the East Asian lingua franca of Shang
Printed From: History Community ~ All Empires
Category: Regional History or Period History
Forum Name: East Asia
Forum Discription: The Far East: China, Korea, Japan and other nearby civilizations
URL: http://www.allempires.com/forum/forum_posts.asp?TID=34739
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Topic: Zhou adopted the East Asian lingua franca of Shang
Posted By: theSinitic
Subject: Zhou adopted the East Asian lingua franca of Shang
Date Posted: 18-Jun-2014 at 11:14
Taken from the last pages of Scott DeLancey's paper "The Origins of Sinitic" http://www.academia.edu/3894773/The_Origins_of_Sinitic - http://www.academia.edu/3894773/The_Origins_of_Sinitic
Focusing
on the highlighted parts, the Zhou were Tibeto-Burmans whom were
culturally Sinicized by the Shang demographic before they went on to
Tibeto-Burmanize the lingua franca the Shang had used. The Zhou were
using a typologically alien language in which they fused to Shang's
lingua franca by use of their genetic components such as Tibeto-Burman pronouns and relict
lexical morphologies.
Therefore there is highly supported disagreement about the notion which says Tibeto-Burmans
were the original Sinitics and did not accrue cultural knowledge from
Shang. If Tibeto-Burman had been in control of the Sinitic and the
Shang had already been Tibeto-Burman what need was there to
Tibeto-Burmanize the Shang's lingua franca?
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Here is further support to corroborate the Sinitic did not come from what would have been accepted as Tibeto-Burman areas.
Roger Blench's rationale (not mine) that Cishan-Peiligang farmers were highly unlikely to have produced linguistic imprint.
Taken from his paper "Stratification in the peopling of China: how far does the linguistic evidence match genetics and archaeology?" http://www.rogerblench.info/Language/China/Geneva%20paper%202004%20submit.pdf - http://www.rogerblench.info/Language/China/Geneva%20paper%202004%20submit.pdf
Wherever Sinitic originates within Sino‑Tibetan, there is a broad
consensus that its main spread has been north–south, from the
millet‑growing to the rice‑growing areas and that it has assimilated or
overwhelmed a diverse in situ population (e.g. Fitzgerald 1972; Lee
1978; LaPolla 2001). It is therefore unlikely that Sinitic can be
identiied with the earliest Neolithic communities in north China such as
the Péilígăng or Císhān (6500 BP onwards) and it is more helpful to
think of Sinitic as one of Barnes’s (1993: 108) ‘Late Neolithic Elites’
emerging between 3500 and 2000 BC. The notable feature of the end of
this period is the appearance of bronze vessels in the archaeological
record and it easy to imagine the inception of the Shang as marking the
take‑off of Sinitic. Presumably, a major element in the in situ
population was Hmong‑Mien‑speaking, but unless these groups were
considerably north of their present location, the agriculturists of
Císhān were not Hmong‑Mien either. Van Driem (1998) has canvassed
Sichuān as the likely original homeland of Sino‑Tibetan (Tibeto‑Burman
in his terms). A comparable view is supported in a study of Y
chromosome haplotypes reported in Su et al. (2000) who argue that
proto‑Sino‑Tibetan was spoken in northern Sichuān and dispersed
westwards to the Himalayas and east and south to create the Chinese
dialects. However, they also argue that this nucleus was the lineal
descendant of early Neolithic millet‑growers, which seems highly
unlikely. There is no obvious candidate for the ethnolinguistic identity
of the millet‑growers of Péilígăng and it may be that they have no
linguistic descendants.
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It did not matter which
subclades were coalescing in great concentration within that area if they
didn't immediately evolve linguistics to service the Sinitic, which undoubtedly
transformed into the lingua franca used during Shang. Chinese
civilization's urheimat, not the whole Sino-Tibetan affiliation, was
designed around the premise that culture could be spread by
civilization, through language and writing just as any other
civilization had. Without linguistic descendants how would we even
begin to talk about culture, or the records of that culture? I don't
think I have to belabor the point so many linguistic scholars have
already made which distinguish Sinitics apart from Tibeto-Burmans.
Tibeto-Burman like the Austronesian which it split from was agglutinated
speech, moreover it had always used SOV syntax. Sinitic is monosyllabic and SVO
syntax, always had been. How do you expect to write Shang oracle while using
agglutinated speech?
Sinicization took place as early as 3000 BC, by the people of Liangzhu. Taken from Li Liu's book, "The Chinese Neolithic: Trajectories to Early States"
------------- http://hwyst.hangzhou.com.cn/wmyzh/content/2013-10/09/content_4920423.htm
Liangzhu was typified by hallmarks which glorified 5000 years of China.
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