Николас Остлер - Empires of the Word - A language History of the World

A confused and increasingly bloody period ensued, leading in the fourth century AD to open competition among a number of Turkic and Mongol hordes for control of the north, and exposing the total impotence there of the traditional government. The effect was to displace southward the centre of Chinese. In 317 a new dynasty was founded in Nánjīng , ‘Southern Capital’, while different Turkic and Mongol hordes contested the north. Ultimately, the two centuries to 557 were dominated in the north by the Tabgach, [67] This looks very much like a Chinese rendition of Hunnu , which would allow these people to be identified with those known to the Indians as Hūna , and to the Europeans as Hunni. But the phonetic resemblance unfortunately remains the only strong evidence. (See Sinor 1990: 177-9.) who at least proved effective in defending what they had won. These new lords were speakers of a Turkic language, but they soon endeavoured to take up local forms, adopting the Chinese name Wèi. This policy appears to have needed some enforcement, or at least encouragement: six generations later, in 500, their ruler, Xiaowen, outlawed by decree the Turkic language, costume and customs.

It was rather similar, politically and linguistically, to what was going on in the old Roman empire at the same time, with Germans taking over its heartland in western Europe, changing but not supplanting its language as they attempted to adopt it, and the successors of the old Roman power retrenching into what had historically been non-Roman lands in the eastern territories, the Balkans, Greece and Anatolia. Yet the Chinese language faced no competition from a potential equal, as Latin faced Greek in the eastern Mediterranean. The land, in all its parts, was dominated by Chinese, even if increasingly spoken by people with some very strange accents.

Down in the south a unified Chinese dynasty continued; there large numbers of well-to-do Chinese immigrants were gradually spreading the range of Chinese. They had moved partly to escape the invaders, but also to occupy the more fertile land drained by the Yangtze. The languages of the native population there, whether of the Tai, Sino-Tibetan or Hmong-Mien families, were all of a type quite similar, though often unrelated, to Chinese. The result was a relatively smooth take-up of Chinese by learners in the south: some of the new Chinese dialects that arose, especially the southernmost (called Yue, or Cantonese), sound very much like the original.

Middle Chinese of the seventh century AD had syllables that could end in m, n, ng, p, t, k or a vowel, and so does Modern Cantonese, just like the (unrelated but neighbouring) southern language Zhuang; in Mandarin final m has become n , and final p, t and k have all been dropped. Again Middle Chinese is inferred to have had three tone contours, and a separate, so-called ‘entering’, pattern for words ending in p, t or k. These later split to eight tones, with a high and a low onset, depending on whether they started with a voiced or voiceless consonant ( b-d-g-z-j versus p-t-k-s-c ). This is the basis of the system in modern Cantonese, and also in Zhuang; Mandarin has taken a different route, splitting only one of the original tones, but when it dropped final p, t and k it assigned all the words affected to one of the other tones. It has ended up with four tones, while Cantonese (and Zhuang) have eight. [341] Ramsey (1987: 102-3, 139-40, 236-7). Strictly speaking Cantonese has nine tones, having added one more split.

In 589 it proved possible to reunite the country. A new Chinese golden age, of prosperity if not always peace, began under the Sui and then the Tang dynasties. Throughout this period, Chinese continued to spread southward.

The Tang dynasty lasted until the end of the ninth century, when it degenerated into a power struggle among regional warlords. Many foreign missions reached China in this period, including Buddhists from India, Nestorian Christians, Zoroastrians and Manichaeans, and Muslims. This would have spread the sounds of the Sanskrit, Aramaic, Persian and Arabic languages to the major centres, where they would have been used in worship; but the numbers actually speaking them must have remained tiny. In any case, by the end of the Tang all except the Buddhists and Muslims had been purged out of existence. During the eighth and ninth centuries there was an increasing threat of incursions from Tibet in the west, and stout resistance from the Nanzhao natives in Yúnnán (’South of the Clouds’, in the south-west) but no long-term loss of territory. This period (from 847) also saw another Turkic-speaking group, the Uighurs, settle in the northerly province of Gansu, and set up an independent kingdom, friendly to the Chinese, in the far west (modern Xinjiang).

The breakdown of central government was repaired after half a century (960) by the Song dynasty, but not before the extreme north, Manchuria and the lands north of the Great Wall, had been taken by the Khitan, a Mongolian tribe; Gansu too, in the north-west, was lost, invaded by the Tangut, who spoke a language related to Tibetan. The Tangut held on to this area; but the Khitan were in 1115 overwhelmed by another group from farther north—the Jurchen, a Tungus-speaking people, whom the Chinese, ill-advisedly, assisted. Although the Jurchen adopted the Chinese name and style of Jīn ( , ‘golden’), they almost immediately turned on their allies and, after invading much of the south as well as the north, were left in control of the entire valley of the Huang-he, the traditional Chinese heartland. This they held (like the Tangut) until displaced by one greater, Genghis Khan himself, who led a Mongolian invasion in 1211.

As so often, it proved much easier for the invaders to overrun the north than the south. For two generations the Song dynasty maintained a defence of the southern empire, based on Hangzhou, until in 1279 the Mongols were able to take them in the rear, having first conquered Yunnan (and indeed the north of Vietnam) in the south-west.

For the first time, a non-Chinese speaking dynasty (Mongols, now known as the Yuán , , ‘Original’) controlled the full extent of China. Since the Mongols by this time also controlled most of the rest of Asia, it could be thought lucky for China that the Mongol Kublai Khan decided to move his capital from Kara Korum in Mongolia to Běijīng ( , ‘Northern Capital’), since otherwise it might have suffered the fate of all colonies, to be disregarded by its ruler; but in any case, the unity of the Mongol empire was lost by 1295. The newly converted Muslim Khans of the west refused to accept the sovereignty of Kublai Khan’s successor at Beijing, since he was a Buddhist.

Mongol control of China did not last much longer. Although Kublai was famous for his civility, his successors were less distinguished. It is worth mentioning the last of the dynasty, Togan Timur (1333-1369), since among much anti-Chinese legislation he passed laws forbidding Chinese to read or write Mongolian. It is evident that a strict racial policy was being followed. One would have expected, by comparison with the Manchu who were to follow much later—or the contemporary, but of course quite unknown, example of the English in Ireland [68] Called in modern Chinese Tùobá , using characters that at the time would have been pronounced Tak-B’uat. The name has become the modern Chuvash: it still designates a Turkic-speaking people of whom there are 1.5 million scattered across Russia and Siberia (Clauson 2002 [1962]: 38; Dalby 1998: 134-5). —that the elite would be passing laws to prevent their own members from taking up the language of the conquered people.