Language translations for leader sayings

I had my mom listened to Ba Trieu's lines, and she said Vietnamese reminds her of her native Hainanese Chinese dialect a bit. And Mongolian sounds like Korean to her.

Caveat: Historical linguistics is hugely speculative and often based on much less evidence than you'd think. Speaking here as someone who has worked with and is friends with historical linguists (in SE Asia, no less).

Neither of these languages are in the same family, and they are certainly miles away from being "mutually intelligible." Kupe (the forum poster, not the leader) is never going to be able to understand Mongolian based on speaking Korean. I'm afraid I can't imagine your mom being able to understand Vietnamese based on Hainanese. However, they each share some links via history.

Vietnamese and Hainanese are technically unrelated, although they've been in close enough contact over the years (both "Yue" tribes in early Chinese history) that there might be some crossover. Vietnamese for a long time was classified as "Mon-Khmer" but is pretty unique. There's a lot of Chinese borrowings, though, and the language is heavily tonal. (Speakers here might be able to comment more on similarities). In sum, I wouldn't be surprised if the two languages seemed close, but the underlying structure is a bit different.

Korean and Mongolian might be closer, but it's debated. Personally, I think they sound alike sometimes, too, but I speak neither language. There was an old theory that a lot of these Central Asian languages (including Finnish) featuring giant words that get increasing suffixes to change their meaning ("agglutinative") were from a common "Altaic" origin, but that's questionable - tracing Asian history back to the Altai Mountains in Siberia is a long and completely ahistorical move.

Historical linguistics is tough - languages and cultures aren't like DNA, where there's a clear descent. Rather, there's always borrowings and shiftings and innovations.

I'll be the obligatory, but unwilling, pedant here :p "Northern Vietnamese" probably sounded much different when she was around a long time ago.

Yes. It's hard to get reference points for a lot of ancient languages in the area. The Trung sisters, for instance, spoke "Lac", which is an entirely vanished language. Chinese linguists currently suggest that Lac is related to Tai languages (Thai, Lao, Zhuang, Dai, Shan), but not based on much evidence, and with a sort of political desire to link Northern Vietnamese ethnicities with officially recognized Chinese state ethnicities (e.g. the Zhuang). That said, the mountains to the west of Hanoi seem to be where the Tai languages originated - in contradiction to 19th century historiography which places the Tai... where? You guessed it. The Altai Mountains of Siberia (a theory that is completely bonkers and is only repeated now by <checks notes> the Prime Minister of Thailand). So what would the Trung sisters sound like?

Anyone? Anyone?

Nope, we don't have an answer for that. It's like asking what Harappan sounded like. Something lost to the years.
 
Caveat: Historical linguistics is hugely speculative and often based on much less evidence than you'd think.
And methodology is super, super important because the human brain is hardwired to find patterns, even where they don't exist. A nineteenth century linguist "proved" that every language in the world descended from Hebrew. Suffice to say his methodology was not scientific and a textbook case on how not to conduct historical linguistics. Especially since Semitic linguistics would have been advanced enough at the time to know that Hebrew itself had ancestors and cousins.

That said, the mountains to the west of Hanoi seem to be where the Tai languages originated - in contradiction to 19th century historiography which places the Tai... where? You guessed it. The Altai Mountains of Siberia
I know someone, fortunately an amateur linguist not a professional, who is convinced that all of the major languages of the steppe and Siberia are related. It is his lifework to prove that Indo-Uralic-Eskimo-Aleut is a valid macrofamily. :crazyeye: (There is some limited but non-definitive evidence that Indo-Uralic could be valid--but, especially considering how long linguists have been trying, I don't think demonstrating a relationship between Eskimo-Aleut and any Old World language will happen soon. Dene-Yeniseian is definitely the most promising thread for an Old World/New World relationship--but that still has a long way to go before it's considered on firm ground itself.)
 
That said, the mountains to the west of Hanoi seem to be where the Tai languages originated - in contradiction to 19th century historiography which places the Tai... where? You guessed it. The Altai Mountains of Siberia (a theory that is completely bonkers and is only repeated now by <checks notes> the Prime Minister of Thailand).
Finding Uhreimats was never an exact science. Though unlike those, we can say for certain that, for instance, Austronesian and Kra-Dai languages are in the same language family. With the only real question being how to construct the relationship (similar to Balto-Slavic, where it's eitehr two language families from a common ancestor or just Baltic family with Slavic being a more divergent branch). Needless to say the Uhreimat of that is also not established but I still find it a very cool fact, a spit in the face of Altaists (because it proves that the very methods disproving their stuff can and are used productively in areas where the research simply hadn't been so thorough before), and am looking forward to the reaction by more nationalistic minded folks like Mr. Prime Minister that will have to do a complete 180 and start finding all the "obvious" connections and "glorious past"s Thais share with Hawaians, Maori and so on.

On the topic, though. I extremely recommend even a short excursion into André-Georges Haudricourt's work. He's the guy who figured out the weirdness of Vietnamese and in doing so set the foundation for our understading of tonogenesis in this part of the world. Simply put, why do Chinese, Thai and Vietnamese sound so much alike and so unlike Tibetan/Burmese, Phillipino/Hawaiian or Khmer that they are actually related to. "The origin of the peculiarities of the Vietnamese alphabet" is also highly relevant for this short period of time before a new civ gets the spotlight. Not only a nice excursion into the history of the language, but also the way Europeans of the time tackled all those new languages they came across and needed to transform into a somewhat-readable Latin form with no IPA and other fancy-shmancy tools we'd use today, thus giving us wonders like Nguyên dynasty of Nguyên Thế Tổ, the other (highly thematic :mischief:) leader introduced in this pack.
 
I'm very familiar with historical linguistics, and I know Mongolian and Korean aren't related linguistically. Their ancestors definitely did interact with each other at some point. Same goes for Vietnamese and Hainanese/Cantonese. It's like how spoken Modern Greek superficially sounds like Spanish to many people. (Though technically those two languages are in the same language family).

Recently, I'm been playing the successors of the Great Language Game (LingYourLanguage, LanguageSquad), basically guessing the recorded language out of several choices. It seems pretty hard, with regards to the Slavic languages.
 
It's like how spoken Modern Greek superficially sounds like Spanish to many people.
At first I found this surprising because of the pervasive palatalization in Modern Greek, but on the other hand the widespread lenition and the general similarity of the consonant and vowel inventories could give that impression.
 
Altaic fell out of favor decades ago, and most linguists who still push it are crackpots--and even when it was considered a thing Koreanic and Japonic were considered dubious members. There are still some linguists who believe in a smaller family of Mongolic and Tungusic, though.
To be honest I'm not very knowledgeable on the theory, but Etymological Dictionary of the Altaic Languages was published in 2003, which is... well yes, a couple of decades ago. But from this video I had an impression that the controversy is still not over.
 
To be honest I'm not very knowledgeable on the theory, but Etymological Dictionary of the Altaic Languages was published in 2003, which is... well yes, a couple of decades ago.
Crackpots are still publishing on Nostratic, too, but that doesn't mean it's scholarly. :p However, there may be some confusion where some scholars call their hypothetical Mongolic-Tungusic(-Turkic) family Altaic and are not actually referring to the older discredited theory. You see a similar phenomenon in North American linguistics where Na-Dene originally referred to a larger family that has since been discredited, but the name is still used for Tlingit-Eyak-Athabaskan, which is firmly established.
 
Crackpots are still publishing on Nostratic, too, but that doesn't mean it's scholarly.
I wouldn't call Sergei Starostin, Anna Dybo and Oleg Mudrak crackpots. They are very well know and respected scholars, and even such an amateur linguists as myself know their names.

However, there may be some confusion where some scholars call their hypothetical Mongolic-Tungusic(-Turkic) family Altaic and are not actually referring to the older discredited theory.
Etymological Dictionary of the Altaic Languages contains both Korean and Japanese.
 
I wouldn't call Sergei Starostin, Anna Dybo and Oleg Mudrak crackpots. They are very well know and respected scholars, and even such an amateur linguists as myself know their names.


Etymological Dictionary of the Altaic Languages contains both Korean and Japanese.
I would 100% call Sergei Starostin a crackpot. He was infamous for his farfetched Eurasian macrofamilies based on scanty evidence and wild imagination, much like Joseph Greenberg in the Americas and Africa.
 
This is getting way off topic, but I'm seriously surprised that it's harder to connect Eskimo-Aleut with Siberian languages, versus say Dene-Yeneseian. I thought the understanding is that the former represents a much later migration to the Americas (with a possible back-migration to Siberia for the Siberian Yupiks.

(Also, as a Canadian, the phrase "Eskimo-Aleut" rubs me the wrong way, since we've been taught to say "Inuit" instead (to the point that a sports team named "Eskimos" was renamed this year), although I do understand that Alaskan peoples in that group object to the term "Inuit" covering them).
 
This is getting way off topic, but I'm seriously surprised that it's harder to connect Eskimo-Aleut with Siberian languages, versus say Dene-Yeneseian. I thought the understanding is that the former represents a much later migration to the Americas (with a possible back-migration to Siberia for the Siberian Yupiks.
Yes, the Eskimo-Aleuts came to the New World about 6,000 years later than the Na-Dene so Dene-Yeniseian is certainly a surprise. Worth noting that most linguists regard the connection as "promising"--i.e., very far from established.

(Also, as a Canadian, the phrase "Eskimo-Aleut" rubs me the wrong way, since we've been taught to say "Inuit" instead (to the point that a sports team named "Eskimos" was renamed this year), although I do understand that Alaskan peoples in that group object to the term "Inuit" covering them).
The term is used in linguistics because "Eskimo" covers both Inuit and Yupik.
 
Yeah I'm aware of why "Eskimo" is used. It just feels weird to write it.
 
I would 100% call Sergei Starostin a crackpot. He was infamous for his farfetched Eurasian macrofamilies based on scanty evidence and wild imagination, much like Joseph Greenberg in the Americas and Africa.
TBH I was hesitant to write his name, since I heard his name only a couple of times. But Anna Dybo and Oleg Mudrak are well-known and respectable on the field of Turcology.

But yeah, this is way too offtopic.
 
Somebody with a Mongolian IP address wrote down all of Kublai Khan's lines in Mongolian.

Also some of João's lines are already written down. That's even faster than with Bà Triệu. :)
And snowgigas just put up a video with his lines. Any Portugese speakers willing to help?
Best-animated NFP leader confirmed. :D
 
Somebody with a Mongolian IP address wrote down all of Kublai Khan's lines in Mongolian.

Also some of João's lines are already written down. That's even faster than with Bà Triệu. :)
And snowgigas just put up a video with his lines. Any Portugese speakers willing to help?
I think there is a Portuguese speaker that is currently updating all the lines. Some are written down, some aren't, so I guess they are playing the game against Joao and writing the lines down at the same time.

Fun fact: The Vietnamese language uses the latin alphabet because the writing system was invented by a Portuguese Jesuit missionary. I think I read somewhere that the most notable remnant of Portuguese influence in Vietnamese writing system is the tilde ~, a rare diacritic in other Latin alphabet-based languages.
 
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