Jie Language, Part 4!

Just to reiterate: this is not my own work, it's a summary of Alexander Vovin's 2002 "Did the Xiongnu Speak a Yeniseian Language?"

It seems plausible that Proto-Yeniseian would have had something like *tirjaqang for "they went (out)".  It’s entirely possible that in the Jie language, if it were Yeniseian, -jaq- could have shifted to –jeq- or –ek-.  Perhaps some tweaking is acceptable here, since after all Jie and Proto-Yeniseian would have been separated by about 300 years and 1000 miles.  After all, (most) English speakers don’t still talk like it’s the 18^th century.  So, assuming –jaq—shifted to –ek—

t.i.r.ek.ang

preverb t + conjugation i + past tense r + verb stem ek + third person plural ang

“They went out”

It seems to fit!

Now, let’s look the second verb.  Remember, going by ket –kas—“to catch or take”, it would have been *–kat—in Pumpokol, a South Yeniseian language.  It could easily have been something like *–kot—or even vowel-free *–kt—in Proto-Yeniseian or Jie.

The Proto-Yeniseian for “they will catch him” would have been *ktoktang:

k.t.o.kt.ang

preverb k + object marker t + conjugation o + verb stem kt + third person plural ang

"They catch/will catch" 

There is some ambiguity on present vs. future here because the verb seems to be in a generic nonpast tense.  This "nonpast" as opposed to present/future exists in Ket, although I don't know if it was a feature of Proto-Yeniseian.

All we need now is an o between the first k and t and we have an exact match with the Jie verb!  Where the o would come from I’m not sure, but again, Jie was not Proto-Yeniseian.  Some shifts in pronunciation would be expected—but of course, why the first *kt—shift to *kot-, but –kot—“to catch” drop the vowel sound?  That doesn’t make sense at all, and all I can say is that it’s the job of smarter Yeniseicists than I to figure that one out.

So, let’s look at the whole sentence:

Suke tirekang, Bokkok kotoktang.

Armies went out, they’ll catch Bokkok.

How do we know that “armies” is plural?  Remember, the verb tirekang, which includes pluralizer -ang, which would not be there if suke "army" was considered a singular unit.  Therefore, the best translation here would have to be "armies."  Furthermore, earlier on in the same text, we have a description of huge troop movements and sending out one division to attack another, and so forth.  Given the size of these forces, it’s entirely reasonable that we could be talking about "armies", rather than a single army, further evidencing that the verb is consistent with Yeniseian morphology.

Certainly not a 100% confirmation that the Jie were speaking a Yeniseian language, but it shows that we cannot dismiss the idea as wishful thinking of Yeniseicists.  The sentence appears optimistically consistent with being a Yeniseian language.  I don’t know about you, but it boggles the mind to think that the language spoken by the elite of a Chinese dynasty could feasibly be in the same family as a tribe of hunter-gatherers in Siberia—or that the feared warriors of the Jie could be the linguistic cousins of the feared warriors of the Tlingit!  Or that the Xiongnu, steppe nomads of the Eastern Hemisphere, could be the linguistic cousins of the Navajo, steppe nomads of the western hemisphere!  That’s the beautiful thing about historical linguistics.  Even if we have stories of horrible wars and genocides, these languages could well be a testament to our closeness as a human family.

Jie Language, Part 3!!!

This video is in really bad quality, so I made an MSPaint of the important stuff and stuck it on the end.  See the last 30 seconds.

Just to reiterate: none of this is my own, this is a summary of Alexander Vovin's 2002 "Did the Xiongnu Speak a Yeniseian Language?"

Let’s look at the verbs for “come/go” and “catch” in Proto-Yeniseian.  Yeniseian verb morphology is mind-bogglingly complicated, so we’ll just go over the basics here.  Yeniseian verbs are conjugated by stacking up to eight pieces of information before the stem of the verb.  For example, suppose me and my friend have both put up our birchbark teepee.  We can say to each other in our satisfaction,

            “qu’s dbilbetn!”

            Qu’s.d.b.il.bet.n

            Birchbark teepee.1p.3p inanimate object.past.make/do.pl.

            “Birchbark teepee I-it-did-do-we!

"We made a birchbark teepee!"

According to Starostin’s 1995 reconstruction, the verb stem for “come/go” is –jaq-.  We’re not sure on “catch” but Vovin points to modern Ket –kas—or –qos--, which would have been –kat--/--qot—in Pumpokol, an extinct southern Yeniseian language.  It makes sense that a crew of Yeniseian-speaking badasses marauding around in China would have a closer connection to South Yeniseian languages than North Yeniseian languages!

Anyway, let’s conjugate these verbs and see what we find!  First, let’s look at how Starostin reconstructed Proto-Yeniseian verbs:

Preverb p/t/k + object marker w/t/k + conjugation marker a/i/o + aspect/tense marker r/n + stem + plural marker *-n- (for 1pp and 2pp) + subject marker

Subject markers are as follows:

1ps –ŋ	1pp –ʒəng
2ps –(k)u	2pp -(k)ong
3psm –a 3psf –i	3pp –ang

Therefore, it seems plausible that Proto-Yeniseian would have had something like *tirjaqang.  It’s entirely possible that in the Jie language, if it were Yeniseian, -jaq- could have shifted to –jeq- or –ek-.  Perhaps some tweaking is acceptable here, since after all Jie and Proto-Yeniseian would have been separated by about 300 years and 1000 miles.  After all, (most) English speakers don’t still talk like it’s the 18^th century.  

Jie Language, Part 2: Or, Watch Out, Bokkok!

(Just to reiterate: none of this is my own, this is a summary of Alexander Vovin's 2002 "Did the Xiongnu Speak a Yeniseian Language?")

One sentence of this forgotten and mystery-shrouded Jie tongue survives, that may hold the key to unlocking the riddle.  A Buddhist monk was good enough to write down a single sentence in the Jie language!

            秀支 替戾剛 僕谷 劬禿當 

            Xiu4 zhi1 ti4 li4 gang1, pu2 gu3 qu1 tu1 dang1

            Sadly, the IPA was not invented yet, so he had to use Chinese characters.  So, in order to see how this sentence was actually pronounced, we first need to take off our Standard Modern Chinese goggles and switch over to Early Middle Chinese, which is like Cantonese beaten over the head with Wu:

            su-ke ti-re-kang, bok-kok ko-tok-tang.

            Another thing the helpful monk did was give us a gloss.  Here it is:

            suke.tirekang.bokkok.kotoktang
            army.go out.bokkok.capture

            “Armies (have gone/will go) go out and (have captured/will capture) Bokkok”

            
Whatever Bokkok did, I’d hate to be him.

            Linguists have been having a great time with this one.  Originally pretty much everyone assumed the language would be Turkic, and did some pretty incredible mental gymnastics to make it Turkic.  Some linguists, for example, conveniently left out the “Reconstructing Ancient Chinese” part, while others did things like phonetic or grammatical tweaking.  This is the kind of stuff I used to do in college when I was writing a paper two hours before it was due (““tirekang” means nothing in Old Turkic, but “tashyqyng” does!  Close enough.  Now, where did I put my beer?”)  The reality is that the sentence doesn’t “fit” with Turkic, and attempting to make it fit is betrayal of the scientific method.

            But interestingly, what does seem to fit is none other than Proto-Yeniseian, the ancestor of my favorite language, Ket.  What’s even more interesting is that “Jie” is pronounced just like “Ket” in Early Middle Chinese.  In Cantonese, “Jie” is still pronounced “kit”.  In Japanese it’s “ketsu”.  Proto-Yeniseian was spoken 2000 years ago, so it’s not completely farfetched that some Yeniseian-speaking badasses might have been lured down into what is now China.

Jie Language, Part 1

This article series is dedicated to the genius of Alexander Vovin at the University of Hawaii.  It’s basically a summary of his brilliant paper “Did the Xiong-Nu Speak a Yeniseian Language?”  All of the credit goes to him.  I did nothing.  And also to Georgii Starostin for his 1995 reconstruction of Proto-Yeniseian, as well as Edwin Pulleybank, who first advanced the Yeniseian Jie hypothesis in the 60s.

            351 C.E.—the Later Zhao dynasty of Northern China has risen and fallen.  The ethnic group who ruled the Zhao was a nomadic tribe from the north known as the Jie.  They were a mysterious people with a language and even physical appearance completely foreign to their Chinese subjects.  Unfortunately, the dynasty had a bad habit of deposing and executing emperors who weren’t bloodthirsty psychopaths.  Due to this, their Chinese subjects have a bit of a grudge.  Following the dynasty’s fall, the Jie ethnic group is subjected to near-total genocide.  This ancient bloodbath was so complete that the mystery of who the Jie were will probably never be solved.  Even their language was wiped out…

            Almost.

Hao Leng: or, Not Actually That Cold

 “Hao leng!”
                --China

So you might have read that China is currently experiencing the coldest winter in decades.  What does this mean on the ground?  People complaining about how cold it is, and me rolling my eyes because it’s not.

                Winter in China is a joke.  I know my winters, being from a ski town in Colorado.  My hometown is at 9,000 feet and gets some 150-180 inches of snow every year.  That’s cold.  What we’re experiencing now is “gosh, I think I’ll put on a coat”.  It’s currently like 5 degrees C(ommie) which is…I don’t know…degrees F(reedom), I think around 40.   I know it’s above freezing.  Either way drop down to 20 or 10 F(reedom) and then we’ll talk.

                I knew I was in for a lot of eye rolling when I was walking down the street one night in October.  It must’ve been 60-something F(reedom).  A lady walked by in a coat and a scarf muttering “hao leng, hao leng”.  That means “so cold”--literally “good cold,” as in English dialectal “good n’ cold!”

                “But bro,” I hear you saying. “Parts of China—parts that you have been to—are classified as subarctic.”  True.  But that’s not where the vast majority of people live.  Try this.  Look at China a map and draw a line with your finger between Beijing and Kunming, down near Burma.  That’s where like 90% of the population lives.  Compare that, latitude-wise, with the United States.  It equates roughly to the space between DC and Miami.  In this kind of climate people aren’t used to the weather being anything other than TDH (too damn hot). 

I remember two years ago in Hangzhou, there was the hottest summer on record.  There was a whole month where the temperature didn’t go under 40 C(ommie), day or night.  People were dropping dead on the street from heat exhaustion.  At work, the air conditioner broke.  Interestingly, a rat chose this as a great time to die in the office’s air vent.  Through the whole month the Chinese teachers were talking about how nice the weather was.  New rule, guys: the weather’s not “nice” if “he walked outside” shows up on autopsy reports.

In a climate like this, you’d think China would be a culture obsessed with trying to keep cool.  Not so.  China is a culture obsessed with heat—cf. Backdiapers and Breast Cancer.  But strangely, despite being a culture obsessed with keeping warm in a punishing subtropical climate, Chinese offices and apartments do not have central heating.  This leads to people perceiving the weather as being colder than it actually is—because of course you expect to be warm inside.  I’m glad I’m going home for Chinese New Year, because if  I hear “hao leng” one more time I think I’m gonna hurl.