Monthly Archives: October 2007

Tailingua.com: an introduction to Taiwanese

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My friend Michael Cannings has just unveiled his new Web site on the Taiwanese language, Tailingua. Here is how he introduces it:

Taiwanese is a Chinese language spoken by two-thirds of the population of Taiwan. It forms one dialect of the group known as Southern Min, which has a total of around forty-nine million native speakers, making it the twenty-first most widely-spoken language in the world.

However, there is very little information in English available on the internet (or in print, for that matter) about Southern Min in general, and Taiwanese in particular – a lack that Tailingua is designed to remedy, at least in part.

The site provides concise summaries of romanization and other methods for writing Taiwanese. It also offers fonts, input methods, a list of useful books, and more.

A very promising beginning!

‘Indo-European Vocabulary in Old Chinese’

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Sino-Platonic Papers has rereleased for free Indo-European Vocabulary in Old Chinese. A New Thesis on the Emergence of Chinese Language and Civilization in the Late Neolithic Age (2.9 MB PDF), by Tsung-tung Chang of Goethe-Universität.

Here’s the table of contents:

  1. Recent developments in the field of historical linguistics
  2. Monosyllabic structure of Chinese words and Indo-European stems
  3. Tonal accents of Middle Chinese
  4. Preliminaries on the comparison of consonants and vowels
  5. Some IE stems corresponding to Chinese words of entering tone
  6. Middle Chinese tones and final consonants of IE stems
  7. Some IE stems corresponding to Chinese words of rising tone
  8. Some IE stems corresponding to Chinese words of vanishing tone
  9. Some IE stems corresponding to Chinese words of level tone
  10. Reconstruction of Middle Chinese vocalism according to Yün-ching
  11. Old Chinese vocalism
  12. Vocalic correspondences between Chinese and IE
  13. Initials of Old Chinese
  14. Initial consonant clusters in Old Chinese as seen from IE-stems
  15. Proximity of Chinese to Germanic
  16. Relation of Old Chinese to neighboring languages
  17. Emergence of Chinese Empire and language in the middle of the third millennium B.C.

Appendix

  • Abbrevations
  • Bibliography
  • Rhyme Tables of Early Middle Chinese (600)
  • Rhyme Tables of Early Mandarin (1300)
  • Word Index
    • English
    • Pinyin

This was first published in January 1988 as issue no. 7 of the journal.