Network Perspectives on Chinese Dialect History (original) (raw)

Abstract

Little is known about the history of Chinese dialects. Major dialect groups were identified long ago using various traditional criteria, such as tonal and segmental development from their presumed common ancestor; however, scholarly agreement about their detailed development is largely lacking. At the core of the problem lies the role that language contact played in the history of Chinese. Unlike in the case of other language families, the Chinese dialects never really separated into distinct, independent languages, but kept evolving in close contact to each other. As a result, it is hard to tell whether traits shared among the dialects have been inherited or borrowed. Recent network approaches from a biological perspective could show a way out of this dilemma, since they were specifically designed to handle vertical and horizontal aspects in bacterial evolution, and the first pilot studies in historical linguistics have reported promising results. In this paper, a case study on the application of network approaches in Chinese historical linguistics is presented. Based on a dataset of 200 basic items translated into 23 Chinese dialect varieties, competing proposals for Chinese dialect classification are compared and tested for general plausibility. The results of the comparison show that network approaches are a useful supplement for quantitative and qualitative approaches in Chinese historical linguistics. In order to reach their full potential, however, the underlying evolutionary models need to be more closely adapted to linguistic needs, and additional evidence, like geographic information, needs to be taken into account. (This article is in English.)

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