and then a steppe to the right

[wombat1138]

An assortment of oddments:

1.) This news item from last year was brought back to mind by a comment exchange with bellatrys about sauerkraut and kimchee: the ambiguous modern status of Huns in Hungary.

2.) A felted yurt Nativity set.

3.) Sometime last year, I ran across a really fascinating page by a Hungarian physicist/polymath with several essays about cultural coincidences(?) between the Magyars and the Japanese, such as this one. Evidently he's not the only person with that line of thought:

Northern China was originally a temperate and lush place full of forests, streams, and rainfall. It began to dry out, however, a few thousand years before the common era. This dessication, which eventually produced one of the largest deserts in the world, the Gobi, drove the original inhabitants south and east. These peoples pushed into Korea and displaced indigenous populations. Eventually, these new settlers were displaced by a new wave of immigrations from northern China and a large number of them crossed over into the Japanese islands. For this reason, the languages of the area north of China, the language of Korea, and Japanese are all in the same family of languages according to most linguists. Because Mongolian (spoken in the area north of China) is also part of this language family and because the Mongolians conquered the world far to the west, this means that the language family to which Japanese belongs is spoken across a geographical region from Japan to Europe. The westernmost language in this family is Magyar, spoken in Hungary, and the easternmost language in this family is Japanese.

I mean, call me a sock with holes worn through it, cause I'll be darned. Dunno how much underlying truth there is to it (I suppose Cavalli-Sforza might have some interesting pertinent data, if I ever remember to track it down), but it's a dang good story.

Comments

[eeedge.livejournal.com]

That nativity is so cool! I had to resist the urge to go ahead and order one. Impulse purchases BAAAAD.

[wombat1138.livejournal.com]

But it's on saaaaaaaale. OTOH, how hard could it be to felt your own Nativity yurt? Start now and you've got plenty of time to finish it before next Xmas!

Meanwhile, while poking around more yurt lore, I noticed the Wikipedia illo thereof: a version of this photo (http://www.loc.gov/exhibits/empire/images/p87_6x__00006_.jpg), a color (not colorized) photograph that's nearly one hundred years old (http://www.loc.gov/exhibits/empire/). Given both the period and the setting, I can't decide whether that girl's clothing was dyed with aniline or cochineal or what-all, but I love the patterns (a three-legged upside-down chicken?).

[qadgop.livejournal.com]

Urr? I'm probably displaying how much I'm not a linguist here, but aside from borrowed Chinese characters, I didn't think the Chinese & Japanese languages were related at all. From what little I remember from long-ago aborted attempts to learn Mandarin & Nihongo, they sure didn't seem anything like each other in structure, let alone actual wordage.

[wombat1138.livejournal.com]

I think the idea is that the proto-Ural-Altaics would've been squirted out from the Gobi region and "around" China, though there seems to be some dispute (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ural-Altaic_languages) about whether the Uralic and Altaic branches really connect to each other after all.

But yeah, the underlying structures of Chinese and Japanese are pretty different, despite the superficial correspondences of writing systems and some vocabulary words. At least based on what I recall of my early lessons, Mandarin grammar is actually pretty easy for Anglophones-- no verb conjugations, no noun numbers/genders-- but the writing system is scary. The Japanese writing systems are *more* scary-- hiragana, katakana, and at least two different pronunciations for each kanji character-- and the grammar continues to give me fits with the ten zillion mood/tense/politeness combos for every verb and verblike adjective.

I discovered this afternoon while waiting at the car repair shop that I've lost my grip on most of the hiragana again. Argh. Hope I can still excavate the flashcards.

[qadgop.livejournal.com]

For some reason, I had the impression that at least the core of the Japanese "alphabet" is easier to grasp/smaller than that of Chinese for someone used to Germanic languages, but that might be a misconception on my part; it's been a while.

Still, a whole lotta flashcards.

[wombat1138.livejournal.com]

The kana syllabaries are definitely easier to start with. Hiragana is the curly-looking set that usually fills out the grammar around the ideographic (kanji) verb-stems and nouns; katakana is the spiky-looking set that's used approximately the same way italics are in English, to indicate foreign words and special emphasis.

I'm resigned to the concept of ideographs, which actually aren't so bad once you start to recognize the constituent radicals, but I am driven completely batshit (the technical term, I believe) by the multiple pronunciations for every kanji character, though it would probably help if I could grok the rules of lenition. Even when you recognize the kanji for "god/spirit" and know how to write it with the proper stroke order and everything, you have no guarantee of knowing whether it's supposed to be pronunced kami, gami, shin, or jin, especially if it's incorporated into someone's name.

(Akira, as in Kurosawa's personal name, is the same character as the first half of Meiji, as in the 19th-century imperial reign. How do you cope with a language like that??? In Mandarin, that character ("bright, shining") would be some tonal value of ming and *stay* that way, dammit! Well, maybe unless you switched to a different dialect of Chinese, but even then, the pronunciation would remain consistent within that dialect....)