From: Tavi
Message: 68624
Date: 2012-02-28
>Given that dogs were domesticated in East Asia, the suggestion the
> I'd be interested to hear your arguments for this. Are they any other
> than (1) the purported exchange of a few words, like "house", with
> Yeniseian Ket; and (2) the presence of IE and specifically Germanic
> words in Chinese?
>
> About the latter: a handful of IE words in Chinese pertaining to
> cattle-raising have never been controversial, e.g. "quan" for dog
> (Gk. kuon), "mi" for "honey", "ma" < "*mra" for "horse" (mare). But
> in V. Mair's series Sino-Platonic Papers, a few Chinese scholars have
> argued for a much larger presence of IE words in Chinese, effectively
> distinguishing Chinese from the other Sino-Tibetan languages by its
> IE component. The most accomplished contributor was the late Chang
> Tsung-Tung, who ends up with over a thousand IE words, on closer
> inspection most of them Germanic. Was he biased by his own life in
> Frankfurt with a German wife? At any rate, other Chinese scholars
> (and their nationality deserves emphasis, for Chinese scholarship
> tends to be chauvinistic, e.g. resenting the European presence in the
> Tarim mummies) have built on his theory and argued e.g. that the
> Yellow Emperor, the legendary founder of Chinese culture, was an IE
> immigrant. I am not aware of much critical review of this body of
> theory/speculation. Anyone?
>