Trung Sisters: would present-day Vietnamese be able to understand them?
From: <tobiasrettig@smu.edu.sg>
Date: Sat, Mar 19, 2011 at 8:37 PM
To: Vietnam Studies Group <vsg@u.washington.edu>
Dear List,
I have a slightly unusual question that betrays my ignorance but also my curiosity:
Supposing we could zoom back in time three present-day Vietnamese (one from North, Centre, and South) (or if we could zoom the two sisters into the present), would they be able to understand the Hai Ba Trung's language?
Would they be able to converse with them right away, or would the language (words, pronunciation, even tones) have changed so radically over time as to make initial attempts at spoken communication extremely impossible, at least in the short term?
Any suggestions and educated speculation would be welcome.
Best regards,
Tobias
Tobias Rettig, School of Social Sciences, Singapore Management University
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From: Liam C Kelley
Date: Sat, Mar 19, 2011 at 9:03 PM
To: tobiasrettig@smu.edu.sg, Vietnam Studies Group <vsg@u.washington.edu>
Tobias,
It would depend on what you wanted to talk about. Given that somewhere in the range of 70-80% of the vocab in modern Vietnamese comes from Chinese, and that much of that was adopted in the period from the Tang onward, the way in which an educated Vietnamese today speaks would be incomprehensible to the Trung sisters.
Someone would have to speak without using words which originated from Chinese. I think people would find that difficult because there are plenty of words which Vietnamese think are Vietnamese but which actually come from Chinese and were adopted starting in the Han, like ve (return) and nha (home). So would the Trung sisters be able to understand "Toi ve nha"? Maybe, if "ve" and "nha" had entered their language by that point. But if these words hadn't, then even a statement seemingly that simple would be incomprehensible. That being the case, is there any other way to say "Toi ve nha" in Vietnamese? Not that I know of, and that is a good sign that the language of the Trung sisters is gone.
This all of course assumes that the Trung sisters spoke a proto-Viet language. Given that the Red River delta was probably inhabited by a variety of ethnic groups speaking a variety of languages, there is no way to know for sure.
In conclusion, if you are thinking of bringing the Trung sisters back from the dead and inviting them to a dinner party, I would recommend that you don't. They undoubtedly have some great stories to tell which we'd all like to hear, but it will be very hard to understand them.
Liam Kelley
University of Hawaii
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From: Melanie Beresford
Date: Sat, Mar 19, 2011 at 9:07 PM
To: tobiasrettig@smu.edu.sg, Vietnam Studies Group <vsg@u.washington.edu>
I'm curious about this too.
I have been told that the Hai Ba Trung were actually Muong - which is one of the root languages of Vietnamese. Could modern-day Muong speakers understand them?
Melanie
--
Melanie Beresford
Associate Dean Research
Associate Professor in Economics
Faculty of Business & Economics
Macquarie University, NSW 2109
Australia
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From: Walter james Mc intosh <alohamac@xtra.co.nz>
Date: Sat, Mar 19, 2011 at 9:24 PM
To: tobiasrettig@smu.edu.sg, Vietnam Studies Group <vsg@u.washington.edu>
Tobias , I would venture a guess that there would not be a big problem with understanding the basic language. If I recall correctly the Trung Sisters rebellion was in the early 10th century. I recall in 1960 when I was at Columbia University reviewing Nguyen Van Hoa's Ph.d. work on his dictionary , among his source material was some of Alexander De Rhodes work on Quoc Ngu from the 16th Century but Rhodes was relying on many older texts , and there were a number of notes on sounds of Vietnamese words in French . I would hazzard a guess that it would not be how the language sounded but rather modern meanings of so many words that would be the main bsarrier to communication .
Mac McIntosh
The Lighthouse- Bluff, NZ
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From: will pore
Date: Sat, Mar 19, 2011 at 10:09 PM
To: Vietnam Studies Group <vsg@u.washington.edu>
The remarkable thing about written, "high" (i.e. Classical) Chinese is that it has changed very little over a long time. If the Trung sisters could write Chinese, even today it would be possible to have a lively "brush talk" with them.
Will Pore
--
William F. Pore, Ph.D.
Associate Professor
Department of Global Studies
College of Economics and International Trade
Pusan National University
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From: Tai, Hue-Tam Ho
Date: Sun, Mar 20, 2011 at 5:03 AM
To: Vietnam Studies Group <vsg@u.washington.edu>
One should also mention that "toi" meaning "I" dates from the 19th century. The original meaning means "servant" as in "toi to" and was used originally by officials when speaking to the emperor; since they were all his servants, they were one another's equals. The word "toi" thus has limited use. I would never have dreamed of referring to myself as "toi" when speaking to my parents!
So none of "toi ve nha" would work in the first century AD in its present meaning.
As for the ethnicty of the Trung sisters, Melanie raises a good question. They are said to have descended from the Hung kings who themselves were the progeny of Lac Long Quan and Au Co. Au Co herself was the daughter of the king of Tungting Lake in modern Hunan province. She took 50 of the children she had borne to Lac Long Quan up to the mountains and these were the ancestors of the Vietnamese.
Obviously this is all mythology; the Trung sisters, however, are historical figures. Keith Taylor suggests that"muong" as an ethnic marker is a French colonial invention. Before that, muong was an agricultural practice suited to the upland; lowlanders who moved into the uplands would need to adapt to the local terrain.He suggests that it was French anthropologists such as Jeanne Cuisinier who transformed an agricultural practice into an ethnic label.
While the ethnicity of the Trung sisters has not been a subject of discussion, as far as I know, Lady Trieu is strongly suspected of being of non-kinh ethnicity. She was a native of Thanh Hoa and the description of her riding bare-breasted on her elephant would fit with what we know of some local customs up to recent times.
Hue-Tam Ho Tai
Kenneth T. Young Professor
of Sino-Vietnamese History
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From: Nghia Vo
Date: Sun, Mar 20, 2011 at 5:10 AM
To: Vietnam Studies Group <vsg@u.washington.edu>
List,
A few things,
1. The Trungs' rebellion occured in 39 AD, not the 10th century.
2. Would we understand them? Since it was in the 1st century, like old Latin or Greek, I would guess that we would not be able to understand them unless we learn the ancient Vietnamese.
3. Since you are talking about the Trung--what brought you to this subject anyway?-- according to the Viet Dien U Linh Tap (Compilation of the Departed Spirits in the Realm of Viet) written by Ly Te Xuyen in 1329:
The ladies were abandoned and died in battle. The local people pitied the sisters and built a temple to workship them. (VDULT)
Olga Dror in her book Princess Lieu Hanh 2007, p 19 wrote:
"Pity for their sad end and not admiration of their unprecedented brave uprising was what caused their deification."
What do you think?
Nghia
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From: Frank
Date: Sun, Mar 20, 2011 at 5:15 AM
To: Vietnam Studies Group <vsg@u.washington.edu>
My understanding is that it is more likely that the Trung sisters spoke a Tai language than that they spoke a Vietic language. The Vietic-speaking peoples were probably still in the highlands of Nghe Tinh when the Trung sisters were around, or just beginning their northward migration toward the Red River delta.
At this mythical dinner party invoked by Liam, if you were looking for recognizable words, you'd do much better with body parts such as 'eye' or 'mouth', natural phenomena such as 'sky' or 'earth' (or foodstuffs such as 'water' or 'rice') than you would with a pronoun such as 'toi' - pronoun systems are often the least stable parts of a vocabulary, especially one such as the Vietnamese system with its elaborate politeness levels and euphemisms.
But would one of Alexandre de Rhodes' informants be able to conduct a conversation with a living Vietnamese?
Best,
Frank Proschan
37 place Jeanne d'Arc
75013 Paris
FRANCE
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From: John Phan
Date: Sun, Mar 20, 2011 at 9:29 AM
To: Vietnam Studies Group <vsg@u.washington.edu>
Hello everyone:
It is virtually certain that the Trung Sisters would not be able to communicate either with modern-day Muong or Vietnamese speakers. Language changes as a function of time; Middle English (spoken about 600 years ago) is already quite removed from modern English, and Old English (some 900 years ago) is completely unintelligible to modern speakers.
The Trung sisters probably did speak a Vietic language; but living in the 1st century CE, they would have been speaking what is called "Proto-Viet-Muong"--the ancestor of modern Muong and Vietnamese. It is even possible they were speaking an even earlier form of the language (i.e. "Proto-Vietic"--the ancestor of Vietnamese, Muong, and some other languages spoken in the highlands, like Ruc, Pong, Arem, etc.). At any rate, not only the lexicon (as noted by Liam Kelly), but the phonology and syntax of Vietnamese and Muong would be subsequently transformed--both by Chinese influence, and by internal linguistic changes over the next millennium.
Regarding ethnicity, as Professor Tai suggested, it is a good question to ask whether or not modern categories of ethnicity (which largely derive from French ethnographic work during the early 20th century) apply at all.
Best, John
--
John D. Phan
Ph.D. Candidate
East Asian Linguistics & Literature
Cornell University
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From: John Phan
Date: Sun, Mar 20, 2011 at 9:39 AM
To: Vietnam Studies Group <vsg@u.washington.edu>
Dear everyone:
I should add, that the easiest analogy would be Chinese itself. The Chinese of the 1st century CE was vastly different than any of its descendent languages today--it probably had no tone, probably had a sesquisyllabic (minor + major syllable) structure, and may even still have had morphological inflection. In other words, if Ma Vien (Ma Yuan) were himself transported to modern-day Beijing (or Guangzhou), he would certainly not be able to understand what anyone was saying.
Best, John
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From: Walter james Mc intosh <alohamac@xtra.co.nz>
Date: Sun, Mar 20, 2011 at 12:31 PM
To: Vietnam Studies Group <vsg@u.washington.edu>
I tend to think most of the respondents to this speculative question are really underestimating the power of the human mind to communicate. I recall when I was living in Greece , I often visited the site of Hippocrates hospital on the island of Kos . I think that hospital was built about 500 BC ( I hope I got those dates right) -- and I could easily read the various incriptions carved into the stones of that hospital . I feel fairly sure that any Greek of 500 BC would have been able to understand my pronouncation of those words . Also when working in the voice intercept field in Vietnam I occasional came upon tapes of conversations that had been scrambled to enhance security of the conversation , yet I found that just by listening a few times to the tape that the human brain could unscramble the conversation better than any electronic device .Of course as that was 50 years ago , technology both in scrambling and unscrambling may well have improved in the mean time.
Mac McIntosh
The Lighthouse- Bluff, NZ
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From: Tai, Hue-Tam Ho
Date: Sun, Mar 20, 2011 at 4:44 PM
To: Vietnam Studies Group <vsg@u.washington.edu>
Well, my Cantonese-speaking husband cannot understand Mandarin. It's not quite the same as different pronunciations of Latin or Greek, or the difference between a Saigon and a Hanoi accent.
During Tang times, the Cantonese pronunciation was standard. Anyone wanting to study Tang period poetry ought to speak with a Cantonese accent. And Vietnamese is closer to Cantonese than to Mandarin.
Still Frank poses a good question. If the Trung sisters spoke a Tai language, then internal changes within Vietnamese would not be relevant. I assume that Tai also underwent internal change over the centuries.
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From: Walter james Mc intosh
Date: Sun, Mar 20, 2011 at 5:07 PM
To: Vietnam Studies Group <vsg@u.washington.edu>
Hue - Tam Ho Tai ,
July of lsast year I travelled to Shang Hai to take in the Expo. My hosts were PLA Officers that did not speak English .While we did have the aid of their son , who did speak English , I found that if I took Chinese Loan words , such as Mau tuan for contradiction , or such terms as My quoc Dai Su Quan for American Embassy , I could make myself understood in spite of the fact that my hosts spoke Mandarin and not Cantonese. I think the real key is the fact the human beings have a near innate need and desire to communicate. Remember Mario Pei , the chap that co-wrote a vast series of language books called - Getting along in....X language ? I met and had a number of discussions with him in 1960 at Monterey on this very subject . He felt passionately that any two people could finds ways to talk /communicate with each other very quickly in the right cimcumstances. I recall Mario taught censorship techiques to security officers in WWII in 40 someodd languages.
Mac McIntosh
The Lighthouse- Bluff, NZ
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From: Tai, Hue-Tam Ho
Date: Sun, Mar 20, 2011 at 6:48 PM
To: Vietnam Studies Group <vsg@u.washington.edu>
I certainly can pick up some bits of conversation in Mandarin (having studied it for four years) and some Cantonese; but not enough to sustain a serious conversation .
When my husband watches Chinese movies in Mandarin, he needs subtitles. And when he turns on the Cantonese version, he complains that the Chinese subtitles are not the same as what he is hearing. I can follow a conversation with Bac Ninh people, but when they talk too quickly, I cannot substitute "l" for "n" and vice-versa quickly enough to make sense of what they say.
But this is getting away from what the Trung sisters may have spoken. As Frank Proschan suggests, it may have little in common with Vietnamese, ancient or modern.
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From: John Phan
Date: Sun, Mar 20, 2011 at 8:48 PM
To: Vietnam Studies Group <vsg@u.washington.edu>
Hello everyone:
What a fun thread!
The idea that the Trung Sisters spoke a Tai language is interesting. I'd love to hear more about that theory. It was always my understanding, however, that Tai-speaking groups did not migrate out of their Yunnan/Guangxi homeland across n. Vietnam until the 10th-11th centuries. I am not familiar with the idea that there were Tai speakers anywhere in n. Vietnam as early as the 1st century CE, except perhaps in the Cao Bang/Lang Son area, which represents the southern fringe of their homeland territory. A good person to go to about Tai migrations, and the internal history of Proto-Tai is Joe Pittayaporn, now at Chula (dissertation: "The Phonology of Proto-Tai"). Joe's work supports the idea of 10th-11th century migrations, rather than anything earlier.
That said, it is still unclear what language(s) were spoken in northern Vietnam in the 1st century. Some very fascinating hypothetical work has been conducted by the leading Vietic linguist, Michel Ferlus, who has tried to connect Dongsonian cultures with Proto-Vietic. But I can say from my own work that I am pretty convinced that Proto-Viet-Muong was spoken during the Jiao (n. Vietnam) of the Six Dynasties, and so it is not much of a stretch to suggest that the major language(s) of the 1st century were probably some form of Vietic.
Going back to the intelligibility of this ancient language to modern speakers, again, it is very unlikely that either modern Viet or Muong speakers would be able to understand 1st Century Proto-Viet-Muong (or, as the case may be, Proto-Vietic). Just as Chinese has changed radically into its descendant languages of Cantonese, Mandarin, Wu, etc., so too has Proto-Viet-Muong evolved into very different languages today. It is not an understatement to say that the language spoken in 1st century n. Vietnam no longer exists. Neither does "Old Chinese," which was the language spoken by people of the Han Dynasty. Nor even does "Late Middle Chinese"--the language of the Tang Dynasty, which later evolved into at least Mandarin and Cantonese (though, as Prof. Tai has pointed out, Cantonese is much closer to LMC than Mandarin, which mutated dramatically in contact with northern Altaic languages). These languages are all extinct, and the linguistic mutations that separate them from their descendants, also mean that they are not mutually intelligible.
That isn't to say that there aren't communicatory systems that link present-day languages with their ancestors. Writing is one of those systems, and the persistence of a relatively stable form of classical Chinese grammar (as was also pointed out) represents a remarkable continuity. Leaving aside the still very great differences in, say, Zhou Dynasty classical and Qing Dynasty prose for the moment, I do not doubt that someone who has mastered Classical (and maybe even someone who has just mastered Literary) Chinese could probably engage in a fairly successful pen-pal-ship with Ma Yuan. But if Ma Yuan tried to watch "Anh Hung Xa Dieu"--even in Cantonese, with Chinese subtitles, I think he'd be pretty lost! Of course, he'd probably be lost anyway, since it's about the Song Dynasty.
To shift gears a bit, I would hazard to say that we would be able to understand Alexandre de Rhodes' consultants. When I was doing fieldwork with the Muong, I could practically understand them from the get-go, and after a couple weeks, could understand maybe 40%-60% of their speech with just Vietnamese. The "Vietnamese" in De Rhodes' 17th century dictionary is strikingly Muong-like, though still more "Vietnamese-like" than modern Muong languages. Interesting question!!
Finally, Jason--those are interesting questions. I don't know that there is a consensus on the relationship between grammatical inflection and tone. If you asked me to speculate, I don't know that I would guess that there is any "order" to the evolution. Certainly, the tonal system that would develop in the environment of a multisyllabic language with grammatical inflection would be very different--and probably, you wouldn't get tone on the inflected morphemes (much like you don't get tone in question particles in modern Mandarin), but I don't know that there is anything in the syntax of an inflectional language that would feasibly constrain the development of tone.
Sorry for the long reply. It's been a really fun thread.
Sincerely,
John
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From: Liam C Kelley
Date: Sun, Mar 20, 2011 at 9:27 PM
To: Vietnam Studies Group <vsg@u.washington.edu>
Ok, I really need to write my paper for AAS, so that's why I'm going to respond to this post. . .
Yes, Joe Pittayaporn needs to publish something which will set the record straight about the Tai in Vietnam, because ever since Maspero started talking about Vietnamese as a Tai language in the early 20th century, the antiquity of the Tai-Viet relationship has been overstated. Ferlus argues that there was limited contact between Austro-Asiatic speakers and Proto-Tai speakers (I think he sees "rice" gao/khao as an example of this) way back when, but what Joe Pittayaporn argues is that the majority of linguistic borrowing from Tai into Viet occured after Southwestern Tai broke away from other Tai languages (somewhere around 900-1,000 AD).
Demonstrating the ancient interactions of all of the nationalities (dan toc) has been an important project in the past half century in Vietnam (starting in the DRV) as a means to show that all of the dan toc are one big happy family. In the early 1980s, Pham Duc Duong, argued for ancient Viet-Tai relations in the first millenium BC, and he did this largely based on linguistic evidence. However, he did this in complete ignorance of the history of the development of Tai languages. This is why Joe Pittayaporn's ideas need to be more widely known, because many of the terms which Pham Duc Duong argued were "ancient" Tai terms, in fact are quite "late" Southwestern Tai terms. What they show is contact after say 900 AD, not in the first millenium BC.
So who was in the Red River delta in the first millenium BC? Frank Proschan mentioned that the Viet should have still been in the Nghe An highlands at that point. I'd like to agree with that, but then who was in the delta? Amra Calo, in her recent book on the bronze drums, argues that the "birdmen" who we see on the bronze drums are evidence of at least contact with Austronesian peoples who had migrated to the central areas of what is today Vietnam, that is, the ancestors of the Cham, but she doesn't know who the people who made the bronze drums were or what language they spoke.
So this seems to be the big puzzle. We know the people who were in the vicinity, but we don't know who was in the actual Red River delta.
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From: Tai, Hue-Tam Ho
Date: Mon, Mar 21, 2011 at 4:33 AM
To: Vietnam Studies Group <vsg@u.washington.edu>
Would Phong Chau, where Au Co supposedly took her offspring and gave rise to the Hung kings, be considered part of the Delta?
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From: Frank
Date: Mon, Mar 21, 2011 at 5:42 AM
To: Vietnam Studies Group <vsg@u.washington.edu>
One cannot confuse the speakers of Southwestern Tai languages (including Lao and Thai [Siamese]) with the speakers of Tai languages of other branches found in Viet Nam such as the Tay and Nung, whose languages are in the Central Tai branches, or Thai Mene (in Nghe An) that bears features of being a Northern Tai-branch language. Although the southward migration of Southwestern Tai can be dated to the end of the first millennium of the common era and beginning of the second millennium, the Tay and Nung certainly were in Viet Nam much earlier (and, if Mene is a Northern-branch language, they also likely predated the Southwestern Tai migrations). I did not suggest that the Trung sisters spoke a language of the SW branch, and arguments about the later migration of SW Tai speakers do not tell us much about the earlier presence of speakers of Central Tai in and around the Red River delta.
It is also impossible to speak a proto-language, or to say that at date X there were speakers of language Proto-Y. A proto-language is an invention of scholars, based upon historical reconstruction of developments in vocabulary and sound shifts among many daughter languages. If we can reconstruct some 1,000 to 3,000 Proto-Vietic roots (I'm guessing, but the number is in any case relatively small), there has probably never been a language with such an impoverished vocabulary, and someone speaking at the time would have had many more words that have since disappeared, without leaving the traces in daughter (and great-great-great granddaughter) languages that are the only evidence we have for the ancestral language.
It is also impossible - despite the best efforts of the SIL and their pseudo-science of 'glottochronology' - to arrive at a date for a proto-language in the absence of other compelling evidence. Languages change at their own pace, and attempting to retrodict the age of a proto-language from the degree of variation in its descendants cannot be done. If we can reasonably speculate about the age of a proto-language, it is not from the internal evidence found within the known descendants, but only because of other (external) historical evidence about population movements and contacts.
Sent: Mon, March 21, 2011 5:27:34 AM
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From: Liam C Kelley
Date: Mon, Mar 21, 2011 at 12:26 PM
To: Vietnam Studies Group <vsg@u.washington.edu>
Dear Hue-Tam,
Good question, but unfortunately I don't think we have a good sense of how the various areas of the north were (or were not) related during that period. This is an issue which archaeology should provide the evidence for, but Vietnamese archaeology began with a strong drive to prove the historical existence of Van Lang, as recorded in later historical sources. Some degree of variation was allowed for (i.e., you could have the 15 tribes/bo lac) as long as it all fell under the united rule/influence of the Hung kings. But were historical records which were written down at best centuries after the fact (the Shuijing zhu) or at worst well over 1,000 years after the fact (the Dai Viet su ky toan thu) really the best lens through which to examine the archaeological record? What would people have seen if they had examined the archaeological record without preconceived ideas of what they would find there? I think it's the answer to this second question which we need to know in order to get a sense of what was actually going on in the region in the first millennium BC. However, I suspect that it will be very hard to get such an answer because you can't put artifacts back in the ground and start over again.
If there are any archaeologists on the list who are less pessimistic, please illuminate and uplift.
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From: Ngô Thanh Nhàn
Date: 2011/3/21
To: Vietnam Studies Group <vsg@u.washington.edu>
Dear Liam and Frank,
I can confirm Frank's position re. glottochronology... I was doing this
when I prepared my thesis early 1980's, and my professor tested
several versions of glottochronology basic lists... They came out
wrong.
I might have missed the following references in the email threads.
If so, my apology.
When I look up the new "T? di?n Bách khoa: Ð?t nu?c, Con ngu?i
Vi?t Nam" (published late 2010, and I have just received today from
Hanoi) on "Kh?i nghia Hai Bà Trung"... It seems that they were born,
and the uprising started in huy?n Mê Linh of Giao Ch? District (today Ba
Vì, Tam Ð?o). And when I looked up Ba Vì, Tam Ð?o, Kinh, Mu?ng and
Dao are listed as today's ethnic composition of the area. But if you look
at Vinh Phúc, then today live the people of Sán Dìu, Sán Ch?y
and Tày (Tày-Kadai).
I read somewhere, sometimes ago, that the name Trung Tr?c came
from tr?ng ch?c (kén ch?c), the strong and good silk cocoon, and
Trung Nh? from tr?ng nhì (kén nhì), the second best silk cocoon.
If this is true, their language might be closed to Mu?ng.
Best,
Nhan
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From: John Phan
Date: Mon, Mar 21, 2011 at 1:47 PM
To: Vietnam Studies Group <vsg@u.washington.edu>
Hi VSG,
Great stuff, seeing ancient Vietnam discussed on the listserve!
The ethnolinguistic make-up of the Han-era Hong plain is such a puzzle, and, a really fascinating one. I know Tran Tri Doi at VNU in Hanoi has been conducting a linguistic analysis of some of the toponyms of the upper Red River valley, in order to try and tease out their possible histories--work he is including in a forthcoming book.
Liam, I'd love to see the reference for that archaeological work on Austronesian/Dongsonian contact--it sounds really interesting. I'd also agree that it's completely plausible that the Vietic migration into the Red River Plain was happening over the 1st millennium. I wonder, though, if it wasn't already complete by the time the Han got there?
As Dr. Proschan pointed out, linguistics is of course limited in pinpointing centuries or years, and the picture around the 1st Century CE is indeed fuzzy. Linguistic evidence from Sino-Vietnamese and Sino-Muong does strongly suggest that Proto-Viet-Muong (the shared ancestor of Vietnamese and Muong) was spoken at least as early as the 5th or 6th centuries. Old Sino-Vietnamese words like "mùi" for ?, appear to have been borrowed before devoicing and tonogenesis occurred in Chinese, processes which we can roughly date to the early Medieval Period (i.e. 5th-6th centuries) due to the good fortune of both philological records like theQieyun, as well as other records like Yan Zhitui's Yanshi Jiaxun, which notes pronunciation confusions deriving from voiced/voiceless alternations. But of course, that only gets us to the 400s or so, a good few centuriesafter the Hai Ba Trung lived.
All that is to say, that I think Liam's question of, "if not Tai, then who?" is really great, and there is certainly room for speakers of other languages to have moved in and out of the Red River plain during Han administration. In some senses, the simplest explanation would be to assume that it was an itinerant majority of Vietic speakers that the Han encountered. But given the evident propensity for humans to move and transform, I agree that the simplest answer is not to be preferred just for its simplicity alone.
As for the history of Tai migrations, I am admittedly restricted to Joe's work in my own experience (with a bit of Li Fang-Kuei thrown in there of course). While Joe's work argues for an earlier diversification into three (and possibly four) main subgroups earlier in history, it does not support the migration of any of these subgroups out of the Yunnan/Guangxi homeland until the early 2nd millennium, after which at least two migratory waves probably occurred. I, too, eagerly await an article by Joe clarifying these issues. But I am not well-read on the subject, and would love to learn more about evidence supporting an earlier Tai presence in n. Vietnam (outside of Cao Bang and Lang Son).
Thanks finally to Dr. Proschan for pointing out the evils of glottochronology! As one of the most ill-fated experiments in linguistics, it's always good to be reminded of wrong turns the field has made, which in the end also serves to demonstrate how far the field has come. Linguistics is indeed unable to generate historical dates by itself. What Historical Linguistics can do is provide sequences of changes, and reconstructed portraits of different stages in the development of language. These extinct languages are not imaginary, however, any more than Attic Greek is an imaginary language, or Middle Chinese is an imaginary language. It is true, however, that our portraits of them are sometimes severely restricted. But it is in the comparison of the linguistic record with other records--historical, archaeological, even literary--that we can begin to assemble a richer portrait of the past.
If anyone is interested, I'd love to be a part of an early Vietnam reading/discussion group, where we can trade data and readings in a more specific format. I would be very excited to learn from the work all of you have been doing on these early periods. As the saying goes, 'three poor cobblers can surpass a Zhugeliang!"
Best, John
ps: sorry again about the long post. such interesting questions!
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From: John Phan
Date: Mon, Mar 21, 2011 at 1:57 PM
To: Vietnam Studies Group <vsg@u.washington.edu>
minor correction:
devoicing & tonogenesis in MC was complete by the second half of the 1st millennium, but it was probably ongoing throughout the 5th-7th centuries, depending on the regional variety.
--