Thread by @ZevHandel

@Tao_Collective @KIRINPUTRA @viroraptor @homosappiest @xiao_collective @catielila @BadLingTakes Sure. Let's just suppose for the sake of argument that we have a core set of Sinitic languages descended from a common ancestor spoken in what is now northern China, under historical circumstances that can be reasonably approximated by the tree model of divergence.

@Tao_Collective @KIRINPUTRA @viroraptor @homosappiest @xiao_collective @catielila @BadLingTakes We can call that language Old Chinese and we'd like to reconstruct its vocabulary and phonology. We have two windows into that language's vocabulary and pronunciation. One is primarily text-based or, if you will, philological.

The other is cognate vocabulary in modern lgs.

@Tao_Collective @KIRINPUTRA @viroraptor @homosappiest @xiao_collective @catielila @BadLingTakes They aren't commensurate, for several reasons: (1) The textual record is incomplete, much is lost to us. So there might be words attested only in texts that haven't survived. (2) Because writing is employed only in certain socio-cultural contexts and is not a precise

@Tao_Collective @KIRINPUTRA @viroraptor @homosappiest @xiao_collective @catielila @BadLingTakes mirror of spoken language, some words in common use in spoken vernacular may not ever appear in the textual record (even if everything survived). (3) Related to #2, the texts we have may reflect dialects adjacent, but not identical to, the ancestral spoken language.

@Tao_Collective @KIRINPUTRA @viroraptor @homosappiest @xiao_collective @catielila @BadLingTakes (4) There may well be words in the textual record that we don't recognize, because the way they are written disguises their identity and they weren't codified in the medieval lexicographic tradition.

@Tao_Collective @KIRINPUTRA @viroraptor @homosappiest @xiao_collective @catielila @BadLingTakes What all this means is that if your starting point for Old Chinese reconstruction is textual — that is, you start with a set of graph-word combinations that are attested in pre-Qin texts (and therefore belong to OC vocabulary),

@Tao_Collective @KIRINPUTRA @viroraptor @homosappiest @xiao_collective @catielila @BadLingTakes you will simply fail to reconstruct anything in the lexicon that isn't in those texts. Even if those lexical items are reasonably well reflected in two or more major branches of the family!

@Tao_Collective @KIRINPUTRA @viroraptor @homosappiest @xiao_collective @catielila @BadLingTakes On the other hand, if you really applied the comparative method, by meticulously collecting vocabulary in as many modern Chinese languages as possible, throwing out borrowed layers to retain only the directly inherited colloquial forms, identified regular correspondences,

@Tao_Collective @KIRINPUTRA @viroraptor @homosappiest @xiao_collective @catielila @BadLingTakes and sought out cognates attested in geographically distant branches, then you would end up reconstructing vocabulary items in Old Chinese that were part of the spoken language but had no early textual representation.

@Tao_Collective @KIRINPUTRA @viroraptor @homosappiest @xiao_collective @catielila @BadLingTakes That would not only give a clearer picture of the spoken ancestor — something more akin to Proto-Romance — but through comparison of that reconstructed language (let's call it Proto-Chinese) with philologically-reconstructed Old Chinese, you could learn a lot

@Tao_Collective @KIRINPUTRA @viroraptor @homosappiest @xiao_collective @catielila @BadLingTakes about early Chinese linguistic varieties and the relationship between spoken and written language.

Nobody has really tried anything like this. It's a massive effort and we still don't have good documentation of colloquial speech in many modern Sinitic languages and dialects. END

@Tao_Collective @KIRINPUTRA @viroraptor @homosappiest @xiao_collective @catielila @BadLingTakes ^^ I'm sure you know most or all of this already, @Tao_Collective , so apologies for my long-windedness. Just laying it out in full to help me keep my thoughts organized.