Tibeto-Burman and Sumerian comparisons

 

 

Lost Culture of the Chaldeans

 

Part Three:

Tibeto-Burman and Sumerian comparisons

by

 

Damien F. Mackey

 

 

 

A British academic has written to me:

 

“Do you know the work of the Polish Sumerianist Jan Braun?

He wrote a book on Tibeto-Burman and Sumerian comparisons back around 2004”.

 

 

 

The correspondent wrote:

 

Dear Mr Mackey,

Academia.edu just recommended to me a brief .pdf upload of yours comparing words in Sumerian and Chinese. It is a bit unclear to me whether this is your work or work that you find stimulating.

I have also found such comparisons very thought provoking. Do you know the work of the Polish Sumerianist Jan Braun? He wrote a book on Tibeto-Burman and Sumerian comparisons back around 2004. I do want to point out however that the .pdf you uploaded compares 20th century Chinese pronunciations with (circa) 2000 BC Sumerian pronunciations. The pronunciation of Chinese is extremely well known from 602 AD and quite well known from around 500 BC, so methodologically speaking the comparisons would be more convincing if they used earlier pronunciations of Chinese.

A lot more research must still be done in this area and I hope you will pursue this question more systematically.

very best ….

 

To which I replied:

 

Many thanks … for alerting me to the research of Jan Braun which I am now keen to check out. I was entirely unaware of it.

The article was not my work, but just something that grabbed my interest as I proceeded with a series on the (Genesis) origins of the Chinese - the Sin stock of Canaan, son of Ham, I believe.

I had picked up in the Uni. of Sydney (Fisher) library years ago Dr. Charles Ball's book of extensive Sumero-Chinese linguistic comparisons. That there were such had amazed me at the time.

Of great interest to me these days also is the suggestion by some that Sumerian is actually the old Chaldean, perhaps related to the ancient Sin through Heth. For more on this, see my article:

"Lost Culture of the Chaldeans. Part Two: Related to Sinites (Chinese)?"
http://www.academia.edu/23543490/Lost_Culture_of_the_Chaldeans._Part_Two_Related_to_Sinites_Chinese_

My best wishes,
Damien.

 

 

In the following article we read a bit of E. T. Williams’s impressions of what he described as “the striking similarity between the language of ancient China and that of the Sumerians”:

The Relationship of the Sino-Tibetan languages

 

Edited by Veronica Veron Cruz Wong

….

E. T. Williams considered in detail the theory of the Chinese Urheimat [original homeland] in Central or Western Asia in his article "The origins of the Chinese" published in "American Journal of Anthropology" in 1918. He noted that it was difficult to separate the facts given by Terrien de la Couperie and his guesses but he was certain that de la Couperie's theory "enables us to give a very satisfactory explanation of the striking similarity between the language of ancient China and that of the Sumerians and the still more striking similarity between the ideographic symbols of the two peoples"

Anthropological differences seem to contradict the idea of any connection between Chinese and Babylonians but L. W. King noted obliquely-set eyes of figures in early Sumerian reliefs.

Left: Statue of a notable Sumerian. Lagash. Circa 2500 BC.

The statue shows a man with slightly obliquely-set eyes. This could be a sign of the cross-breading between Caucasoids and Mongoloids. What this sign is expressed rather weakly and could be explained that Mongoloids left Sumeria some millenniums before.

It is certain that Sumerians were not Semites and E. T. Williams along with other scholars thought that they had some Turanian features therefore came to such conclusion:

We have, then, the facts that various Chinese tribes appear to have come in to what is now China from some region to the northwest of that country, and that the Sumerians appear to have come into the Euphrates Valley from some place to the northeast of Babylonia; that the Sumerians were apparently of the Turanian race, and that their language and their script are strikingly like those of the ancient Chinese; and that extensive changes in the climate of Central Asia have driven out at different periods great numbers of the inhabitants who have migrated in various directions.

It does not seem at all improbable then that the Chinese forefathers and the ancestors of the Sumerians may have been related and may have migrated from neighboring regions, the Chinese toward the east and the Sumerians toward the west (WILLIAMS E.T., 1918: 211).

 

 

And, regarding professor Jan Braun’s book, one finds this brief note at:

https://ksiegarniaorientalna.pl/pl/p/SUMERIAN-AND-TIBETO-BURMAN%2C-Jan-Braun/45

 

Jan Braun, professor at the Oriental Institute of the University of Warsaw, in his book presents the beginnings of the Sumerian language which is one of the oldest literary languages of the world. On a broad spectrum of the material the Author attempts to prove the genetic affiliation of the Sumerian to the Sino-Tibetan family of languages.

ISBN 83-87111-18-X, 96 p.