February 23, 2003

HMONG/MIAO.

Allow me to introduce you to one of the most intractable problems of nomenclature I've run across.

You have probably seen references to the Hmong people; many of them fled Southeast Asia after working with the American military and finding themselves on the wrong side of the Communist takeover, and a sizable community has settled in the U.S. They have established themselves enough to have begun to find a voice; the NY Times yesterday published a long article by Felicia R. Lee about the birth of a literature out of an oral tradition, in particular the literary journal Paj Ntaub Voice, based in St. Paul, Minnesota, and an anthology, Bamboo Among the Oaks. A quote from the article:

As for the Hmong, they are gradually coming into their own in America. They have elected their first state senator, from Minnesota, and the St. Paul police have learned to speak Hmong. The anthology is being bought particularly by educators and those interested in Asian culture, said John van Vliet, a spokesman for the Minnesota Historical Society Press. Since October, about 3,200 of the 4,500 books in print have been sold, said Kevin Morrissey, a marketing manager for the press.
Note that in none of those links does the word "Miao" occur.

Now let us turn our attention to the minority languages of China. One of the most prominent (spoken by 5,000,000 people, behind only Zhuang, Uighur, and Yi) is Miao, part of the Miao-Yao group. A striking feature of Miao is that it has a large number of consonants (49 in one representative dialect) but few vowels, and syllables can end only in a vowel or in the consonant -ng (in some dialects, this becomes nasalization of the preceding vowel). The usual romanization system takes advantage of the fact that no syllable ends in a consonant: the tone (except for the mid tone) is indicated by a consonant letter written at the end of each syllable. Thus pob 'ball' has high tone, poj 'female' has high falling tone, and so on, with po 'spleen' representing the mid tone. This is a clever and economical system, with the disadvantage that foreigners not used to the conventions find it virtually impossible not to "hear" the final consonant they see written. Thus the name of the journal I cited above, Paj Ntaub, is pronounced something like "pa ndau" (with tones as in my examples). Note that in neither the above paragraph nor in the links does the word "Hmong" appear.

The attentive reader will already have anticipated the surprise ending: Miao and Hmong are one and the same. It took me some time to figure this out, and once I did I was quite annoyed. There are many languages that are known by more than one name (Gypsy/Romanes, Galla/Oromo, Araucanian/Mapuche, Votyak/Udmurt, etc., the latter of each pair being the "correct" name), but when these are referred to acknowledgment is usually made of the duality. Only in the case of Hmong (written Hmoob in the standard romanization) and Miao do the two terms lead such separate lives. The explanation is simple enough. The group that migrated from southern China to Laos and Vietnam within the last couple of centuries (many of whom have now emigrated to the U.S.) call themselves Hmong and quite naturally passed the term on, first to the soldiers they worked with and now to Americans at large; meanwhile, the much larger group that remained in China has always been known to the Chinese as Miao, and since there is no common self-designation (only a minority using "Hmong"), Miao has quite naturally been used by linguists and others who deal with the minorities of China. So what are we who want to refer to the whole population to do? Joakim Enwall has written a short article on the subject, and I am willing to accept his conclusion:
I propose that the term Hmong be used only for designating the Miao groups speaking the Hmong dialect in China and for the Miao outside China. This usage is by now well established in Western literature. However, I think that it is best to use Miao as a general term, especially as this is in accord with tradition and is also practical for making the situation clear to persons not specialising in Miaology. Many persons have already been confused by the present terminological state and see no connection between the Hmong and the Miao. There is perhaps not much that can be done about this now, but I hope that some people will understand the relation between the words Miao and Hmong better, if they are used in a more logical way.

Posted by languagehat at February 23, 2003 05:42 PM
Comments

Just now am at my mother's in Yorkshire finishing off my copy of Jared Diamond's 'Guns, Germs and Steel' I started when I was last back.

Just last night got to the Pacific languages bit where Diamond identifies the Miao as "known in the US as the Hmong". Maybe we should build this little fact into the intelligent-cat question-and-answer joke I heard last week....

Posted by: mark at February 24, 2003 08:26 AM

Regarding ethnonyms/glossonyms issues, one would usually tend to consider that sticking to the people's self-designation in their own language is always better than alleged scholarly "tradition", which is all-too often based on ages-old misinterpretations of the colonial/missionary period.
However, Enkwall gives a rather convincing argument why this is not as easy to apply as an ideological viewpoint falsly assumes (the 'Miao' who call themselves 'Hmong' being actually 'Baimiao' according to the colour-coded chinese terminology). As a point of comparison, this reminds me of the now usual designation of Greek-Russian immigrants as "Rossopontii" (Pontic Russians), although only part of them are Pontics (and an even smaller part actually speak the dialect). As a matter of fact, politics is strongly present in the background of such issues: popsci books and travel guides rarely indicate that 'Tibetans' are only known as 'Zang' for the average Chinese.
As an aside, famous writer Shen Congwen, son of a Hmong (Baimiao) mother, has some beautiful descriptions and somehow literary analysis of this nation's epics (the absence of any Han epics is one of those "unsolved mysteries" of human science, quite usefull to stop hasty eurocentric systematizations).

Posted by: Jimmy Ho at February 25, 2003 10:01 PM

Correction: Of course, it's "Russian Pontics". By the way, sorry for using such broken english on a language blog: this is actually the only foreign language I had to learn all by myself, in a pretty chaotical way.

Posted by: Jimmy Ho at February 25, 2003 10:07 PM

Jimmy: Don't apologize; reading your first comment I didn't have any idea you weren't a native English speaker. And you make some very interesting points; I hope you'll drop me a line one of these days (at languagehat at yahoo dot com) so we can discuss them. I'm quite interested in the Pontic Greeks, and the nonexistence of Chinese epic is something I hadn't thought of.

Posted by: language hat at February 25, 2003 11:35 PM

Perhaps Chinese epics were among the books that Qin Shi Huangdi burned.

Posted by: Ilya Vinarsky at February 28, 2003 08:11 PM

It is a bittersweet when talking about the terms Miao and Hmong. Either term is acceptable at the time being. However, there is another push for a new term--Mong. Actually, the term Hmong and Mong existed at about the same time in the early 1950s, in Laos, of course. But then Mong was less used then Hmong. How these two terms derived from remain silent still. I agree with Joakim Enwall and you that let the term Miao be the universal term when referring to this group of people, and Hmong and Mong be in use in the western countries, especially the United States.

Posted by: Charles Moua at October 31, 2003 06:31 PM

It is a bittersweet when talking about the terms Miao and Hmong. Either term is acceptable at the time being. However, there is another push for a new term--Mong. Actually, the term Hmong and Mong existed at about the same time in the early 1950s, in Laos, of course. But then Mong was less used then Hmong. How these two terms derived from remain silent still. I agree with Joakim Enwall and you that let the term Miao be the universal term when referring to this group of people, and Hmong and Mong be in use in the western countries, especially the United States.

Posted by: Charles Moua at October 31, 2003 06:35 PM