purakjelia

Tang Dynasty poem Middle-Age Chinese pronunciation

mingming

Mandarin didn't really become an official language until the Ming/Qing periods. Even then it was used more by officials and the aristocracy. I agree that medieval Chinese has a more "southern" flavor to it and that's probably why Tang dynasty poems sound better with Cantonese.

Eroica

A poem in Old Chinese.

mingming

Sounds like Thai, actually. Maybe that's where Thai came from!

Eroica

Well, it's very closely related to Tibeto-Burman, to the point now that some linguists are now classifying Sinitic as a sub-branch of Tibeto-Burman rather than as it's own major grouping within Sino-Tibetan.

However, some linguists postulate that Sino-Tibetan, Tai Kadai, Hmong-Mien, Austro-Asiatic and Austronesian all share a deeper linguistic connection - based upon various shared features that are not present in other languages of east and central Asia. This thesis is also supported by genetic evidence (correlates with YDNA O).

mingming

There is genetic evidence that the Tibetan people broke off from what is now the Han people nearly 3,000 years ago. Therefore, I think the Tibetans must have preserved aspects of Old Chinese, hence the similarities.

Now that I think of it, Shanghainese also sounds similar to this.

Eroica

Chinese and Tibetans both belong to the Sino-Tibetan grouping, along with Burmese, Yi, Tujia and various other peoples in southwest China and northeast India. As I understand it, Ydna haplogroup O3 is the defining Sino-Tibetan marker, found in ~50% of Han, ~40% of Tibetans and close to 100% among some isolated Tibeto-Burman tribes in southwest China and northeast India.

To the untrained ear, standard Tibetan can sound (superficially) remarkably similar to various Chinese dialects: Some of the other Tibeto-Burman dialects (like Burmese) are more divergent, however.