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<p>Mehhhhh. </p>
<p>Chinese culture was not some monolithic entity, a single person who started growing up in 3000 BC. The culture of Zhou (and its language, and its ethnicity) was vastly different from Chinese culture as it is now. We may not even be exactly sure what the ethnic makeup of the Shang and Zhou were. The Dukedom of Qin incorporated a vast variety of nomadic peoples into their state even before the Unification, some of whom may have been Indo-European or Turkic. Note that even the Mandarin pronunciations of these old Chinese entities are misleading: look into any philologist’s historical dictionary for Old Chinese, and you find exotic consonant clusters vastly different from Mandarin Chinese: “swra” (the ancestor of the “hua” in “huayu”), many “sl” words, glottal stops and pharyngeals, and all that fun phonetic stuff. The “Han people” didn’t start existing as a cohesive unit until about 2000 years ago. The Southern Chinese languages have received a massive substrata influx from Austronesians and Austroasiatics, andyou can tell how the Southern languages are more phonologically similar to Vietnamese and Thai versus Northern languages like Mandarin. Tones weren’t present in the Chinese languages until they were borrowed from a non-Chinese group living near Vietnam called the Miao, and the innovation spread northwards.</p>
<p>So I kind I have to roll my eyes at the whole “5000-year-old culture thing”. Sure, the history is interesting, but it’s like saying British culture dates all the way back to Boudicca.</p>