28.4710, Calls: Tungus, Anthro Ling, Genetic Classification, Historical Ling, Lang Documentation, Socioling/Estonia

Thu Nov 9 16:02:57 UTC 2017

LINGUIST List: Vol-28-4710. Thu Nov 09 2017. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 28.4710, Calls: Tungus, Anthro Ling, Genetic Classification, Historical Ling, Lang Documentation, Socioling/Estonia

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Date: Thu, 09 Nov 2017 11:02:44
From: Andreas Hölzl [hoelzlandreas at web.de]
Subject: The Tungusic Language Family through the Ages: Interdisciplinary perspectives

Full Title: The Tungusic Language Family through the Ages: Interdisciplinary perspectives 

Date: 29-Aug-2018 - 01-Sep-2018
Location: Tallinn, Estonia 
Contact Person: Andreas Hölzl Thomas E. Payne
Meeting Email: tpayne at uoregon.edu

Linguistic Field(s): Anthropological Linguistics; Genetic Classification; Historical Linguistics; Language Documentation; Sociolinguistics 

Language Family(ies): Tungus 

Call Deadline: 14-Nov-2017 

Meeting Description:

The interdisciplinary workshop emphasizes on the diachronic dimension, tracing
the development of Tungusic languages from prehistory and the earliest
attestations to the present day.

Tungusic (or Manchu-Tungusic) is an endangered language family that
encompasses about twenty languages located in Siberia and northern China. They
are distributed over an enormous area that ranges from the Yenissei river in
the west to the Kamchatka Peninsula in the east (Janhunen 2012). Recent years
have seen a considerable interest in this language family (e.g., Malchukov &
Whaley 2012). The proposed workshop has the overarching goal of bringing
together researchers from different countries and disciplines to create
opportunities for mutual exchange. The workshop emphasizes on the diachronic
dimension, tracing the development of Tungusic from prehistory and the
earliest attestations to the present day. In recent decades it has become
clear, however, that historical linguistics alone cannot answer all questions
concerning the development of a language family, especially as concerns the
time and urheimat of the speech community of the proto-language. While the
focus will lie on the interpretation of the history of the Tungusic language
family, we welcome classical comparative studies, as well as original
synchronic studies of individual languages, and encourage participants to
engage in an inter-disciplinary dialogue with disciplines such as archaeology,
ethnology, genetics, or history.

For example, a recent study that combined archaeology, genetics, and
linguistics came to the conclusion that the direct ancestors of the Tungusic
speaking Ulchi have been living in Manchuria for at least 7700 years, which
suggests a remarkable genetic continuity (Siska et al. 2017). It goes without
saying that genetic continuity does not necessarily imply linguistic
continuity, which at any time could have been disrupted by language shift.

Andreas Hölzl, University of Zurich
Tom Payne, University of Oregon

Call for Papers:

 In order to solve such problematic issues, we welcome innovative thinking
from as many different perspectives as possible. The time-frame for possible
contributions can range from prehistory to the 21st century. Possible topics
for presentations include, but are not restricted to the following:

- Fieldwork reports and the investigation of endangered Tungusic languages,
changes in the structure of moribund languages, and language shift to Chinese
or Russian (Janhunen 2005).

- The reevaluation of previously published materials on Tungusic languages
such as word lists from the 19th century and their importance for our
understanding of the historical development of individual languages (Alonso de
la Fuente 2017).

- Progress in the decipherment of the two Jurchen scripts (ca. 12th to 15th
century) that represent the oldest attestation of Tungusic languages
(Golovachev et al. 2011).

- Comparative investigations and reconstructions of Proto-Tungusic,
conclusions regarding the internal structure of the Tungusic language family,
and an evaluation of previous work in the area (Doerfer 1978).

- Questions regarding the time, place, and speech community of proto-Tungusic
and the modelling of the subsequent spread of the individual languages. Here
and in the following point we especially welcome data and results from
archaeology (Kim 2013), ethnology (Sasaki 2011), genetics (Duggan et al.
2013), and history (Zgusta 2015).

- The critical evaluation of wider connections of Tungusic such as to the
Khitano-Mongolic language family. With the recent progress in the decipherment
of the extinct neighbouring language Khitan (Apatóczky & Kempf 2017), new
possibilities for research in this area are opening up. These include the
investigation of loanwords in Tungusic languages or the potential genetic
relationship between Tungusic and Khitano-Mongolic in what has been called the
Khinganic hypothesis (Janhunen 2012).

The workshop will be held at the 51st Annual Meeting of the Societas
Linguistica Europaea in Tallinn, 29 August - 1 September 2018. The deadline
for submission of provisional abstracts with max. 300 words is the 14 of
November 2017. After the acceptance of the workshop, full abstracts will be
required by the 15 of January 2018. Papers for the workshop can also be
submitted for the general call for abstracts
(http://sle2018.eu/call-for-papers). Each presentation will be 20 minutes
long, followed by a discussion of 5 minutes. The publication of workshop
proceedings is planned and will be submitted to Language Science Press in
Berlin (http://langsci-press.org/). See Call for Papers for additional
information.

Please email Andreas Hölzl at hoelzlandreas at web.de with questions or concerns.

References:

Alonso de la Fuente, José A. 2017. An Oroch word-list lost and rediscovered: A
critical edition of Tronson’s 1859 pseudo-Nivkh vocabulary. Bulletin of SOAS
80(1). 97–117.

Apatóczky, Ákos Bertalan & Béla Kempf. 2017. Recent developments on the
decipherment of the Khitan small script. Acta Orientalia Academiae Scientiarum
Hung. 70(2). 109–133.

Doerfer, Gerhard. 1978. Classification problems of Tungus. In Gerhard Doerfer
& Michael Weiers (eds.), Tungusica, Band 1: Beiträge zur Nordasiatischen
Kulturgeschichte, 1–26. Wiesbaden.

Duggan, Ana T. et al. 2013. Investigating the prehistory of Tungusic peoples
of Siberia and the Amur-Ussuri region with complete mtDNA genome sequences and
Y-chromosomal markers. PLOS ONE 8(12). e83570.

Golovachev, V. et al. 2011. Tyrskie stely XV v.: Nerebod, kommentarii,
issledobanie kitajskix, mongolskogo i chzhurzhens’skogo tekstov. Sankt
Petersburg: Nauka.

Janhunen, Juha (ed.) 2003. The Mongolic languages. London.

Janhunen, Juha. 2005. Tungusic: An endangered language family in Northeast
Asia. International Journal of the Sociology of Language 173. 37–54.

Janhunen, Juha. 2012. The expansion of Tungusic as an ethnic and linguistic
process. In Andrej Malchokov & Lindsay J. Whaley (eds.), Recent Advances in
Tungusic Linguistics, 5–16. Wiesbaden.

Kim, Alexander. 2013. Osteological studies of archaeological materials from
Jurchen sites in Rusia. Journal of Song-Yuan Studies 43. 335–347.

Malchukov, Andrej & Lindsay J. Whaley (eds.). 2012. Recent Advances in
Tungusic Linguistics. Wiesbaden.

Pakendorf, Brigitte. 2014. Historical linguistics and molecular anthropology.
In Claire Bowern & Bethwyn Evans (eds), The Routledge handbook of historical
linguistics, 627–641. New York.

Sasaki, Shiro. 2011. Sacred places and masters of hunting luck in the forest
worlds of the Udege people of the Russian Far East. In Peter Jordan (ed.),
Landscape & culture in northern Eurasia, 257–278. Walnut Creek.

Siska, Veronika et al. 2017. Genome-wide data from two early Neolithic East
Asian individuals dating to 7700 years ago. Science Advances 3. e1601877.

Zgusta, Richard. 2015. The peoples of Northeast Asia through time. Precolonial
ethnic and cultural processes along the coast between Hokkaido and the Bering
Strait. Leiden.

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