29.3486, Confs: Historical Linguistics/Australia

Wed Sep 12 00:24:06 UTC 2018

LINGUIST List: Vol-29-3486. Tue Sep 11 2018. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 29.3486, Confs: Historical Linguistics/Australia

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Date: Tue, 11 Sep 2018 20:21:55
From: Alexander Savelyev [santor.jus at gmail.com]
Subject: Agriculture-driven Language Spread in Northeast Asia

Agriculture-driven Language Spread in Northeast Asia 

Date: 01-Jul-2019 - 05-Jul-2019 
Location: Canberra, ACT, Australia 
Contact: Martine Robbeets 
Contact Email: robbeets at shh.mpg.de 

Linguistic Field(s): Historical Linguistics 

Meeting Description: 

This panel adresses the linguistic prehistory of North and East Asia,
integrating results from the disciplines of archaeology and genetics with
linguistic evidence. Northeast Asia encompasses Mongolia, Northeast China, the
Russian Far East, the Korean peninsula and the Japanese Islands. It is home to
a variety of different language families, such as Chukotko-Kamchatkan,
Yukaghiric, Amuric (Nivkh), Ainuic and Transeurasian.  The Transeurasian
languages are a group of geographically adjacent, structurally homogeneous and
--in some linguists' view (Starostin et al. 2003, Robbeets 2005, 2015)--
genealogically related languages including Turkic, Mongolic, Tungusic,
Koreanic and Japanic languages. Ainu and Nivkh have been regarded as
''marginal'' pockets of earlier structural types whose lineages became
isolated before the large-scale language spreads in Eurasia (Fortescue 2013,
Bickel et al. 2016,  Nichols 2011)

Our key objective is to understand the wide-spread distribution of the
Transeurasian languages as opposed to other language families in North and
East Asia and to investigate to what extent agriculture impacted the spread of
these languages. To this end, we welcome linguistic research into the
classification of these language families, their cultural reconstruction, the
location of their original homelands, the estimation of their timedepth, the
motivation of their break-up, the reconstruction of their dispersal routes and
the identification of early contacts among neighboring families. We further
hope to bring together experts in linguistics with archaeologists and
geneticists and motivate them to leave the comfort zone of their own
discipline in order to enhance interdisciplinary collaboration.
In the panel description (see the program), we propose six basic papers, but
we hope that other colleagues will be inspired to submit abstracts and join
our panel. All presentations are to be submitted through the general ICHL
paper submission process (http://www.dynamicsoflanguage.edu.au/ichl24/). For
general inquiries about conference, send email to the ICHL24 organizers at:
ichl24anu at gmail.com.

Program:

1. The speakers of Transeurasian: pastoralists or farmers?
Martine Robbeets
The Farming Language Dispersal Hypothesis posits that many of the world's
major language families owe their present-day distribution to the adoption of
agriculture by their early speakers. Especially for regions such as Northern
Asia, where farming is only marginally viable, this claim has been seriously
called into question. This paper investigates to what extent agriculture
impacted the early dispersals of the Transeurasian language family. It
challenges the traditional ''Pastoralist Hypothesis'' that identifies the
primary dispersals of the Transeurasian languages with nomadic expansions
starting around 2000 BC in the eastern Steppe (Menges 1977, Miller 1990, Dybo
2013) and argues that they were rather driven by agriculture. Integrating,
archaeology, genetics and linguistics in a single approach, this presentation
serves as an introduction to our panel and sets the scope of the papers to be
presented.

2. Agricultural vocabulary in Turkic: contact vs. inheritance
Alexander Savelyev
The Turkic languages display extensive pastoralist vocabularies, which reflect
the predominantly nomadic lifestyle of the Turkic-speaking peoples in the last
two thousand years. Agriculture-related terms are less abundant in the Turkic
languages but still numerous, including terms for cereals and other crops as
well as agricultural tools and basic agricultural techniques. This paper will
address agriculture-related lexical items that can be reconstructed to the
Proto-Turkic stage and focus on the distinction between the effects of
borrowing and inheritance. Some agricultural terms will be identified as
Wanderwörter reflecting ancient language contact relations in the Central
Asian region while others show no signs of foreign or otherwise secondary
origin and a few can be traced to an earlier proto-Altaic - and, further,
proto-Transeurasian - stage.

3. A Bayesian perspective on the manner of dispersal of the Transeurasian
languages
Nataliia Neshcheret
Although the genealogcal relatedness of the Transeurasian languages is
gradually gaining acceptance in the field, there is no consensus on the
internal structure of the unity under the assumption that these languages
share the genealogical affiliation. By applying Bayesian tree-sampling
techniques and phylogenetic comparative methods to 228 abstract structural
features coded for 45 Transeurasian languages, I derive the internal structure
of the unity and investigate the manner of the dispersal of the Transeurasian
languages. The resulting topology suggests that the Japono-Koreanic and Altaic
(Tungusic, Mongolic, Turkic) languages separated as two branches first,
followed by the split of the Tungusic languages from the Altaic ancestor. The
amount of conflicting signal in the data indicates that the initial dispersal
was relatively rapid and that languages stayed in contact after the
divergence.

4. Genetic perspective on the Neolithic populations in Northeast Asia
Ning Chao
Eastern Asia is home to many different language families as well as to the
world's most important crops, including rice, soybean and millet, and
therefore yields an interesting area for population genetic studies. Both
linguistic and archaeological evidence suggests population contact between
different populations within this region. This paper will focus on the
population prehistory of Northeast Asia.  It will present sequenced genomes of
ancient samples from the West Liao River Valley, a probable homeland of millet
farming, and integrate them with ancient DNA samples from Korea, Japan as well
as that from Russia Far East. By aligning the genetic evidence with linguistic
and archaeological findings, this paper will show that the introduction of
millet-farming technologies and the alleged dispersal of the Transeurasian
languages was combined with genetic exchange.

5. From the West Liao River valley to the Korean Peninsula: Neolithic contacts
examined by archaeological, genetic and linguistic evidence
Tao Li
This paper investigates the evidence for Neolithic contacts between the West
Liao River valley, a center of origin of millet agriculture and the Korean
Peninsula. From the archaeological perspective, it examines correlations
between subsistence strategies, ritual and ideology, non-food production
activities among both regions in the period between 8000 and 3000 BP. From the
genetic perspective, it reviews evidence from ancient human DNA for links
between the West Liao River valley and the Korean Peninusla. From the
linguistic perspective, it integrates recent views on the location and
time-depth of proto-Korean and on its separation from Japano-Koreanic.
Integrating the different lines of evidence, this paper suggests a possible
route for dispersal for millet from the West Liao River valley to the Korean
Penisula and proposes that the introduction of millet may be linked to
linguistic spread and genetic exchange.

6. ''Farming Avoidance Language Dispersals'', with special reference to
Transeurasian
Mark Hudson
This paper suggests an extension of the farming/language dispersals hypothesis
based on the common tendency for farmers in Bronze Age and later state
societies to developing subsistence strategies which avoided or reduced
excessive state control and taxation. This argument will be developed using
examples from the Transeurasian language family. Although
Transeurasian-speaking groups are characterized by a wide diversity of
subsistence economies, it will be argued that many of these economies share a
concern with escaping the state. Farming avoidance language dispersals are
posited to be a widespread phenomenon in the post-Neolithic world.

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