32.3679, Review: Anthropological Linguistics; Historical Linguistics: Driem (2021)

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LINGUIST List: Vol-32-3679. Mon Nov 22 2021. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 32.3679, Review: Anthropological Linguistics; Historical Linguistics: Driem (2021)

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Date: Mon, 22 Nov 2021 22:08:21
From: Geoffrey Sampson [sampson at cantab.net]
Subject: Ethnolinguistic Prehistory

 
Discuss this message:
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Book announced at http://linguistlist.org/issues/32/32-1848.html

AUTHOR: George van Driem
TITLE: Ethnolinguistic Prehistory
SUBTITLE: The Peopling of the World from the Perspective of Language, Genes and Material Culture
SERIES TITLE: Languages of the Greater Himalayan Region
PUBLISHER: Brill
YEAR: 2021

REVIEWER: Geoffrey Sampson, University of Sussex

SUMMARY

This is a strange book, to the extent that it is not easy to say what, as a
whole, it is about.  It is published in a series edited by van Driem under the
title “Languages of the Greater Himalayan Region”, but although that is van
Driem’s special subject, this book ranges far wider.  The subtitle indicates
that it aims to use the evidence of genetics, linguistics, and material
culture to discover how the historical distribution of human populations
emerged from prehistoric movements of peoples and of cultural traits between
peoples.  Several chapters are about this.  But for instance much of the first
chapter is a detailed account of the discovery in 1984 by a metal-detector
hobbyist of a zinc tablet with a four-line inscription in Greek letters in
Bern, capital of the Swiss confederation.  (The lettering is so regular that I
would have taken the tablet for a modern fake, but we are told that research
by several labs has eliminated that possibility.)  The inscription has
tentatively been interpreted as in a Celtic language and as providing a Celtic
etymology for the name “Bern”.  This makes an interesting story, but its only
relationship to the theme announced in the subtitle would be (though this is
not spelled out) as showing that inhabitants of the Bern area at some past
time, later than the creation of the Greek alphabet, spoke a language other
than the Swiss-German spoken there today.  So far as I know it is wholly
uncontroversial that proto-Celtic was spoken in Switzerland, and that
languages have often migrated from one part of the world to another.

The heart of the book analyses what DNA evidence can be made to tell us about
the earlier migrations of human groups, from the emergence of the first human
beings in Africa until the beginnings of recorded history.  The author often
finds it possible to link these movements to the ancestors of present-day
language families, and sometimes to features of material culture uncovered by
archaeology.  Van Driem evidently has a detailed familiarity, very rare among
linguists, with current research on genetic genealogy (if that is the proper
term).  With the help of numerous maps, he shows how dozens of “paternal
clades”, with names like B, CT, D, D1a, D1a1, and so forth, can be seen to
have spread across the continents.

One significant finding is what van Driem, citing publications by Estella
Poloni and co-authors, calls the “Father Tongue correlation”.  Apparently it
is a general rule, though there are exceptions, that “the languages spoken by
particular communities … correlate with the paternally inherited [i.e.
Y-chromosome] markers prevalent in that same population”, implying that “a
mother teaching her children their father’s tongue must have been a prevalent
and recurrent pattern in linguistic prehistory”.  While the Y chromosome
occurs only in males, mitochondria are inherited only from the mother, and
“The worldwide mitochondrial landscape often appears to a large extent still
to reflect earliest settlement”.  Once an area acquired human inhabitants, the
women tended to stay put but groups of men often invaded one another’s
territories, and (quoting Lendering 2010) “as so often happened in the wars of
antiquity, the widows married the murderers of their spouses”.  Few will be
surprised that men were aggressors, but (child-rearing being typically women’s
work) it is more surprising to find that children grew up speaking their
father’s rather than mother’s language.  In the case of Indo-European, van
Driem quotes Zhang et al. (2018) as claiming that lexicons correlate with
paternal lineages but phonetics with maternal:  children grew up speaking
Fatherese with a Motherese accent.

Not all migrations were aggressive.  Van Driem identifies three waves of
migration into Europe:  hunter-gatherers 15,000 years ago, farmers about 8,500
years ago, and a wave of immigration from the steppes through Eastern into
Northern Europe in the Bronze Age.  The genomic evidence suggests that in much
of Europe the second wave was peaceful, with existing European populations
sometimes adopting the newcomers’ culture while their own genetic lines
continued, though in the British Isles the hunter-gatherer lineages were
eliminated by the agricultural newcomers; and the third wave, which may
correspond to the arrival of Indo-European speakers, replaced the previous
population of Northern Europe.  (It is not clear to me whether van Driem sees
the first of these three waves as having been peaceful or aggressive, or
whether the question is inapplicable because Europe was largely unpopulated
following the last ice age.)

Another major theme is the prehistory of the Chinese language, early forms of
which as reconstructed by recent scholarship make it look in many respects
like “just another Trans-Himalayan language”, but with far less morphology. 
(It was van Driem who coined the name “Trans-Himalayan” which has become
widely accepted for the language-family that includes Chinese.  The name used
previously, “Sino-Tibetan”, was unsuitable because Chinese and Tibetan are
geographically adjacent rather than spanning the territory of the family, and
that name may also imply a misleading view of relationships within the family.
 “Trans-Himalayan” is appropriate because, while the single language Chinese,
spoken north and east of the Himalayas, accounts for the majority of speakers
of Trans-Himalayan languages, most of the several hundred languages in the
family are spoken south of the Himalayan watershed.)  Van Driem argues that
the “isolating” character of Chinese grammar is due to its having arisen as a
creole, with genomic data (“paternal haplogroup Q”) suggesting that the
substrate language was related to the present-day Siberian language Ket; the
speakers of the substrate may have been the Xiongnu, frequently mentioned in
early Chinese historical records and possibly identifiable with the Huns who
arrived in Eastern Europe in the fourth century.  Bearers of varieties of
paternal lineage O2, originating in the general area of Assam and Bhutan,
“introduced Trans-Himalayan language to the North China plain”, and “Old
Chinese arose when a Trans-Himalayan ‘lingua franca’ was adopted by the …
language communities whom the proto-Sinitic speakers encountered and
assimilated.”  Loss of morphology is a natural consequence of creolization.

Although I described genetic genealogy as the heart of the book, coverage of
that only begins about a hundred pages in.  Earlier chapters are rather
diffuse.  Some parts seem designed to establish the author’s “woke”
credentials, for instance van Driem remarks that “there is no such thing as
race”.  I never know what is meant by assertions that race is unreal or “only
a social construct”.  If they mean that racial categories are not sharp
because many individuals have mixed parentage, that is too obvious to be worth
saying.  But if (as I suppose) they mean that everyday, pre-scientific racial
categories have no objective basis, that is just false.  There is solid
experimental evidence showing that when computers are set to classify the
genomes of samples of the world population, with no information about the
geographical origin or outward appearance of individuals in the samples, the
groupings identified correspond very closely to the pre-scientific categories
(see e.g. Tang et al. 2005, Li et al. 2008).  So van Driem’s remark seems an
odd thing for a student of genetic genealogy to say, and he does not explain
what he means by it.

The closing section of the book begins with the remark “The diffusionists of
yore have today been largely vindicated either by linguistic or population
genetic evidence, [or] both, as well as by the geographical distribution of
cultigens that must have been introduced by man to distant shores and climes
in some cases as early as the 3rd or 4th millennium BC”.  Among
anthropologists “diffusionism” refers to the idea that when a particular
cultural feature shows up in separate places this is commonly a consequence of
human contact, rather than of parallel but independent cultural developments. 
Van Driem is emphasizing that people, or at least males, moved from place to
place at early periods more than has sometimes been supposed.  But the section
then slides into a discussion of the evolution of market economies, and the
motives behind the current drift towards a cashless society.  Van Driem writes
that “Advocates of totalitarianism seek to render citizens transparent to the
opaque state whilst concealing the genuine motive of the campaign to
dematerialise money behind sanctimonious pronouncements about combatting money
laundering, crime or terrorism”.  That may be a valid point – I am
sympathetic, though I am not sure how much of the impetus is in fact coming
from States.  But I can discern no relevance to anything else in this book.

EVALUATION

Van Driem certainly establishes that the fairly new topic of genetic genealogy
is something linguists need to know about.  His account is not always easy to
follow:  I got lost among jumbles of clade labels, and I am surely not the
only linguist who would have appreciated some tutorial material explaining the
basics of the subject.  (What exactly is a haplogroup, for instance?)  But I
have not encountered any other book that tries to do what van Driem has done,
so our discipline owes him thanks for assembling so much information, and
perhaps should not complain if the organization of this book is less than
perfect.

Nevertheless, the book could easily have been much better than it is.  As
already suggested, there are many passages which have no obvious connexion, or
no connexion at all, with what I take to be the author’s main topic – van
Driem too often veers off on tangents to pursue personal hobby-horses. 
Discussing findings from fieldwork on a language of Bhutan, he does not fail
to tell us that the village where he stayed “lay three days on foot from the
motor road, and the going was arduous, since I had freshly broken my leg,
which had been put into a cast in Monggar.”  I do not underestimate the
significance of such events in the author’s life, but a scholarly monograph
normally suppresses material like this in favour of focusing on the topic to
be expounded – or at least it confines the personal stuff to an introduction
or epilogue.  Sometimes van Driem’s presentation seems designed to show off
his deep learning.  Any foreign name within his English prose is always given
its precise foreign orthography, for instance each mention of Sri Lanka (the
modern name for the island I think of as Ceylon) is repeatedly shown with
diacritics on four of its eight letters.  Yet the English-language website of
the Sri Lankan High Commission in the U.K. is content to identify itself as
“Sri Lanka” without diacritics, as is usual in English writing.

Historians often use conventional Latin words with dates, writing for instance
“floruit 1257” (or “fl. 1257”), literally “he flourished …”, to mean “we may
not know his birth or death dates but we know he was alive and active in
1257”.  Van Driem extends this by introducing his own, non-conventional
Latinisms.  Discussing the battle of Bibracte, when Julius Caesar blocked an
attempt by the Helvetii to migrate to what is now western France, van Driem
writes “gerebatur 58 B.C.”  ‘Gero’ is the Latin verb for waging war, but the
date alone would have been clear without any Latin.  (And anyway, if Latin
there must be, should the form not be ‘gessitur’, perfect? – the battle only
lasted a day or so.)

Until the nineteenth century, Roman script used two forms of lower-case s in
different positions in a word, with “long s” looking to modern eyes like f. 
Whenever van Driem quotes from older sources, he prints all the long s’s as
such, for no gain in precision and considerable loss in readability,
particularly when the quotations are lengthy.  He even refers to a former
Russian outpost on the west coast of the U.S.A., called in English Fort Ross,
by spelling the Russian word for “fort” in Cyrillic using one of the letters
that was abolished after the Russian Revolution.

I am not competent to assess the reliability of van Driem’s statements about
genetic genealogy.  Where he writes about topics where I am more
knowledgeable, some of his remarks seem questionable.  The opening sentences
of the book read “At the time of the Roman empire, there was not a single
person who spoke English in England.  In fact, at that time there was nobody
in all of the British Isles who spoke any language that was even ancestral to
English.”  The first point is an empty truism, since in the Roman period no
“English language” yet existed, and what is now England was not an
identifiable subdivision of Great Britain.  But as for the second point, there
were plenty of Germanic-speakers in the legions, and it is generally accepted
nowadays that Germanic-speaking civilians had been infiltrating across the
North Sea to settle in Britain well before Rome finally withdrew in 410 (see
e.g. Green 1998: 143–4, Robinson 1992: 136).

More worryingly:  on p. 94 von Driem states that the typological distinction
between “analytic” and “synthetic” languages was first drawn by John Beames in
an 1868 book.  The correct (and fairly well-known) reference is half a century
earlier:  August von Schlegel 1818: 14–16.  Like the clock which strikes
thirteen, this left me wondering how many other scholarly references were
reliable.

Scholars familiar with European languages have often found it difficult to
believe that a language as wholly devoid of grammatical apparatus as Classical
Chinese could have been adequate to the needs of a sophisticated civilization,
and have sometimes suggested that the language must have had inflexions which
were not recorded in writing.  Van Driem quotes the nineteenth-century German
Carl Lepsius as holding this view, and two pages earlier he supported it
himself.  To me it seems implausible.  Old Chinese poetry was metrical and
rhymed (see e.g. Sampson 2020: 21–3, 39–40), and the hypothetical inflexions
would surely have interfered with metre and rhyming; and Old Chinese
orthography does frequently distinguish forms in which a phonemic contrast has
no semantic significance, for instance pairs of full and reduced pronouns
comparable to French ‘moi’ versus ‘me’, so how plausible is it that the script
would at the same time have ignored contrasts which expressed important
logical distinctions?  But, more significant for this review, if Lepsius’s
idea were correct this would apparently thoroughly undercut van Driem’s later
argument for seeing Old Chinese as a creole.  I find nothing in the book to
reconcile this inconsistency.

The book reflects Brill’s usual superb standard of production.  It contains
many handsome full-colour illustrations and a detailed index; the typography
is attractive, and despite many orthographic complexities I spotted scarcely
any misprint.

REFERENCES

Green, D.H.  1998.  Language and history in the early Germanic world. 
Cambridge University Press.

Lendering, J.  2010.  Alexander de Grote: de ondergang van het Perzische rijk.
 Athenaeum, Polak & van Gennep (Amsterdam).

Li, J.Z., et al.  2008.  “Worldwide human relationships inferred from
genome-wide patterns of variation”.  Science, 22 Feb 2008, pp. 1100–04.

Robinson, O.W.  1992.  Old English and its closest relatives.  Routledge.

Sampson, G.R.  2020.  Voices from early China: the ‘Odes’ demystified. 
Cambridge Scholars Publishing (Newcastle upon Tyne).

von Schlegel, A.W.  1818.  Observations sur la langue et la littérature
provençales.  Librairie Grecque-Latine-Allemande (Paris).

Tang, Hua, et al.  2005.  “Genetic structure, self-identified race/ethnicity,
and confounding in case-control association studies”.  American Journal of
Human Genetics 76.269–75.

Zhang, M., et al.  2018.  “Reconciling the father tongue and mother tongue
hypotheses in Indo-European populations”.  National Science Review 6.293–300.


ABOUT THE REVIEWER

Geoffrey Sampson graduated in Chinese Studies from Cambridge University, and
his academic career was spent partly in Linguistics and partly in Informatics,
with intervals in industrial research. After retiring as professor emeritus
from Sussex University in 2009, he spent several years as Research Fellow at
the University of South Africa. He has published contributions to most areas
of Linguistics, as well as to other subjects. His latest book is ''Voices from
Early China'' (2020).





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