[lg policy] Finding on Dialects Casts New Light on the Origins of the Japanese People

[Jeremy Graves]

This is interesting. This study used a computer model based on words "known to 
change very slowly", which is appropriate, I think. However, I wonder if these 
models allowed for possible borrowing. True, it's not likely that these kinds of 
words would be borrowed, but it's not impossible, either.


________________________________
From: Harold Schiffman <hfsclpp at gmail.com>
To: lp <lgpolicy-list at groups.sas.upenn.edu>
Sent: Wed, May 4, 2011 10:15:32 AM
Subject: [lg policy] Finding on Dialects Casts New Light on the Origins of the 
Japanese People

May 4, 2011

Finding on Dialects Casts New Light on the Origins of the Japanese People
By NICHOLAS WADE

Researchers studying the various dialects of Japanese have concluded
that all are descended from a founding language taken to the Japanese
islands about 2,200 years ago. The finding sheds new light on the
origin of the Japanese people, suggesting that their language is
descended from that of the rice-growing farmers who arrived in Japan
from the Korean Peninsula, and not from the hunter-gatherers who first
inhabited the islands some 30,000 years ago.

The result provides support for a wider picture, controversial among
linguists, that the distribution of many language families today
reflects the spread of agriculture in the distant past when farming
populations, carrying their languages with them, grew in numbers and
expanded at the expense of hunter-gatherers. Under this theory, the
Indo-European family of languages, which includes English, was spread
by the first farmers who expanded into Europe from the Middle East
some 8,000 years ago, largely replacing the existing population of
hunter-gatherers.

In the case of Japan, archaeologists have found evidence for two waves
of migrants, a hunter-gatherer people who created the Jomon culture
and wet rice farmers who left remains known as the Yayoi culture. The
Jomon people arrived in Japan before the end of the last ice age, via
land bridges that joined Japan to Asia’s mainland. They fended off
invaders until about 2,400 years ago when the wet rice agriculture
developed in southern China was adapted to Korea’s colder climate.

Several languages seem to have been spoken on the Korean Peninsula at
this time, and that of the Yayoi people is unknown. The work of two
researchers at the University of Tokyo, Sean Lee and Toshikazu
Hasegawa, now suggests that the origin of Japonic — the language
family that includes Japanese and Ryukyuan, spoken in the Ryukyu
island chain south of Japan — coincides with the arrival of the Yayoi.

The finding, if confirmed, indicates that the Yayoi people took
Japonic to Japan, but leaves unresolved the question of where in Asia
the Yayoi culture or Japonic language originated before arriving in
the Korean Peninsula.

Mr. Lee is a graduate student studying language and the mind, not a
historical linguist. He has used a statistical tree-drawing method
that other biologists have applied successfully to language origins,
despite some linguists’ skepticism. The method, called Bayesian
phylogeny, depends on having a computer draw a large number of
possible trees and sampling them to find the most probable. Each
language is represented by a 200-word vocabulary composed of words
known to change very slowly.

If any fork in the tree can be linked to a historical event, all the
other branch points can be dated. In this case, Mr. Lee knew dates for
Old Japanese, Middle Japanese, and the split between the Kyoto and
Tokyo dialects that began in 1603 A.D. when the capital was moved from
Kyoto to Edo, the early name for Tokyo.

Mr. Lee reasoned that Japanese would have originated with the Jomon if
the root of the tree turned out to be very ancient, but with the Yayoi
culture if recent. The computer’s date of 2,182 years ago for the
origin of the tree fits reasonably well with the archaeological dates
for the Yayoi culture, he reported Tuesday in The Proceedings of the
Royal Society.

John B. Whitman, an expert on Japanese linguistics who works at the
National Institute for Japanese Language and Linguistics, in Tokyo,
and at Cornell University, called the new finding “solid and
reasonable,” although the date of the Yayoi culture, he said, has now
been pushed back to around 3,000 years after a recalibration of
radiocarbon dates. That would open an 800-year gap with Mr. Lee’s date
but not necessarily change his conclusion.

The question of Japanese origins has had political consequences, with
the link to the Yayoi culture having been invoked to justify the
annexation of Korea and Manchuria before World War II. After the war,
the link with the Jomon culture was emphasized.

Quentin Atkinson, an expert on language phylogeny at the University of
Auckland, in New Zealand, said that Mr. Lee’s time scale was plausible
but that if Japonic had spread through an agriculturally driven
population expansion, his language tree should be much bushier at its
root. Mr. Lee said that such earlier versions of Japanese might have
disappeared when the island was politically unified about 1,000 years
ago.

Genetic studies have suggested interbreeding between the Yayoi and
Jomon people, with the Jomon contribution to modern Japanese being as
much as 40 percent. Apparently the Yayoi language prevailed, along
with the agricultural technology.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/04/science/04language.html?ref=science


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