Click the star to add/remove an item to/from your individual schedule.
You need to be logged in to avail of this functionality,
and to see the links to virtual rooms.
Log in
- Convenors:
-
Martine Robbeets
(Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History)
Mark Hudson (Max Planck Institute of Geoanthropology)
Send message to Convenors
- Format:
- Panel
- Section:
- Language and Linguistics
- Location:
- Lokaal 2.25
- Sessions:
- Saturday 19 August, -
Time zone: Europe/Brussels
Short Abstract:
This panel looks at the linguistic prehistory of Japan and Northeast Asia from the perspective of Geoanthropology, a new field which examines interactions between humans and the Earth. Papers consider how historical linguists is informed by issues of climate change, pandemics and natural disasters.
Long Abstract:
Over the last decades, our Earth has experienced an alarming number of extreme events, including heatwaves, storms, flooding, droughts, fires, volcanic eruptions, pandemics, etc. As many of these events can be linked to climate change, they can be expected to occur more frequently in the future but no doubt also had severe impacts on our past.
A new field of study has risen from the ashes of these events: Geoanthropology studies present and past interactions between humans and the Earth System, integrating fields such as Climate and Earth system science, Ecology, Environmental history, Archaeology, Genetics, Economics, Law, Anthropology and Political science. In our panel, we wish to add linguistics to this list and explore the relevance of Historical Linguistics for Geoanthropology.
Our focus is on prehistoric Japan and the impact of extreme events on the spread of language, culture and genes. Modelling how the ancestor of the Japanese language dispersed across Northeast Asia in the Neolithic/Bronze Age and reconstructing what languages were spoken in the Jōmon and Yayoi periods in Japan cries out for consideration of factors that can impact subsistence and demography such as climate change, volcanic eruptions and pandemics.
Northeast Asia is known for its alternating climate, with the subsequent strengthening and weakening of the monsoon during the Neolithic and the Bronze Ages shifting warmer and wetter to colder and dryer periods (Leipe et al. 2013, d’Alpoim Guedes et al. 2015, Jia et al. 2016; Shelach et al. 2019, Xu et al. 2019). These climate perturbances may not only correlate with spatial and temporal patterns of human settlement but also with language dispersals (Miyamoto 2016, Robbeets 2017).
Volcanic eruptions including Kikai-Akahoya in Kyushu around 5300 BC and Mt Paektu in Korea/Jilin China in 946 also resulted in climate perturbations and may have shaped the fate of languages spoken in these regions (Unger 2001).
Finally, the impact of pandemics such as plague on language dynamics in Northeast Asia needs to be reconsidered as a possible cause for the large-scale population decline at the end of the Neolithic (Hosner et al. 2016, Hudson & Robbeets 2020; Yu et al. 2020).
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Saturday 19 August, 2023, -Martine Robbeets (Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History)
Paper short abstract:
Northeast Asia is known for its versatile climate. This paper will explore how climate change pushed the spread of farming along with the Transeurasian languages (i.e. Turkic, Mongolic, Tungusic, Koreanic and Japonic) across time and space. It will focus on the ancestor of Japonic in particular.
Paper long abstract:
Northeast Asia is known for its versatile climate. Adapting to different climatic conditions, agriculture from the Neolithic onwards was supplemented by a variety of subsistence strategies such as hunting, gathering, fishing and eventually, herding. This paper will explore how climate fluctuations may have pushed the spread of farming along with the Transeurasian (i.e. Turkic, Mongolic, Tungusic, Koreanic and Japonic) languages in time and space. It will focus on how climate change impacted the ancestor of the Japonic languages in particular, from the origins of millet agriculture in Northeast China, associated with Proto-Transeurasian around 7000 BC and Proto-Japano-Koreanic around 5000 BC to the addition of rice agriculture in the Shandong-Liaodong area, associated with Proto-Austronesian around 3000 BC over the dispersal of the agricultural package, associated with Proto-Japonic, to the Korean Peninsula around 1500 BC and to Northern Kyushu around 900 BC (Hudson and Robbeets 2020, Robbeets et al. 2021).
Mark Hudson (Max Planck Institute of Geoanthropology)
Paper short abstract:
A Late Neolithic decline affected many parts of Eurasia including Japan during the 4th-3rd millennia BC. This paper reviews evidence for the decline in Japan and considers implications for post-decline re-settlement and language change.
Paper long abstract:
A Late Neolithic decline seems to have affected many parts of Eurasia during the fourth to third millennia BC. It has long been recognised that Jomon societies in Japan experienced a comparable decline and reorganisation over the same time period. In central Honshu, a population decline of as much as 60% has been estimated between the Middle and Late Jomon phases. Possible causes of the Late Neolithic decline have been much debated but include climate change and plague (Yersinia pestis). Although DNA evidence of plague from Jomon Japan has yet to be reported, Y. pestis has been identified from a site in Yakutia dating to 1800 BC, meaning that it is quite possible it also reached Japan. This paper will review evidence for the Late Neolithic decline in Japan and consider possible implications for language change. While in many other parts of Eurasia, depopulation resulted in quite rapid re-settlement by new groups and languages, that process was delayed in Japan by several millennia. The development of a more resilient agricultural package including West Asian cereals seems to have provided the basis for the Bronze Age colonisation of Japan by Japonic-speaking populations from the East Asian mainland after 1000 BC.
Alexander Francis-Ratte (Furman University)
Paper short abstract:
This paper proposes new evidence for a possible association of Pre-Japanese language-culture with elements of the Hongshan culture of Northeast China, and analyzes how gaps in the Japano-Koreanic reconstruction might be explained by an ecological collapse that accompanied its dispersal.
Paper long abstract:
This paper explores Pre-Japanese origins on the Asian continent through linguistic paleontology. First, I propose new evidence for a possible association of Pre-Japanese language-culture with elements of the Hongshan culture of Northeast China (Robbeets 2020), based on an analysis of the Old Japanese word mwi for ‘serpent,’ which I propose to be derived from OJ mwi- ‘turns’ and related to Old Chinese *[mə]roŋ ‘dragon’ as a loan into Proto-Chinese from an unidentified Hongshan language. Second, I analyze how gaps in the Japano-Koreanic reconstruction, specifically for millet agriculture, might also be compatible with a Hongshan origin, specifically as the result of an ecological collapse that accompanied the break-up of the language family. Although a significant number of Japano-Koreanic cognates can be identified in the vocabulary of farming, many are only indirect. Much like how the absence of direct cognates for wheeled vehicle vocabulary between Anatolian and Indo-European suggests a split before the wheel, the presence of indirect cognates in millet vocabulary suggests that millets might not have been staple crops for Proto-Japano-Koreanic speakers. And yet, from the existence of cognates for ‘farm,’ ‘plot,’ and ‘field,’ there can be little doubt that the ancestral population practiced agriculture, and there is other evidence for a split circa 3500 BCE, when millets were the staple crops of Northeast Asia. I propose that these data may point to a farming population that experienced an interruption in their agricultural lifestyle during its dispersal. This fits a possible association of a Proto-Japano-Koreanic Urheimat with the Hongshan Culture, given the strong archaeological evidence for a rapid desertification in northern Liaoning and southern Inner Mongolia, and could explain other odd features of the reconstruction.
J. Marshall Unger
Paper short abstract:
I re-examine the conclusions of Unger 2001 in light of research over the past two decades. In particular, the probability of substratal influences on proto-Japanese has been greatly reduced by new proto-Korean-Japanese.
Paper long abstract:
In Unger 2001, I pointed out that a serious weakness of theories asserting that proto-Japanese was spoken in Japan during the Jōmon period was that they took no account of cataclysmic volcanic eruptions. such as the explosion that created the Kikai caldera in ca. 5300 BCE. Archaeological evidence indicates that this event devastated “most of south and central Kyushu, which was not repopulated for many centuries.” Coupled with the decline in population toward the end of the Jōmon period evidenced by other archaeological finds, it is highly unlikely that seeds of proto-Japanese were planted in Japan in Jōmon times. Likewise, the area controlled by the kingdom of Bohai (K Parhae, 698–926 CE) was devastated by an eruption of Baitoushan (K Paektusan, on the Chinese-Korean border) some time between ca. 920 and 1020; whether the eruption obliterated the kingdom or coincidentally occurred soon after its demise, the Korean and Tungusic speakers now living there are unlikely to be the descendants of the subjects of Bohai or its predecessors.
In this paper, I re-examine the conclusions I drew in 2001 in light of research over the past two decades in historical linguistics, genetics, and archaeology. The likelihood that proto-Japanese was first spoken in the islands in the Early Yayoi period has increased. The dating of Early Yayoi, previously estimated at ca. 400 BCE, is now generally thought to have been ca. 1000 BCE. The probability of substratal influence of Jōmon-period speech on early forms of Japanese has diminished as better proto-Korean-Japanese etymologies have been proposed and evaluated (Unger, 2009, Francis-Ratté 2016, Francis-Ratté & Unger 2020) and the study of historical phonology has given us a better understanding of how varieties of proto-Japanese first diverged (de Boer 2010, 2020).