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.