The ancestry of the languages and peoples of China
Edited by Kong Jiangping 孔江平
As Professor Kong Jiangping mentions in his Preface, the present volume may be regarded as a successor to an earlier JCL monograph #8, entitled The Ancestry of the Chinese Language, based on a two-day symposium held at the City University of Hong Kong in July 1994.
The present volume is JCL monograph #29, with a slightly different title, The Ancestry of the Languages and Peoples of China. With a separation of over two decades between the two monographs, there is quite a turn-over in the authors. While Paul Li graces these monographs again to discuss language families in Southeast Asia, monograph #29 is strengthened by many fresh faces, young linguists with various connections to Peking University. This is of course a good sign—that a new generation of scholars in China have come of age to take up the challenge of understanding where they and their languages come from. In addition, contributions from several more seasoned scholars—George van Driem, Randy LaPolla, and Jackson Sun—make the monograph all the more valuable. Since the monograph has “peoples” in its title, it is especially appropriate that van Driem should discuss “The ancestry of the Chinese people based on language and genes”.
It is well-known that East and Southeast Asia is a ‘linguistic area’, in the sense of Emeneau, M. (1956) , where for millennia migrating peoples fuse and split, again and again, as rhythmically stated in the opening chapter of the Sānguó yănyì三国演义: Tiānxià dàshì, fēn jiŭ bì hé, hé jiŭ bì fēn 天下大勢, 分久必合, 合久必分. In studying language relationships in China, the two dominant legacies are from Indo-European linguistics, centered on the family tree as the primary model, and from Chinese philology, where a Sino-centric perspective has blurred the vital importance of the numerous minority languages over the millennia. To move forward now, we must no longer be constrained by these two legacies, even though they have both combined to give us an indispensable foundation to build upon for many decades. We must give adequate attention, long overdue, to language mixing over the millennia; and we must keep fully in mind numerous languages have mixed intensively with each other along many dimensions during this time, Sinitic being just one of them. Chinese Linguistics is gradually building up a substantive literature on this important challenge of “ancestry”. The two papers on Sino-Tibetan, and this monograph brought together by Professor Kong are the latest important contributions. However, the challenge of understanding clearly where we and our languages come from is an immense one. A remarkable scientific breakthrough like the discovery of Ancient DNA may be too much to hope for in linguistics. Nonetheless, we will need to build carefully upon past scholarship in our own field as well as coordinate closely with geneticists and archeologists if we are to ever succeed in this quest.
Professor William Shi Yuan Wang initiated a symposium named “The Ancestry of Chinese Language” at the City University of Hong Kong in July 1994. A monograph of Journal of Chinese Linguistics, whose number is 8 in the Monograph Series, included 9 papers and 6 comments and was published after the symposium. In 2016, Prof. Wang told me that he was willing to hold the second symposium of “The Ancestry of Chinese Language”, because the study on the ancestry of Chinese language had undergone a lot of progress after more than 20 years’ development in this research field. Since I was a visiting lecture professor of the College of Chinese Language and Culture (CCLC) of Jinan University, I talked to Prof. Shao Yi, the Dean of CCLC and with Prof. Wang’s consent, after which we finally decided to hold the second symposium named “The Ancestry of Chinese Language and People”, sponsored by the CCLC of Jinan University in July 2017, Guangzhou. Jinan University is one of the top 100 universities under the Key Construction Project of the 21st Century of China. CCLC has four departments: the departments of Chinese, Applied Linguistics, Chinese International Education and Pre-university Education, and two academic institutes: the Overseas Chinese Education Research Institute including 6 research centers which are the Chinese Testing Center, Chinese Textbook Research Center, Chinese Teacher Certificate Center, Overseas Chinese Research Center, Chinese Education Service Center and the Editorial Office of TCSOL Studies, and the Institute of Applied Linguistics consisting of three centers which are Center for Ecology of Languages and Cultures, Center for Language Competence Development and Center for Corpus Development.
The second symposium of “Ancestry of Chinese Language and People” was held on May 30-31, 2017. From the name we can see that the symposium topic, in which the study on the people is added, is a little different with the first one, because the study on the relationship between genetics of different ethnos and languages had developed significantly over the last ten years. More than 20 international scholars attended the symposium and finally eleven papers were contributed to the Monograph of JCL by fourteen international scholars. The papers in this monograph can be divided into three categories: the study on the ancestry of Chinese language in historical linguistics, the study on the ancestry of Chinese language and people by new methods, and the study on the distributions of languages and peoples immigrating from the central to the south of China at different times in the Chinese history.
Paul Jen-kuei Li 李壬癸
This is an evaluation of the various hypotheses regarding the possible genetic relationships between different language families in Southeast Asia, including Sino-Tai, Austro-Tai, Austro-Kra-Dai, Austric, Sino-Austronesian, and Sino-Miao-Yao. In order to establish reliable genetic relations between different language families, we need more solid linguistic evidence to distinguish between true cognates and loanwords. Vocabulary gets borrowed easily, whereas morphology is the most resistant to change. The genetic relationship between Chinese and Tibetan-Burman languages is well established, and perhaps so are Austric and Austro-Tai or Austro-Kra-Dai. However, there is not much chance for the genetic relationships of Sino-Tai, Sino-Austronesian or Sino-Miao-Yao.
Subject Keywords 主题词
Genetic relations 亲属关系 Language family 语系 Southeast Asia 东南亚 True cognates 同源词 Loans 借词
Horpa is an understudied, internally diverse Rgyalrongic cluster (Qiangic branch, Sino-Tibetan family) spoken across six counties in two prefectures of northwestern Sichuan. As this author demonstrated in an earlier article using individual-identifying morphological evidence, Northern Horpa (Stodsde) clearly belongs under Rgyalrongic (J. Sun 2000b). The phylogenetic affinity of less conservative Horpa languages (e.g., Rta’u) is however far less obvious. This paper, drawing on extensive recent fieldwork, offers a fuller range of cross-dialect evidence in important areas of Horpa verbal morphology to vindicate the ancestry of Horpa as a Rgyalrongic subgroup. It is shown that quite banal phonological and grammatical evolutions have caused the innovating Horpa languages to cast off much of their characteristic morphology, masking their true Rgyalrongic origins.
Subject Keywords 主题词
Sino-Tibetan family 汉藏语系 Qiangic branch 羌语支 Rgyalrongic subgroup 嘉戎语组 Linguistic ancestry 语言祖源 Phonological and grammatical innovation 音韵与语法创新 Contact-induced language change 接触引发的演变
The Bai language, as a sister language of Chinese, has ever been an enigma of Sino-Tibetan family. To solve this enigma, the tree structure of Sino-Tibetan family as the background should be checked first. As the Bai language has a long-term contact with Chinese, the reconstruction of Proto-Bai becomes necessary in order to exclude late borrowings from Chinese. Studies along this way not only shed light on the formation of Proto-Bai, but also on the formation of Chinese. It has been noticed that lexical items may reflect the partial connection between languages. Looking into more basic functional items like negators in Bai dialects, it is suggested that some surrounding Yi languages may have played a role in the evolution of the Bai language. The multi-language ecology of the Bai language is similar to Chinese, especially at the stage of initial China.
Proto-Bai 原始白语 Sino-Tibetan 汉藏语 Trans-Himalayan 泛喜马拉雅 Chinese 汉语 Ecology 生态
This study makes use of data from eight Yao dialects to reconstruct the initial system of Proto-Yao. Compared with previous studies, the strict sound correspondences (pervasive and complete sound correspondence) are established in this paper to exclude chance resemblance. Then, the initial system of Proto-Yao is reconstructed based on the principle of the comparative method. It is worth noting that the hierarchy of proto-forms is distinguished according to the stringency of sound correspondence, which is necessary for us to examine the proto-form’s time depth and how strongly it is supported by sound correspondence. Based on the reconstruction, some tantalizing issues are discussed including the development of prenasalized initials of Proto-Miao-Yao, three-way distinction of sonorants, six sets of obstruents between Proto-Yao and Proto-Min, and the genetic relationship between Yao and Chinese.
Yao language 瑶语 Sound correspondence 语音对应 Initial system 声母系统 Reconstruction 构拟 Chinese 汉语
Mandarin Chinese and the other Sinitic languages together comprise one out of many branches of the Trans-Himalayan language family. China is also home to languages of the Austroasiatic, Austro-Tai, Altaic and Hmong-Mien families. Twenty years ago, the father tongue correlation was recognised as a principle in the founding dispersals of linguistic phyla based on the ubiquity of the correlation of Y chromosomal markers with the geographical distribution of language families. The geographical distribution and the relative chronology of branching and spread of the Austroasiatic, Austro-Tai, Trans-Himalayan and Hmong-Mien language families correlate with four distinct paternal lineages that are subclades of the Y chromosomal haplogroup O.
Trans-Himalayan language family 跨喜马拉雅语系 Population genetics 群体遗传学 Prehistory 史前史 Historical linguistics 历史语言学 Source of language 语言祖源
Randy J. LaPolla 罗仁地
In Sino-Tibetan historical linguistics, much has been done in reconstructing the sound system of Proto-Sino-Tibetan and in reconstructing a large number of cognate lexical items assumed to have been part of Proto-Sino-Tibetan, and there has been considerable work in terms of what morphology can or cannot be reconstructed to Proto-Sino-Tibetan, but it is much harder to say that two syntactic patterns are cognate than to say that two morphological paradigms or particular words are cognate. Within the family we find that modern Sinitic varieties vary from most of the Tibeto-Burman languages in terms of basic clause structure. In this paper we look at information structure in Old Chinese to attempt to find a directionality to the changes found in the long period we think of as Old Chinese, and to look back to the starting point of those changes to see what the clause structure of the precursor of Old Chinese might have been. As it turns out to be more similar to the dominant patterns of Tibeto-Burman languages, it allows us to hypothesize what the patterns were in Proto-Sino-Tibetan.
Sino-Tibetan languages 汉藏语 Historical linguistics 历史语言学 Information structure 信息结构 Syntactic reconstruction 句法构拟
Baoya Chen 陈保亚; Dejiang Yu 余德江
In this paper, we discuss the genetic relationship of Sino-Tibetan languages, especially that between Sino-Tibetan and Kam-Tai languages. We first review the methodology of correlated and complete sound correspondence and that of rank analysis. By adopting the latter methodology, we then demonstrate rank analyses of domestic animals, tool materials, numerals, and core words, all of which serve as case studies on the relationships between Old Chinese and such languages as Kam-Tai, Written Tibetan, and Written Burmese. Based on the distributional differences of sound correspondences across ranked lexical items in the aforementioned semantic domains, we propose a genetic tree of Sino-Tibetan languages whereby Kam-Tai is not related to Sino-Tibetan.
Sino-Tibetan 汉藏语 Kam-Tai 侗台语 Strict sound correspondence 严格语音对应 Rank analysis 有阶分析 Genetic relationship 语源关系
The emergence of tone has always been a key and difficult point in the study of historical linguistics. Based on people’s language cognitive abilities and the basic laws of phonemes, this paper has developed a method to calculate the phoneme structure load. Using this method, the phoneme loads of thir-ty-two tonal languages and five non-tonal dialects of Chinese, Tibetan and Tibeto-Burman were calculated. Based on this, the information standard of tone emergence in living spoken language has been proposed. At the same time, the phoneme loads of reconstructive languages by Li (1980), Wang (1956, 2010), Guo (2010), Zhengzhang (2003), Baxter and Sagart (2014), and the phoneme load of Chen and Qiu (1008) were calculated. According to the result of phoneme loads, we found that the tone emergence in the recon-structed languages and Guangyun do not accord with people’s cognitive abilities of spoken language.
声调的涌现一直是历史语言学研究的一个重点和难点。本文基于人的语言认知能力和音位的基本规律，发展出了一种计算音位结构负担量的方法。利用这种方法，计算了汉语、藏语和藏缅语32种有声调语言和5种藏语无声调方言的音位负担量，以此为基础，提出了在活的口语中声调涌现的信息量标准。同时还计算李方桂(Li 1980)、王力(Wang 1956, 2010)和郭锡良(Guo 2010)、郑张尚芳(Zhengzhang 2003)、白一平和萨加尔(Baxter and Sagart 2014) 等6种构拟语言和《广韵》(Chen and Qiu 1008)的音位负担量，根据音位负担量的计算结果，我们发现构拟语言和《广韵》中的声调都不符合人们口语的认知能力，它包含了太多的冗余信息，不是古代一个活的语言的音位系统。
Phoneme load 音位负担量 Tones in Sino-Tibetan languages 汉藏语声调 Tone emergence 声调涌现 Tone reconstruction 声调构拟
Recently, some genetic studies have directly related specific languages with specific genes and ethnos. At least so far, these ideas or speculations are too optimistic and confident. After all, ethnos is only a kind of distinguishing relationship between the different ethnic groups, language is a kind of culture that could be shared by different ethnos, and genes are a kind of biological fact of race. We cannot yet now make sure if there is one-to-one correspondence between the language, genes, and the ethnos. The field experiences from Yunnan showed that an ethnic group may speak two or more languages, and two ethnic groups may not identify with each other, although they are from the same ancestor and speak the same language. Based on these facts, this paper researches some literature and some archaeological studies on the early history of Yunnan, and speculates that Chinese spread to Yunnan in the Shang dynasty, and Bai language subsequently developed from it.
Language 语言 Gene 基因 Ethnos 民族 Chinese 汉语 Bai language 白语 Shang dynasty 商代
Xingquan Hou 侯兴泉; Yinghao Li 李英浩; Yi Shao 邵宜; Jiangping Kong 孔江平
The Nanling area in China boasts a rich resource of languages, including not only Chinese dialects such as the group of Southwest Mandarin, Hakka, Xiang, Yue and Min, but also minority languages such as the Yao group of Miao-Yao and the Tai group of Kam-Tai. In addition, there is Tuhua whose language affiliation has yet to be established. The development of the Nanling Tuhua has been contingent on the complex land topography in this area, and on the area being the critical traffic route for people migrating from north to south in China. Through comparison of the Tuhua and the neighboring Chinese dialects or minority languages, it is found that the Nanling Tuhua is best described as a creole or mixed language with its associated features.
Nanling area 南岭 Chinese dialects 汉语方言 Minority Languages 少数民族语言 Tuhua 土话
Feng Yang 杨锋; Xingquan Hou 侯兴泉; Yi Shao 邵宜; Jiangping Kong 孔江平
There have been five important traffic routes in the Nanling throughout history. These routes are the Yuchengling Route, Mengzhuling Route, Dupangling Route, Qitianling Route, and Dayuling Route, from east to west. Immigrants in different periods of history principally traveled on these five routes to emigrate from the Lingbei area to the Lingnan area. Their cultures were merged into the cultures of the local people, which gave birth to the splendid multicultural society in the Lingnan area.
Nanling 南岭 Ancient Road 古道 Immigrants 移民 Culture 文化