2 An overview of language families in Northeast Asia
2.5 Indo-European
Indo-European is the most widespread and the largest language family worldwide in terms of speakers. About one third of the global population speaks an Indo-European language. Proto-Indo-European was presumably located on the Pontic-Caspian steppe, perhaps about 4500 BCE (Anthony & Ringe 2015), although there are competing but in my eyes much less likely hypotheses, for example of a location in Anatolia south of the Black Sea (e.g., Heggarty 2013). There is convergent evidence from the human genome, archaeology, and linguistics for the location on the Pontic-Caspian steppe (e.g., Anthony 2007; Allentoft et al. 2015; Anthony & Ringe 2015; Haak et al. 2015; Jones et al.
2015). According to one prominent view, the subsequent spread and the divergence of Indo-European branches can be summarized as follows:
Archaic Proto-Indo-European(partly preserved in Anatolian) probably was spo-ken before 4000 BCE; early Proto-Indo-European(partly preserved in Tochar-ian) was spoken between 4000 and 3500 BCE; andlate Proto-Indo-European(the source of Italic and Celtic with the wagon/wheel vocabulary) was spoken about 3500-3000 BCE. Pre-Germanic split away from the western edge of late Proto-Indo-European dialects about 3300 BCE, and Pre-Greek split away about 2500 BCE, probably from a different set of dialects. Pre-Baltic split away from Pre-Slavic and other northwestern dialects about 2500 BCE. Pre-Indo-Iranian developed from a
22
2.5 Indo-European northeastern set of dialects between 2500 and 2200 BCE. (Anthony 2007: 82, my boldface)
Indo-European has a dozen major branches, four of which have, or formerly had, rep-resentatives in Northeast Asia as defined here: Tocharian, Iranian (part of Indo-Iranian), (East) Slavic, and (West) Germanic. Historically speaking, Indo-European languages en-tered Northeast Asia at roughly three different times.
Pre-Tocharian, which may have branched off from Indo-European about 5300 years ago (before all other branches except Anatolian), probably reached the Altai mountains shortly afterwards and is associated with the Afanasievo culture (ca. 3300-2500 BCE) (Mallory 2010: 51; Anthony & Ringe 2015: 208). The Afanasievo culture showed a south-ward expansion, which would explain why Tocharian is only attested further south in the Tarim basin in two different forms known as Tocharian A (East) and B (West) (e.g., Winter 1998). There are indications of the existence of a third language (Tocharian C), which is attested exclusively in loanwords (Mallory 2010: 48f.). Tocharian has been ex-tinct for at least a thousand years.
Tocharian A, found in documents near Turfan and Qarashähär, and Tocharian B, found mainly around Kucha in the west but also in the same territory as Tocharian A. The documents, dating from the 6th to the 8th centuries CE, suggest that Tochar-ian A was by that time probably a dead liturgical language, while TocharTochar-ian B was still very much in use. In addition to Tocharian, administrative texts have been dis-covered in Prakrit, an Indian language from the territory of Krorän [lóulán
楼兰
];these documents contain many proper names and items of vocabulary that would appear to be borrowed from a form of Tocharian (sometimes known as Tocharian C) spoken by the native population. The Kroränian documents date to ca. 300 CE and provide our earliest evidence for the use of Tocharian. For our purposes here, it is also very important to note that the earliest evidence for the mummified re-mains of “westerners” in the Tarim Basin is found in cemeteries at Xiaohe [小河]
(Small River) and Qäwrighul [gǔmùgōu
古墓沟], both of which are located in the
same region as Tocharian C. (Mallory 2010: 48f., my square brackets)There are alternative names for Tocharian A, such asAgneanafter the Sanskrit name Agni (yānqí
焉耆) for the city of Karashahr, and for Tocharian B, such as
Kucheanafter the city of Kucha (qiūzī龟兹
and variants) (e.g., Fortson 2010: 400; Geng Shimin 2012).Tocharian was in contact with several Iranian languages that entered the Northeast Asian scene after Tocharian, but were probably present in the Tarim basin as early as 1300 BCE (Mallory 2010: 50). Iranian together with Indic and maybe Nuristani as an in-dependent subbranch, forms the Indo-Iranian branch of Indo-European (Fortson 2010:
202f.). Iranian language history is usually divided into an Old Iranian (until the 4th or 3rd century BCE), a Middle Iranian (until the 8th or 9th century CE), and a Modern Ira-nian period (e.g., Schmitt 2000: 3). IraIra-nian languages only had a wide distribution in NEA during the Middle Iranian period. The two languages Khotanese (hétián sàiyǔ
和 田塞语, in the South of the Tarim basin, ca. 5th to 10th century CE, Emmerick 2009:
23
2 An overview of language families in Northeast Asia
377ff.) and Tumshuquese (túmùshūkè sàiyǔ
图木舒克塞语, in the North, 7th to 8th
cen-tury CE), closely related and usually collectively called Saka (sàiyǔ塞), were more
re-stricted in their distribution than Sogdian (Emmerick 2009; Geng Shimin 2011). Sogdian (sùtèyǔ粟特语
, ca. 4th to 11th centuries CE, Yoshida 2009: 279ff.) was originally spoken in present-day Uzbekistan and Tajikistan, but “the Sogdians played an active role as in-ternational traders along the Silk Road between China and the West, with the result that the Sogdian language became a kind of lingua franca in the region between Sogdiana and China” (Yoshida 2009: 279). Regarding modern Iranian, only the Pamir languages Sarikoli (sàlĭkù’er萨里库尔
) and Wakhi (wǎhǎn瓦军
), treated as dialects of one lan-guage called tǎjíkèyǔ塔吉克语
(Gao Erqiang 1985: 101) but not to be confused with the Tajik language, as well as the mixed Persian-Uyghur language Eynu, are spoken in NEA. However, the discussion will also briefly mention Yaghnobi, which is located in Tajikistan but represents the only modern language that is closely related with Sogdian.The last period of Indo-European influx brought Eastern Slavic as well as Germanic languages into NEA. Together with the Baltic languages, Slavic forms the Balto-Slavic branch of Indo-European. Only the East Slavic languages Russian and Ukrainian ex-panded into NEA. Russian is not only the dominant language of the Russian Federation, but has also had some influence on several languages outside of Russia, such as Mongo-lian or Uyghur. Many speakers of languages in the Russian Federation are bilingual in Russian or are even shifting to Russian as their primary language. Ukrainian only plays a marginal role, but nevertheless can be found scattered across the Russian-speaking area. Slavic originates in Eastern Europe, perhaps northwest of the Black Sea (Fortson 2010: 420f.) and the Russian expansion beyond the Urals only started in the 16th century.
By 1625 the Russians reached the Yenisei, and by the end of the 17th century they had conquered most of Siberia, excluding only Outer Manchuria, Chukotka, and southern Kamchatka (Forsyth 1992: 102). This means that Russian played no role in NEA until about 400 years ago. There is a mixed Russian-Ukrainian language called Surzhyk, of which some speakers are most likely also found in NEA, but which must be neglected for lack of sufficient information (Bilaniuk 2004).
Only West Germanic languages are marginally represented in NEA by scattered mi-norities of German (especially Altai Low German) speakers living in southern Siberia as well as a certain amount of influence from American English as spoken in Alaska and the Aleut Islands. Yiddish is included here mostly because of the existence of a Jewish Autonomous Oblast in Russia close to Khabarovsk, where a handful of Yiddish speakers can be found and where it has an official status. Yiddish is a descendant of primarily southeastern Middle High German that was extensively influenced by Slavic, Hebrew, and Aramaic (Jacobs et al. 1994). Altai Low German (or Plautdiitsch) “is the descendant of the Low German (Low Prussian and Pommeranian) dialects once spoken in the Danzig area.” (Nieuweboer 1999: 13) There is only limited information on questions in Altai Low German, but Standard German, a liturgical language for Siberian speakers of German di-alects, can give some rough indications about how the blanks may be filled in. There was an English jargon introduced with English-speaking whale hunting crews especially in Chukotka (de Reuse 1996). English is perhaps the major foreign language in large parts of NEA and there are many native speakers, often soldiers, in Japan and South Korea.
Furthermore, it often serves as alingua francain international communication.
24
2.6 Japonic (Japanese-Ryūkyūan)
2.6 Japonic (Japanese-Ryūkyūan)
The Japonic language family most likely had its origin on the Korean Peninsula and only later expanded into the Japanese archipelago. This expansion is connected with the Yayoi people, originally perhaps farmers along the Yangtze, who after 850 BCE via Ko-rea spKo-read to Japan where they arrived by about 400 BCE (e.g., Janhunen 2003a; Sean &
Toshikazu 2011; Hirofumi & Oxenham 2013: 219; Siska et al. 2017: 2f.). The Yayoi people mixed with and replaced the original Jōmon population, their hunter-gatherer lifestyle as well as their languages. Peripheral areas such as Hokkaidō and the Ryūkyūan Is-lands preserve stronger traces of the Jōmon genome. But while Ainuic languages in Hokkaidō may represent the last remnants of the Jōmon languages, Ryūkyūan languages are clearly related to Japanese. According to Vovin (2013b: 202), the southward migration of Ryūkyūan only started in the 9th century.
According to one classification, Japanese can be divided into Old (592-794), Late Old (794-1192), Middle (1192-1603), and Early Modern Japanese (1603-1867) (Hasegawa 2015:
5ff.). Old Japanese can be further divided into Eastern, Central, and Western Old Japanese.
Eastern Old Japanese was spoken in what today is the Kantō area in the 8th century CE, while Western Old Japanese is the language from Nara (Kupchik 2011). Hachijō is the only modern descendant of Eastern Old Japanese (Kupchik 2011: 9). Central Old Japanese, thought to be the predecessor of Modern Japanese, is almost unknown (but see Kupchik 2011: 7f., 852). Old Japanese has to be distinguished from Classical Japanese, which was based on Late Old Japanese as defined above and served as a literary language (Tranter 2012a). There is evidence for the former presence of Para-Japonic or Japonic languages on the Korean Peninsula as well as on Jeju Island (Vovin 2013a), but no information relevant for this study can be obtained from these long-gone varieties (see also Beckwith 2007 and especially Pellard 2005 for some discussion).
Japonic had contact with Ainuic, Koreanic, Sinitic, Amuric, Uilta etc. Modern Japa-nese, furthermore, has been influenced by several European languages and especially English. Contact with Austronesian on Taiwan led to the emergence of Yilan Creole.
The dialects of Japanese as well as Ryūkyūan languages are both increasingly being re-placed by Standard Japanese, which itself is based on the Tōkyō dialect in the Eastern dialect area (Sanada & Uemura 2007). Yilan Creole is under Chinese influence.
2.7 Koreanic
The internal dialectal differences of Korean should not be underestimated, and some of these dialects, notably Jeju on Jeju island and Yukcin in the Northeast, have been said to exhibit language-like differences with regard to other varieties of Korean. It is therefore possible to speak of theKoreaniclanguage family instead of aKoreanisolate. Regarding the origin of Koreanic, Vovin (2013b: 201) has recently argued for a location in the north:
It appears that the migration of the Korean[ic] speakers to their present location was quite straightforward, from southern Manchuria in the north to the Korean
25
2 An overview of language families in Northeast Asia
Peninsula in the south. The linguistic process of Koreanization took several cen-turies, and it appears that proto-Korean[ic] or pre-Old Korean gradually replaced [Para-]Japonic languages between the 3rd and 8th centuries ce. The central and southern parts of the Korean Peninsula were originally [Para-]Japonic speaking.
(my square brackets)
Today, Koreanic is distributed across the entire Korean Peninsula as well as adjacent parts of China, parts of Sakhalin, and even Central Asia. Theoretically, Central Asian Korean (Kolyemal) as spoken in eastern Uzbekistan, for example, is located outside of Northeast Asia. However, given its location very close to Xinjiang and the fact that it preserves several conservative features that were lost in Korea, it will also be included.
Korean is historically attested in several stages that may be called Old Korean, Middle Korean, and Modern Korean, but recent descriptions disagree on how exactly the histori-cal stages of Korean should be classified. Whitman (2015) considers Old Korean to be the language of Unified Silla (668-935 CE), while Nam (2012: 41) argues that the Old Korean period already began in the 5thcentury CE.
We divide Old Korean (OK) into Early, Mid and Late Old Korean (EOK, MOK, LOK).
EOK was the Korean of the Three Kingdoms period, roughly from the start of the fifth century until Silla unified the Three Kingdoms in the 660s. MOK was the Ko-rean of the Unified Silla [Sinla] period, from the 660s until the 930s when Koryŏ [Kolye] re-unified the country. LOK was the language of the earlier part of the Koryŏ dynasty from the 930s till the mid-thirteenth century.
The languages that were spoken before or during Unified Silla are only poorly attested.
Very likely these languages included Para-Koreanic and Para-Japonic, but no relevant material is available for the purposes of this study, which is why they have been excluded here altogether. Old Korean was followed by Middle Korean, more exactly Early Middle Korean (10thto 14thcenturies) and Late Middle Korean (15thand 16thcenturies), roughly divided by the invention of the Hangul script in 1446 (Sohn 2012).
Koreanic had contact with Southern Tungusic, Japonic, and Sinitic, which forms a very strong ad- and superstrate. Both Japonic and Koreanic derive a large amount of vocabulary from Sinitic. Today, English is an important contact language as well.
2.8 (Khitano-)Mongolic
There are a dozen Mongolic languages and all are spoken in Northeast Asia except for Kalmyk (an aberrant dialect of Oirat) and Moghol in Afghanistan (Janhunen 2003e, 2006).
Apart from the Mongolic languages proper, there is what has been termed Para-Mongolic (Janhunen 2003c; 2012a), i.e. sister languages of the Proto-Mongolic lineage (e.g., Khi-tan). All known Mongolic languages are extinct and given the scarce material, Para-Mongolic languages will be excluded from the discussion. The age of the Para-Mongolic lan-guage family, i.e. the time of the break-up of the Proto-Mongolic unity, is thought to be only about 800 years (e.g., Janhunen 2012b: 3). If one includes Para-Mongolic, the family
26
2.8 (Khitano-)Mongolic must be much older, but Janhunen’s (2012d: 8) estimate of an age of about 1500 to 2500 years before present shows that the details are far from clear. In addition to the modern Mongolic languages there are historical records of older stages, notably so-called Middle Mongol, which “is the technical term for the Mongolic languages recorded in documents during, or immediately after, the time of the Mongol empire(s), in the thirteenth to the early fifteenth centuries.” (Rybatzki 2003b: 57) In addition, there is written Mongol, a literary language written with the Uyghur alphabet that has a history of about 800 years and exhibits several archaic features (Janhunen 2003f). The recently partly deciphered Hüis Tolgoi inscription from Mongolia seems to represent a form of early Mongolic and is considerably older than Middle Mongol (e.g., Vovin 2017). The “homeland” problem is notoriously difficult for many language families. However, for Mongolic it quite clearly was located somewhere in present-day northeastern Mongolia, the place where the Mon-golic expansion had its starting point (Janhunen 2003e: xxxiv). But Proto-MonMon-golic itself formed a larger family with Para-Mongolic, and the question about the original location of this proto-language of Proto- and Para-Mongolic (Janhunen 2012a: 114 proposes the nameKhitano-Mongolic, also adopted here, and Shimunek 2014; 2017Serbi-Mongolic), is less easy to answer. Janhunen (2012d: 10) assumes that it was located further to the south in present-day Liaoning or eastern Inner Mongolia:
There is a particularly clear parallelism in the expansion of the Mongolic [includ-ing Para-Mongolic] and Tungusic language families. Once they had occupied their protohistorical positions on both sides of the Liao basin, they both assumed a gen-eral northward trend of expansion. In the light of the available information on the history and protohistory of the region, the Mongolic homeland has to be placed in southwestern Manchuria (Liaoxi), while the Tungusic Homeland can hardly have been located anywhere else but in southeastern Manchuria (Liaodong), though quite possibly also extending to the northern part of the Korean Peninsula. (my square brackets)
On Tungusic, see §2.10. Janhunen’s assumption of a Pre-Proto-Mongolic homeland situ-ated roughly in eastern Manchuria is corroborsitu-ated by some historical facts, such as the Khitan Liao-dynasty (辽, 916-1125 CE) that roughly derived from this region.
Mongolic in general shows strong influence from Turkic languages and vice versa (Schönig 2003). Individual Mongolic languages participated in different linguistic areas that sometimes overlap and display a different strength of convergence. Shirongolic is an integral part of the so-called Amdo Sprachbund. Dagur, together with the two Tungu-sic languages Solon and Oroqen, formed a small linguistic area for itself, but during the Qing-dynasty (1636-1911) were also under the strong influence of yet another Tungusic language, Manchu. Similar to Tungusic, Mongolic languages today can be classified as to whether they are under the influence of the national language of Russia (Kalmyk, Buryat) or China (Dagur, Shirongolic etc.). But unlike Tungusic, this only partly applies to the Mongolic languages spoken in ”Outer Mongolia”, where Russian influence appears to be receding, and does not apply at all to Moghol in Afghanistan. A national language itself, Mongolian of course influences all Mongolic languages spoken in Mongolia.
27
2 An overview of language families in Northeast Asia