Himalayan Languages Project

Leiden University

Specialised vocabularies, genes and homelands:The new linguistic palaeontology

George van Driem

The branches of Indo-European

• The Father Tongue hypothesis (Poloni et al. 1997, 2000)seems to apply for many language families or groups, albeit byno means universally, e.g. Baltistan (Tibetan mtDNA vs. NearEastern Y haplogroups)

• Y-SNP data show incursive R haplogroups from thenorthwest, probably datable to the introduction of Vedic to thethe Indian subcontinent and Avestan to the Iranian plateau.

• Many old native mtDNA lineages indigenous to the IndianSubcontinent… the Father Tongue Hypothesis

Indo-Europeans in the Indian SubcontinentSexual dimorphism in population prehistory

widely presumed prehistoricalIndo-Iranian linguistic intrusion

Y haplogroup R (M207, M306) entering the Subcontinent from the northwest(e.g. R1a, etc.) vs. many strains of mtDNA indigenous to the Subcontinent

Spatial frequency distribution map of haplogroup R1a (Sahoo et al. 2006). Caste populations and nationalmajority are shown on the main map, frequency gradients amongst tribal populations on the inset map.

Rice: Austroasiatic vs. Hmong-Mien

André-Georges Haudricourt and Louis Hédin still maintained that rice was‘incontestablement’ of Indian origin (1987: 159-161, 176)

Morphologically immature wild rice may have been used by foragers before actualdomestication of the crop, e.g. at the 八十擋 Bāshídàng site (7000-6000 BC)belonging to the 彭頭山 Péngtóushān culture in the Middle Yangtze. Rice at sitesin the Yangtze delta area such as 跨湖橋 Kuàhúqiáo, 馬家浜 Mǎjiābāng 河姆渡(5000-3000 BC) and Hémǔdù (5000-4500 BC).

Only ca. 5000 BC was the actual cultivation of rice probably first undertaken bypeople in the Lower Yangtze, who at the time relied far more heavily on thecollecting of acorns and water chestnuts (Yasuda 2002, Fuller 2005a, 2005b,2005c, 2006a, 2006b, 2006c, 2007a, 2007b, Fuller et al. 2007, Zong et al. 2007).

There is also currently no evidence for the co-cultivation of rice and foxtail milletalong the middle Yangtze until around 3800 BC (Nasu et al. 2006).

The homeland of rice agriculture is movedfrom the Ganges to the Middle Yangtze

Datings of domesticated rice and ceramic culture from Gangetic basin andDoab sites such as Koldihawa and Mahagarha, reportedly dating from theseventh millennium BC (Sharma et al. 1980, Pal 1990, Agrawal, 2002)

Newer sites with more reliable dates at Lahuradewa (Lahurādevā), Ṭokuvāand Sarāī Nahar Rāī.

Lahuradewa period 1A (ca. 5300 to 4300 BC): Setaria glauca, Oryzarufipogon as well as a morphologically distinct, fully domesticated form of rice‘comparable to cultivated Oryza sativa’ (Tewari et al. 2002). Accelerator massspectroscopy (AMS) dates obtained on the rice grains themselves.

Ṭokuvā site near Allahabad now yields similar dates.

Sarāī Nahar Rāī, also in the Ganges, has been yielding similar dates.

What about the Brahmaputra?

Moving the homeland of ricecultivation back to the Ganges

Original to the language phylum:

*ntsəːi ‘husked rice’

*ɲaːŋ ‘cooked rice’

*n ̥jeŋ ‘rice head, head of grain’

• whereas the Hmong-Mien terms for glutinous (rice), (paddy)field, sickle, rice cake and (rice) seedling ‘are likely to have had aChinese origin’ (Ratliff 2004: 158-159).

Three reconstructible Hmong-Mien etymarelating to rice cultivation

*(kǝ)ɓaːʔ ‘rice plant’*rǝŋkoːʔ ‘rice grain’*cǝŋkaːm ‘rice hull’*kǝndǝk ‘rice husk’*pheːʔ ‘rice bran’*tǝmpal ‘mortar’*jǝnreʔ ‘pestle’*jǝmpiǝr ‘winnowing tray’*guːm ‘to winnow’*jǝrmuǝl ‘dibbling stick’*kǝntuːʔ ‘accompanying cooked food other than rice’

Rice robustly reflected in reconstructible AustroasiaticOsada (1995), Diffloth (2005)

*mraːk ‘peacock Pavo muticus’

*tǝrkuǝt ‘tree monitor lizard Varanus nebulosus or bengalensis’

*tǝnyuːʔ ‘binturong’ or the ‘bear cat Arctitis binturong’

*(bǝn)joːl ~ *j(ǝrm)oːl ‘ant eater, Manis javanica’

*dǝkan ‘bamboo rat, Rhizomys sumatrensis’ (as a loan in Malay)

*kaciaŋ ‘the Asian elephant, Elephas maximus’

*kiaɕ ‘mountain goat, Capricornis sumatrensis’

*rǝmaːs ‘rhinoceros, Dicerorhinus sumatrensis’

*tǝnriak ‘buffalo, Bubalus bubalus’.

Isoglosses diagnostic for the faunal ecology of theAustroasiatic homeland (Diffloth 2005: 78)

Spatial frequency distribution of Y haplogroup O2a for national majority groups andcaste populations [main map] and tribal populations [inset map] (Sahoo et al. 2006)

Geographical distribution ofTibeto-Burman languages

The shape of the Tibeto-Burman family tree

The major Tibeto-Burman subgroups

Geographical distribution of majorTibeto-Burman subgroups

Spatial frequency distribution of the Y chromosome haplogroup O3e (M134) haplogroupShi et al. (2005), Am.J.Hum.Genet. 77: 408-419

Old Chinese 稷 btsïk ‘foxtail millet’Lhokpu căʔkto ‘foxtail millet’

Old Chinese 糲 bmә-rat-s ‘rice’Tibetan ḥbras ‘rice’ …but Hendrik Kern (1889)

still relevantOld Chinese 米 amijʔ ‘grain of cereal’Garo may ‘paddy’

…and lots more data not yet publicly accessible

Reflexes for Setaria italica in Tibeto-Burmanas far flung as Old Chinese in the Yellow River

and Lhokpu in southwestern Bhutan… and rice?

www.iias.nl/himalaya/

Trans-Himalayan Database Programme

HimalayanLanguages

Project

• Open web-based database accessible to all people withinternet access: available (to students, scholars, the languagecommunities and the public at large), extensible (can grow andgrow), correctable (by field linguists and by members of thenative language communities)

• Mirror sites on separate servers in Peking and Leiden

• English-language interface (most Tibeto-Burman languagecommunities are located entirely outside of China)

• The name of the databse will not be ‘Tibeto-Burman’ nor‘Sino-Tibetan’, but the neutral ‘Trans-Himalayan’.

• By the same token, no built-in phylogenetic hierarchies

• No encryption, no stand-alone application, no proprietarydatabase format

• Credit all contributing authors and sources (published andunpublished) from which data have been culled

• STEDT was explicitly used as the ‘bad’ example in the originalproposal to illustrate how not to set up and run a database

Trans-Himalayan Database Programme

• CASS will provide: (1) the manpower for typing in datamanually, (2) the database in Unicode in open format for thetwo sites on the Peking and Leiden servers, inc. the dataalready put in for languages north of the Himalayas

• KNAW & LU (HLP) will provide: (1) access to the HimalayanLanguages Project private collection containing numerous rarepublished sources from Bhutan, Nepal and India, esp.northeastern India, containing lexical data on languages of theHimalayas and areas south of the Himalayas, (2) the lexicaldata in electronic form on Himalayan languages from theHimalayan Languages Project grammars

Trans-Himalayan Database Programme

Two recent articles

• van Driem, George. 2007. ‘The diversity of the Tibeto-Burman language family and the linguistic ancestry ofChinese’, Bulletin of Chinese Linguistics, 1 (2): 211-270.

• van Driem, George. 2007. ‘Austroasiatic phylogeny and theAustroasiatic homeland in light of recent population geneticstudies’, Mon-Khmer Studies, 37.