Proto-Tungusic in time and space

Although there is a general consensus among historical comparative linguists that the Tungusic languages are genealogically related and descend from a common ancestral language, the internal structure of the family, its age, homeland and prehistoric cultural context remain subject to debate. In addition to four competing concepts of classification, the linguistic literature yields a wide range of time estimations for the family covering more than a millennium as well as four different proposals with regard to the location of the homeland covering Eastern Siberia and Manchuria. Here we will combine the power of traditional comparative historical linguistics and computational phylogenetics to shed light on the prehistory of the Tungusic languages. Our aim is to build on a recent Bayesian verification of the Tungusic family and examine its implications in determining a plausible time depth, location and cultural context of the ancestral proto-Tungusic speech community. We will compare spatial inferences based on two different statistically well-supported Tungusic classifications, namely one in which the break-up of Manchuric constitutes the first split in the family as well as a North-South classification with a northern branch including Even, Evenki, Negidal, Oroqen, Solon, Oroch and Udehe as opposed to a southern branch including Manchuric and Nanaic languages. Situating Proto-Tungusic in time and space, we will estimate the break-up of Proto-Tungusic in the beginning of the first millennium and place its homeland in the area around Lake Khanka. Our study pushes the field forward in answering some tantalizing questions about the prehistory of the Tungusic family, providing a quantitative basis for some conflicting hypotheses and in triangulating linguistics, archaeology and genetics into a holistic approach to the Tungusic past

Triangulation supports agricultural spread of the Transeurasian languages

The origin and early dispersal of speakers of Transeurasian languages, i.e., Japanese, Korean, Tungusic, Mongolic and Turkic, is among the most disputed issues of Eurasian population history. A key problem is the relationship between linguistic dispersals, agricultural expansions and population movements. Here we address this question through ‘triangulating’ genetics, archaeology and linguistics in a unified perspective. We report new, wide-ranging datasets from these disciplines, including the most comprehensive Transeurasian agropastoral and basic vocabulary presented to date, an archaeological database of 255 Neolithic and Bronze Age sites from Northeast Asia, and the first collection of ancient genomes from Korea, the Ryukyu islands and early cereal farmers in Japan, complementing previously published genomes from East Asia. Challenging the traditional ‘Pastoralist Hypothesis’, we show that the common ancestry and primary dispersals of Transeurasian languages can be traced back to the first farmers moving across Northeast Asia from the Early Neolithic onwards, but that this shared heritage has been masked by extensive cultural interaction since the Bronze Age. As well as marking significant progress in the three individual disciplines, by combining their converging evidence, we show that the early spread of Transeurasian speakers was driven by agriculture.Introduction Linguistics Archaeology Genetics Discussion: Triangulation Method

A Bayesian approach to the classification of Tungusic languages

The Tungusic language family is comprised of languages spoken in Siberia, the Russian Far East, Northeast China and Xinjiang. There is a general consensus that these languages are genealogically related and descend from a common ancestral language. Nevertheless, there is considerable disagreement with regard to the internal structure of the Tungusic family and the time depth of its separation into daughter languages. Here we use computational Bayesian phylogenetic methods to generate a phylogeny of Tungusic languages and estimate the time-depth of the family. Our analysis is based on the recently introduced Leipzig-Jakarta-Jena list, a dataset of 254 basic vocabulary items collected for 21 Tungusic doculects. Our results are consistent with two basic classifications previously proposed in the literature, notably a Manchu-Tungusic classification, in which the break-up of Jurchenic constitutes the first split in the tree, as well as a North-South classification, which includes a Jurchenic-Nanaic and an Orochic-Ewenic branch. In addition, we obtain a time-depth for the age of Proto-Tungusic between the 8th century BC and the 12th century AD (95% highest posterior density interval). Previous classifications of Tungusic were based on both classical historical comparative linguistic and lexicostatistic approaches, but the application of Bayesian phylogenetic methods to the Tungusic languages has not so far been attempted. In contrast to previous approaches, our Bayesian analysis adds an understanding of the statistical robustness of the proposed branches and infers absolute divergence dates, allowing variation of rates of change across branches and cognate sets. In this way, our research provides a reliable quantitative basis for previous estimates based on classical historical linguistic and lexicostatistic approaches

Contact and Siberian Languages

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