Deep linguistic prehistory with particular reference to Andamanese *

In 1992, American linguist Johanna Nichols introduced a new method of detecting typological patterns at great time depths, based on the morphological analysis and cross-linguistic comparisons of several structural types and grammatical categories (Nichols 1992). She claimed that her method reveals patterns that may go back as far as the initial modern human colonization of the globe, and she set up a preliminary model of early linguistic spread. Has Nichols taken a ground-breaking step towards a greater understanding of our distant linguistic past? And how can we test this? Towards the end of her book, Nichols 1992:263-65 calls for an analysis of ‘critical’ languages which are in a unique position to fill the gaps in her study and thus essential to our understanding of global linguistic prehistory. Using Nichols’ method as a testing model, this article highlights one such critical language group – the Andamanese language family, spoken by the indigenous Negrito population on the Andaman Islands, in the Bay of Bengal – in an effort to shed further light on the distant linguistic past of our species

Loanword phonology in Jahai

Jahai, a language belonging to the Northern Aslian subgroup of the Aslian branch of Austroasiatic, is spoken by a community of approximately one thousand individuals in remote parts of Perak and Kelantan, Peninsular Malaysia, and reportedly also by a small community in the adjacent part of southernmost Thailand. Jahai speakers have long been in frequent contact with speakers of neighbouring languages, notably Temiar, a Central Aslian language, and Malay, the Austronesian majority language. Malay in particular has been an important source of borrowing, and a considerable portion of the Jahai vocabulary is of Malay origin. The present article describes the phonological changes that these words undergo when borrowed into Jahai1

The language of eating and drinking: a window on Orang Asli meaning-making

We make in this chapter a first probe into the lexical domain of eating and drinking as it is construed in the Aslian languages, a branch of the Austroasiatic language family spoken by a majority of the Orang Asli of the Malay Peninsula. Fundamental to human experience and representation, the domain of ingestion has received increased linguistic attention in recent years. Setting out from our own primary field data from several Aslian languages, collected over the past 25 years , we examine the form, meaning, and history of eating and drinking vocabulary and show that Aslian harbours unusual lexical strategies for ingestion. We place particular focus on ingestion events as expressed in the class of verbs. Moreover, in this seemingly restricted and mundane domain, we unpack semantic principles of wider significance to Aslian meaning-making, which speak directly to cultural distinctions within the Orang Asli sphere. In particular, we uncover a clear distinction in semantic categorisation strategies between foragers and non-foragers

Time and Place in the Prehistory of the Aslian Languages

The Aslian language family, located in the Malay Peninsula and southern Thai Isthmus, consists of four distinct branches comprising some 18 languages. These languages predate the now dominant Malay and Thai. The speakers of Aslian languages exhibit some of the highest degree of phylogenetic and societal diversity present in Mainland Southeast Asia today, among them a foraging tradition particularly associated with locally ancient, Pleistocene genetic lineages. Little advance has been made in our understanding of the linguistic prehistory of this region or how such complexity arose. In this article we present a Bayesian phylogeographic analysis of a large sample of Aslian languages. An explicit geographic model of diffusion is combined with a cognate birth-word death model of lexical evolution to infer the location of the major events of Aslian cladogenesis. The resultant phylogenetic trees are calibrated against dates in the historical and archaeological record to infer a detailed picture of Aslian language history, addressing a number of outstanding questions, including (1) whether the root ancestor of Aslian was spoken in the Malay Peninsula, or whether the family had already divided before entry, and (2) the dynamics of the movement of Aslian languages across the peninsula, with a particular focus on its spread to the indigenous foragers

Maps meet myths : Understanding Jahai place naming through Geographical Information Systems

Placenames are seemingly universal, with the potential to reveal different systems of organizing information in everyday communication. We report on the relationship between placenames in Jahai, an indigenous language spoken by the Jahai people of the Malay Peninsula, and the environment. Our approach explores the tendency to organize names using a hierarchy of kinship associated with the cnεl, mythological entities in origin stories, which appears to map onto catchment areas. By associating linguistic data with these ethnographic inputs and geographical properties calculated in a Geographic Information System, we generate and make suggestions for productive ways of understanding placenames as systems

Forests : the cross-linguistic perspective

Do all humans perceive, think and talk about tree cover (‘forests’) in more or less the same way? International forestry programs frequently seem to operate on the assumption that they do. However, recent advances in the language sciences show that languages vary greatly as to how the landscape domain is lexicalized and grammaticalized. Different languages segment and label the large-scale environment and its features according to astonishingly different semantic principles, often in tandem with highly culture-specific practices and ideologies. Presumed basic concepts like mountain, valley and river cannot in fact be straightforwardly translated across languages. In this paper we describe, compare and evaluate some of the semantic diversity observed in relation to forests. We do so on the basis of first-hand linguistic field data from a global sample of indigenous categorization systems as they are manifested in the following languages: Avatime (Ghana), Duna (Papua New Guinea), Jahai (Malay Peninsula), Lokono (the Guianas), Makalero (East Timor), and Umpila/Kuuku Ya’u (Cape York Peninsula). We show that basic linguistic categories relating to tree cover vary considerably in their principles of semantic encoding across languages, and that forest is a challenging category from the point of view of inter-cultural translatability. This has consequences for current global policies and programs aimed at standardizing forest definitions and measurements. It calls for greater attention to categorial diversity in designing and implementing such agendas, and for receptiveness to and understanding of local indigenous classification systems in communicating those agendas on the ground

Conceptualisations of landscape differ across European languages

Acknowledgments: Thanks to Peter Sercombe for assistance with English data collection and to Maximilian Hartmann for assisting in the creation of the network visualisations. Funding: This work was funded by a Bank of Sweden Tercentenary Foundation Jubilee Initiative Grant (https://www.rj.se/en), grant ref. NHS14-1665:1. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.Peer reviewedPublisher PD

Olfactory language and abstraction across cultures

Olfaction presents a particularly interesting arena to explore abstraction in language. Like other abstract domains, such as time, odours can be difficult to conceptualize. An odour cannot be seen or held, it can be difficult to locate in space, and for most people odours are difficult to verbalize. On the other hand, odours give rise to primary sensory experiences. Every time we inhale we are using olfaction to make sense of our environment. We present new experimental data from 30 Jahai hunter-gatherers from the Malay Peninsula and 30 matched Dutch participants from the Netherlands in an odour naming experiment. Participants smelled monomolecular odorants and named odours while reaction times, odour descriptors and facial expressions were measured. We show that while Dutch speakers relied on concrete descriptors, i.e. they referred to odour sources (e.g. smells like lemon), the Jahai used abstract vocabulary to name the same odours (e.g. musty). Despite this differential linguistic categorization, analysis of facial expressions showed that the two groups, nevertheless, had the same initial emotional reactions to odours. Critically, these cross-cultural data present a challenge for how to think about abstraction in language.This article is part of the theme issue 'Varieties of abstract concepts: development, use and representation in the brain'

Sustainability and semantic diversity : A view from the Malayan rainforest

Sustainable development goals assume that basic notions such as health, life and water can be universally and easily expressed and understood across diverse communities and stakeholders. Yet there is growing evidence pointing to considerable semantic diversity in how humans represent the world in language. In this paper I discuss such semantic diversity in the context of key notions of sustainability. Focusing on an environmental term of broad relevance to sustainability goals, forest, I explore how this notion compares with assumed equivalent notions in a non-Western lesser-known speech community. Specifically, I analyze representations of treed environments in the language of the Jahai, a forager community inhabiting the rainforests of the Malay Peninsula. The results show that an understanding of local indigenous systems of representation can be crucial to the communication and implementation of sustainability goals