Get your Austro-Tai out of my Japonic
At least, that seems to be the majority reaction to a book by Paul Benedict called Japanese / Austro-Tai, which claims that Japanese is genetically part of the Austro-Tai family. Note that Austro-Tai is a proposed macro-family consisting of Austronesian (Formosan, Malayo-Polynesian), Austroasiatic (Mon-Khmer, among others), and Tai-Kadai (Thai, among others). So the book has at least as many presuppositions in it as the infamous Japanese and other Altaic Languages by Roy Miller. And it seems to have taken quite a bashing, at least among stauch defenders of an Altaic connection, like Alexander Vovin.
I came across the book as part of a little research project to see what people out there think about the origins of the Japanese people and language. It turns out that the Altaic theory is still pretty strong among linguists and some anthropologists and geneticists, though the possibility of an Austronesian connection is still pretty strong, especially among Eastern scholars. It seems that many of them believe that the origins of the Japanese are best understood as a mixing between northern (Altaic, perhaps) and southern (Austronesian or Austroasiatic, though usually the former) features, at least culturally. Linguistically, the arguments for either a creole or a southern substratum remain, to my eyes, rather unconvincing. Though, I will admit, there are some interesting lexical correspondences between some Ryukyuan, Okinawan, and Kyushuan words for sea navigation, and some proposed Proto-Austronesian words. Okay, there’s really just one really good one, which was presented not by Benedict but by Osamu Sakiyama in a book with a great title: Prehistoric Mongoloid Dispersals. The word is proto-Austronesian *paRi, which is reflected in various languages with meanings related to south, southern winds, the southern cross, and sting rays (what the southern cross looks like). And, apparently in many of the Japonic languages spoken in southwestern Kyushu and beyond, there are words like pae and pai that mean south/southwestern wind. So, the medial loss of r is supposed to have happened in Japanese (though, I think that is arrived at via comparative Altaic data, so…yeah); but the vowels, I think, are supposed to have merged in various ways. Clearly some more work has to be done on this one, but it’s interesting nonetheless.
Anyway, for me the little research project definitely inspired me to become more aware of the (attested) history of Japanese, so it looks like some learning of classical Japanese should be in my future.
Comments(7)
Hello there, how did you manage to get your hands on a copy of that book? It seems to be rather hard to find… Do you want to sell it? Oh… Well, any hint would be appreciated! Cheers, Chris
While an Austro-Tai connection to Japanese is intuitively difficult to justify, you should keep in mind Alexander Vovin is simply into bashing anything that moves. His excuse? “I’m Russian.” But I know rational Russians.
Re Vovin, see “In Defense of the Comparative Method, or The End of the Vovin Controversy,” by Dybo and Starostin, http://starling.rinet.ru/Texts/compmeth.pdf. This critique of Vovin’s 2005 article concludes that it is a “propaganda piece, bent on misrepresenting EDAL as a work of unscientific fantasy and its authors as unprofessional frauds…[VOVIN 2005] also sets a new low standard for academic debate in the field of Altaistics. . . accusing his opponents of forgery and basic ignorance.”
See “In Defense of the Comparative Method, or The End of the Vovin Controversy,” by Dybo and Starostin. It concludes that Vovin’s 2005 review of EDAL is a “propaganda piece, bent on misrepresenting EDAL as a work of unscientific fantasy and its authors as unprofessional frauds…[VOVIN 2005] also sets a new low standard for academic debate in the field of Altaistics. . . accusing his opponents of forgery and basic ignorance.” http://starling.rinet.ru/Texts/compmeth.pdf
Wow. I wasn’t quite aware of the level of controversy, though I suppose in an area like macrocomparative linguistics, where evidence is thin (or perhaps I’m inserting bias) and opinions strong, such is inevitable. Thanks for the pointers, too!
Please be alerted that a legthy reply to the lengthy paper by Starostin and Dybo is underway, vindicating basically the position of Vovin and other critics of the so-called “Altaic hypothesis”
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