Eurasian eureka

After reading the the latest series of Language Log posts on long range connections (see below for a listing), Geoff Wade suggested that I title the next post in this series as I have this one.  If there ever was an occasion to do so, now is as good a moment as any, with the announcement of the publication of Chau Wu's extraordinary "Patterns of Sound Correspondence between Taiwanese and Germanic/Latin/Greek/Romance Lexicons, Part I", Sino-Platonic Papers, 262 (Aug., 2016), 239 pp. (free pdf).

Before proceeding, here are the posts in the current series on Eurasian connections and Old Sinitic reconstructions:

• "Of precious swords and Old Sinitic reconstructions" (3/8/16)
• "Of precious swords and Old Sinitic reconstructions, part 2" (3/12/16)
• "Of precious swords and Old Sinitic reconstructions, part 3" (3/16/16)
• "Of precious swords and Old Sinitic reconstructions, part 4" (3/24/16)
• "Of precious swords and Old Sinitic reconstructions, part 5 " (3/28/16)
• "Of felt hats, feathers, macaroni, and weasels" (3/13/16)
• "Old Sinitic reconstructions and Tibeto-Burman cognates" (4/18/16)
• "Of shumai and Old Sinitic reconstructions" (7/19/16)

Though it adopts a different approach than the recent spate of Language Log posts on ancient objects and the Old Sinitic reconstructions of the words for them, Chau Wu's paper complements these LL posts that draw comparisons between words in Indo-European languages and words in Sinitic for the same objects or customs.

Chau Wu's paper follows in the tradition of Tsung-tung Chang's well-known "Indo-European Vocabulary in Old Chinese" which was published as Sino-Platonic Papers, 7 (January, 1988), i + 56 pp. (free pdf).  Since Chang's paper appeared nearly thirty years ago, much progress has been made in archeology, Sinitic historical linguistics, ethnography, and other related fields, Chau Wu has more and better resources at his disposal, so we would naturally expect that his results would be more exact and more abundant.  Still, Tsung-tung Chang deserves to be recognized as a modern pioneer in the comparison of IE and Sinitic vocabulary.

It must be pointed out that, so far as I know, neither Chang nor Wu nor myself posits a cognate relationship between IE and Sinitic, a position that some earlier scholars such as Edwin Pulleyblank took.  Rather, what must have occurred is extensive borrowing that started no later than the third millennium BC, when cultural exchange was occurring across the Eurasian steppe.

It must also be noted that, although great strides have been made in the techniques and standards of reconstruction, we should not take the various proposals too literally as reflecting what Old Sinitic actually sounded like at any given period in the ancient past.  All the more, we should not expect that recurring sound correspondences between IE and Sinitic can be identified because, in my view, Sinitic and IE are unrelated.  Indeed, that is not what is at issue, since I, at least, am not attempting to prove a genetic relationship between the two families.  It would be better to think of Old Sinitic reconstructions as formulaic representations of phonological properties within an integral system that evolved through time but that theoretically remained consistent and was supposedly internally coherent — at least in the eyes of those who subscribe to the concept of a single Sinitic family that has lasted for more than 3,200 years and is adequately recorded by the Chinese writing system (i.e., the Chinese characters).

Some reconstructions of OS involve elements, such as "laryngeals", that are clearly abstractions.

For OS there is the added problem that character-forms and character-readings are the vast bulk of the evidence adduced to frame the problem. So what we're really getting is a formulaic representation of the writing system, meaning mostly the writing system as standardized in retrospect beginning in the Han.  Moreover, some skeptics would hold that the division between Old Sinitic (OS) and Middle Sinitic (MS) constitutes a break in the system, so that any projections backward in time from MS are perforce untrustworthy.

[MS — roughly 3rd-13th cc. AD, before that is OS, after that is Modern Sinitic]

Wu obviates the need for reliance on OS reconstructions by comparing words in IE languages, especially Germanic, with Taiwanese (Hoklo / Holó), an extant Sinitic topolect that preserves numerous old features.  Wu's paper constitutes a vast cornucopia of IE-Holó comparisons.  I myself do not necessarily agree with every single one of them, but if even one half or one quarter of them can be sustained, then Wu will have made a monumental contribution to early East-West linguistic exchanges.  What is even more stunning is that Wu backs up his claims based on language with evidence from culture, ethnography, archeology, genetics, and other fields.  Equally exciting is that his methods for the analysis of data are drawn from the hard sciences, in particular molecular biology.  Wu is well versed in traditional Chinese philology as well as in modern, Western linguistics.  He weaves all of these strands together into an impressive, compellingly patterned fabric that combines threads and colors from IE and Sinitic.

Regardless of the reliability of any or all of the existing OS reconstructions, there is plentiful evidence of cultural exchange between eastern and western Eurasia dating back to the third millennium BC and likely even before then.

Brian Spooner, a specialist on Central Asian societies and cultures, states:

I have been convinced for a long time that what we now call the Silk Road was an open highway from very early on — I would even say before the Bronze Age (see what I wrote in "Investment and Translocality", especially parts 2 and 3, starting p. 15 (point your browser here [pdf]).  I suggest that trade was an important factor in the growth and proliferation of cities east and west from Mesopotamia from as early as the 6th millennium, gradually at first, but accelerating, and leading to the development of writing (for recording transactions, to begin with) in the late 4th millennium.

I think that the Steppe was a corridor for traffic and trade from the early Bronze Age, starting already in the third millennium if not before.  See Andrew Sherratt's remarkable posthumous "The Trans-Eurasian Exchange: The Prehistory of Chinese Relations with the West," in Victor H. Mair, ed., Contact and Exchange in the Ancient World (Honolulu:  University of Hawaii Press, 2006), pp. 30-61.

———

A closing note:

Since I mentioned Ho Dah-an's review of Baxter and Sagart (2014) in this post,

Guillaume Jacques thought that Language Log readers might want to see his paper "On the status of Buyang presyllables: a response to Ho 2016" (submitted to JCL), where he raises some issues with one particular topic discussed by Ho Dah-an, the reconstruction of a presyllable in lù 鹿.

[Thanks to Tsu-Lin Mei, David Branner, Chris Button, and Maria Fasolo]