Finding on Dialects Casts New Light on the Origins of the Japanese People

The New York Times ^ | 04 May 2011 | NICHOLAS WADE

[Palter]

Researchers studying the various dialects of Japanese have concluded that all are descended from a founding language taken to the Japanese islands about 2,200 years ago. The finding sheds new light on the origin of the Japanese people, suggesting that their language is descended from that of the rice-growing farmers who arrived in Japan from the Korean Peninsula, and not from the hunter-gatherers who first inhabited the islands some 30,000 years ago.

The result provides support for a wider picture, controversial among linguists, that the distribution of many language families today reflects the spread of agriculture in the distant past when farming populations, carrying their languages with them, grew in numbers and expanded at the expense of hunter-gatherers. Under this theory, the Indo-European family of languages, which includes English, was spread by the first farmers who expanded into Europe from the Middle East some 8,000 years ago, largely replacing the existing population of hunter-gatherers.

In the case of Japan, archaeologists have found evidence for two waves of migrants, a hunter-gatherer people who created the Jomon culture and wet rice farmers who left remains known as the Yayoi culture.

The Jomon people arrived in Japan before the end of the last ice age, via land bridges that joined Japan to Asia’s mainland. They fended off invaders until about 2,400 years ago when the wet rice agriculture developed in southern China was adapted to Korea’s colder climate.

Several languages seem to have been spoken on the Korean Peninsula at this time, and that of the Yayoi people is unknown.

[Palter]

More Detail.

Dating the origin of Japanese languages with Bayesian phylogenetics

One more success story in the application of Bayesian phylogenetics to language studies. As Nicholas Wade reports:

Researchers studying the various dialects of Japanese have concluded that all are descended from a founding language taken to the Japanese islands about 2,200 years ago. The finding sheds new light on the origin of the Japanese people, suggesting that their language is descended from that of the rice-growing farmers who arrived in Japan from the Korean Peninsula, and not from the hunter-gatherers who first inhabited the islands some 30,000 years ago.

I think it's absolutely fascinating how closely the authors' date for Japonic languages corresponds to the Yayoi period. The Quentin & Atkinson way of doing language age estimation was initially met with derision by the linguistic establishment: part of it was that they did not understand it, part of it that it was introduced with a very controversial topic (Indo-European), and part of it that it triggered a deep-seated skepticism against the application of biologically-inspired methods to the study of culture.

Nonetheless, the method keeps on bringing reasonable results every time it has been applied, and it has now been adopted by many researchers of a quantitative inclination.

From the paper:

Fortunately, recent progresses in phylogenetic methods and their application in studying languages were found to provide adequate solutions for these problems [6]. Accumulating empirical evidence suggests that languages have, astonishingly, gene-like properties in numerous aspects and they also evolve by a process of descent with modification (for review, see [7]). This implies that once the shared innovations among languages are revealed by converting linguistic signals (i.e. presence or absence of homologous words) into discrete binary characters, various stochastic phylogenetic techniques for modelling biological evolution can be used to adequately reconstruct the history of language evolution. During the last decade, therefore, these techniques were quickly adopted to critically examine, and subsequently corroborate, instances of farming/language co-dispersal for Bantu [8], Indo-European [9] and Austronesian speakers [10].

What I find fascinating is the widely different manifestations of the farming/language dispersal phenomenon: the earliest attested one is the expansion of Indo-European languages from Asia Minor ~9,000 years ago, and the latest one the expansion of Japonic languages from mainland Asia ~2,400 years ago. Bantu, Austronesian, Semitic languages fill the void between these two dates. The law-like regularity with which farmers fill lands, transform the landscape, grow in numbers, and start diverging linguistically as they do so is a rare instance of mathematical regularity manifesting itself in the recent history of our species.

But, lest we get too much carried away by admiration for the farming phenomenon, let's tip our sugegasa to the Jomon hunter-gatherers of Japan, who were the partial ancestors of the modern Japanese people, and whose genetic legacy is best preserved among the Ainu (left). Again, from the paper:

If our results are correct, one surprising aspect of prehistoric Japan becomes apparent; the hunter–gatherer population, which settled in Japan around 12 000–30 000 YBP, managed to fend off the farmers for thousands of years until being abolished suddenly and dramatically with the arrival of proto-Japonic-speaking farmers around 2400 YBP. To place this in perspective, it should be noted that the hunter–gatherer societies and their languages in Europe began to be abolished by those of the farmers as early as 8500 YBP [9]. Even some of Japan's closest neighbours such as China had started agriculture since 9000 YBP [1], which progressively brought about fully fledged kingdoms equipped with metal tools fighting each other for political unification. During all this transition outside, the hunter–gatherers of Japan continued to prosper by using simple stone tools and without adopting full-scale agriculture, despite knowledge of cultivation of many crops [12]. There are probably two reasons that explain their unusually long survival. First, the population size of the hunter–gatherers may have been too large to be invaded by nearby farmers. The hunter–gatherer of Japan was perhaps one of the most affluent hunter–gatherers known to humankind, endowed with a large range of plants, animals and sea foods [46]. This vast availability of food resources is probably related to the fact that the world's oldest known pottery was made by the hunter–gatherers of Japan [47]. The development of pottery meant that unlike other hunter–gatherers around the world, they had a means to cook and store the foods that were available abundantly in their environment, and such could have triggered a population explosion to the extent that it prevented the farmers asserting any force over the hunter–gatherers for a long time. The second reason behind their long survival could be that it probably took a few thousand years for the farmers to modify rice, one of their main food sources, to grow in cold climate [48]. The archaeological evidence suggest it was not until around 3500 YBP that rice farming of warm southern China spread to the much colder Korean Peninsular [49], which is thought to be the most recent homeland of proto-Japonic-speaking farmers. A combination of these two factors might have contributed to the unusually long occupation of the hunter–gatherers in Japan.

Proceedings of the Royal Society B doi: 10.1098/rspb.2011.0518

Bayesian phylogenetic analysis supports an agricultural origin of Japonic languages

Sean Lee and Toshikazu Hasegawa

Languages, like genes, evolve by a process of descent with modification. This striking similarity between biological and linguistic evolution allows us to apply phylogenetic methods to explore how languages, as well as the people who speak them, are related to one another through evolutionary history. Language phylogenies constructed with lexical data have so far revealed population expansions of Austronesian, Indo-European and Bantu speakers. However, how robustly a phylogenetic approach can chart the history of language evolution and what language phylogenies reveal about human prehistory must be investigated more thoroughly on a global scale. Here we report a phylogeny of 59 Japonic languages and dialects. We used this phylogeny to estimate time depth of its root and compared it with the time suggested by an agricultural expansion scenario for Japanese origin. In agreement with the scenario, our results indicate that Japonic languages descended from a common ancestor approximately 2182 years ago. Together with archaeological and biological evidence, our results suggest that the first farmers of Japan had a profound impact on the origins of both people and languages. On a broader level, our results are consistent with a theory that agricultural expansion is the principal factor for shaping global linguistic diversity.

Link

[Palter]

Jomon, Ainu, language, etc.

[gaijin]

farmers who arrived in Japan from the Korean Peninsula

Yup. This is painful 2 hear for Japanese, but in my view the chances of that are far above 90%.

Every so often they're digging up ancient stuff in Japan, and the Imperial Household Agency swoops in and tells them flat-out to STOP and just shut up.

Basically that's cuz they're turning up super old stuff that's clearly from Korea and this drives some rigth-wingers (and even some non-political types) sort of nuts.

[Inyo-Mono]

I studied linguistics in college and this is an interesting post.

[Jonty30]

I would think they’d prefer to find they are descendents of Koreans rather than Chinese.

[Ciexyz]

Very interesting, first I heard of languages evolving with gene-like properties.

[yarddog]

I worked at a Summer retreat for a total of 12 Summers. Each year we would get a group of around 40 Japanese students who would work with us for maybe a month or a little more.

I got to noticing that out of the maybe 20 girls there would be at least one but usually 2 or 3 who were extremely pretty. The pretty ones were almost always the tiny ones.

The larger girls often had sort of flat faces. They were all pleasant to be around and never refused a request.

The guys tended to have one or two really tall guys, over 6’ which is not what you think of and also one who resembled a small sumo wrestler or even a large one.

It was more apparent with the guys but sometimes one of them would look almost Western but not quite enough to fool you.

[9422WMR]

ping pong po?

[mewykwistmas]

So they are Korean. No wonder they look alike ;)

[Tainan]

Japan language ping

[Jack Hydrazine]

I bet it was the 10 tribes who traveled East from Israel after the Assyrians invaded in 722BC and took them away.

[wendy1946]

[6]. Accumulating empirical evidence suggests that languages have, astonishingly, gene-like properties in numerous aspects and they also evolve by a process of descent with modification (for review, see [7]).

In real life, evolution doesn't work any better for human languages than it does for animals or plants. Sure you could explain the difference between Chaucer's English and ours or between Ukranian and Russian via a sort of a linguistic microevolution, but thats every bit of it.

The biggest problem for the linguistic evolosers is the Indo-European/Semitic divide. There is no meaningful racial difference between IndoEuropean and Semitic peoples and you'd not figure that more than 5,000 or 6,000 years or so had passed since the two groups split up. The two language groups should be strongly related but, in real life, other than for a few borrowed words, they are not related at all.

Likewise when Europeans first came to Australia, they found hundreds of aborigine languages, no two of which apparently resembled eachother any more than English and Japanese resemble eachother.

You have total isolate languages such as Basque which should not exist if languages evolve, you have languages like Lithuanian which, other than for having a small number of things you might call IndoEuropean roots, resemble nothing around them at all. English is vastly closer to Russian than Lithuanian is and no theory of language evolution could explain that. I mean, Lithuanians have blue eyes and yellow hair and have been sitting right there between the Slavic and Germanic worlds forever so that somebody who insisted on believing in language evolution would have to assume that Lithuanian would be halfway between German and Russian; only problem is, it isn't.

Far as I know, this is the closest thing there is to a real version of the history of human languages

[Havisham]

I believe Japanese and Koreans have been found to share more genes, by far, than other east Asians. What an interesting article.

[Psalm 144]

I would be more interested in DNA analysis than linguistic. I also think DNA would reveal some Central Asian (Mongol/Turkic) connections both in Japan and in the Americas.

[blam]

The Samurai And The Ainu

[aruanan]

I mean, Lithuanians have blue eyes and yellow hair and have been sitting right there between the Slavic and Germanic worlds forever so that somebody who insisted on believing in language evolution would have to assume that Lithuanian would be halfway between German and Russian; only problem is, it isn't.

That's an unwarranted assumption itself built on unwarranted assumptions; that is, it's a poor characterization of the claim, which was not principally positing change based on interaction with surrounding species. You may as well say that gazelles have been living between lions and hyenas for a very long time "so that somebody who insisted on believing in...evolution would have to assume that [a gazelle] would be halfway between [a lion] and [a hyena]; only problem is, it isn't."

[ml/nj]

An acquaintance of my has authored a book entitled 300 Ways to Ask the Four Questions. (From the Passover Seder, Why is this night different from all other nights, etc.) The 300 ways are the different spoken languages so this book is a Rosetta Stone in spades, and one I think people interested in language relationships might find interesting. A second edition has been released that ups the number of languages to 374, but some of the additions are languages like Klingon.

ML/NJ

[SunkenCiv]

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[668 - Neighbor of the Beast]

bookmarking that!
Thank you Civ

[SunkenCiv]

My pleasure, sorry I got so behind this week. OBL’s little boo-boo was a distraction.