Questions about East Asia

[shijing]

There are a number of questions I would like to ask about groups of people all over the world, and I thought it might be good to break things down regionally and do it one by one in order to make it more manageable. I know I still have other population genetics questions in the queue, so please feel free put this on the back burner until older questions are resolved. Although my questions are historical in nature, I hope that some of them might interlock with the research going on at the chateau trying to piece together what parts of history were consciously manipulated, and what happened "just because it happened". For now I am going to focus on East Asia:

(1) Is the linguistic phylum "Austric" a valid genetic subgrouping, and does it include all of the following: Austroasiatic, Austronesian, Kra-Dai, and Hmong-Mien? To what family is Hmong-Mien most closely related? Is it correct to correlate this general Southeast Asian population with Lemuria, since it was noted previously that "Orientals come from a region known in your legends as “Lemuria”"?

(2) Do the Nostratic-speaking Asian populations* represent an original Austric (Lemurian) population which underwent language shift to Nostratic languages? If so, did this occur once for a single population which then broke apart, or multiple times for individual groups? Did this happen in the pre-diluvian or post-diluvian era? Did the adoption of Northeast Asian shamanism occur at the same time and in the same context as this language shift?

(3) To what other language or language families are the isolates Ainu and Nivkh (Gilyak) most closely related?

(4) Do the original speakers of Sino-Tibetan represent the most direct line of descent from Atlantis within East Asia, and is Sino-Tibetan most directly related to the Yeniseian and Na-Dene language families? If not, to what is it most closely related?

*Uralic, Altaic (including Turkic, Mongolic, Tungusic, Korean and Japanese), Chukchi-Kamchatkan and Eskimo-Aleut

 

[cholas]

Hi shijing. I'm pretty unfamiliar with linguistics, especially in East Asia, but came across some very interesting information when looking into the Scythian groups. I'm pretty sure it has been hypothesized(at least) That the Scythians were the carriers of the shamanic traditions from Asia into the southern areas. Possibly Europe, Middle East/Africa.

Here is a link. Said groups are called Bactrians and Saka Scythians and were eventually located in present-day Afganistan.

Not sure of their language(Bactrian?) but Sanskrit is theorized as having spread from this area so there might very well be an ancient connection to a pre-flood civilization at some point.

The shamanic connection seems valid as well. It's been awhile since I read these pages, so I could be off here a bit, but will have another look-over.

_http://www.freewebs.com/lukferi/

edit: having once thought I was pretty nifty at geography I now realize that I'm talking central Asia talk, not East. Sorry, but maybe this helps. :/

 

[shijing]

having once thought I was pretty nifty at geography I now realize that I'm talking central Asia talk, not East. Sorry, but maybe this helps. :/

Thanks cholas, and I appreciate the link and the information. Aside from knowing that both groups are Indo-Iranian, I don't know much about them (particularly regarding shamanism), but I would like to learn more -- down the road, I would like to ask some questions about other geographic areas, including Central, South, and West Asia, and these groups seem to be distributed at the crossroads of those particular regions. Whatever eventually happens with the questions above about East Asia will probably frame how I proceed (or not) elsewhere.

 

[Mal7]

I wonder if there was a Sino-Tibetan language.

"The field of ST linguistics is only about 50 years old, and has been a flourishing object of inquiry for only the past 25. Scholars have been trying since the mid-19th century to situate Chinese in a wider genetic context. As the relationships between Chinese and Tibetan on the one hand, and Tibetan and Burmese on the other became obvious, vague notions of an "Indo-Chinese" family (Hodgson 1853, Conrady 1896) began to crystallize. The term Sino-Tibetan seems to have been used first by R. Shafer (1939-41, 1966/67), who conceived of it as a tripartite linguistic stock comprising Chinese, Tibeto-Burman (TB), and Tai (= "Daic")."
- _http://stedt.berkeley.edu/about-st#STlx

It would be to the Chinese Communist Party (CCP)'s advantage to promote scholarship into the validity of the Sino-Tibetan language family, as this would fit well with the idea of Tibetans having always been one of China's ethnic minority groups since time immemorial, and with Tibet always having been part of China.

The Hungarian scholar Alexander Csoma de Koros was interested in tracing the origins of the Hungarian language, which was what led him to Tibet.

Sir William Jones discovered the common origins of the Indo-European languages, including Sanskrit. Perhaps Tibetan is closer to the Indo-European languages than to the Sinitic languages.

"Tibeto-Burman is generally regarded as a branch of the Sino-Tibetan language family. Pulleyblank maintains that the relationship is clear, although he admits some uncertainty about the strenth of the connections:

"By common consent, the language-family to which Chinese is most likely to be genetically related is Tibeto-Burman. Indeed, such a connection is regarded as well established by most scholars, even if there is still much disagreement about details. The primary evidence for such a genetic relation is provided by shared items of basic vocabulary. One can readily list a few dozen obvious cognates between Chinese, Burmese, and Tibetan . . . Moreover, the phonetic correspondences are in many cases not so simple and transparent as to lead to a suspicion of borrowin . . . [but] the number of generally agreed upon cognates between Chinese and the other languages of the family remains fairly modest."
- Pulleyblank, "Chinese and their Neighbours in Prehistoric and Early Historical Times" in The Origins of Chinese Civilization, ed. David N. Kneightly. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983.

However, some Tibetologists are skeptical of any but the most remote connections between Chinese and Tibetan. Beckwith describes attempts to force Tibetan into a 'Sino-Tibetan family' of languages as predominantly due to 'contemporary political-racial considerations':

"The Tibetan verbal system is strongly reminiscent of Germanic tongues, but the language exhibits systematically entrenched proto-Indo-Iranian vocabulary. Together, these features indicate a relationship with the divergent 'Indo-European' group, but the agglutinative grammatical structure, among other features (especially of modern spoken Tibetan), indicates a relationship with languages of the convergent 'Altaic' group. Vocabulary and some other features do indicate a probable relationship of some sort with Burmese. Any divergent relationship with Chinese is unlikely - although still conceivable for the remotest prehistoric past."
- Christopher Beckwith, The Tibetan Empire in Central Asia: A History of the Struggle for Great Power among Tibetans, Turks, Arabs, and Chinese during the Early Middle Ages. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987. p. 5."

- Warren W. Smith. Tibetan Nation: A History of Tibetan Nationalism and Sino-Tibetan Relations.Oxford: Westview Press, 1996. pp. 6-7.

The Tibetan language was an oral language only, with no script, until the 7th century A.D., when one of the Tibetan king's ministers was sent to India to obtain a script for it. The script he brought backm and which was adopted for a written use of the language, was based on the Indic Devanagari script.

 

[shijing]

I think that Beckwith makes a good argument that Tibeto-Burman and Sinitic (Chinese) are not actually related, and that lexical similarities between the two are the result of contact and not common inheritance. I don't presently see any reason to connect Tibeto-Burman to Indo-European, but Beckwith provides some evidence which shows evidence of very early contact between the two, as well as between Indo-European and Sinitic. The Indo-European group in question may be what was referred to as the 'Scythians' in this session:

Q: (L) [...] Okay, going in another direction: what other names were the Danaans known by?
A: Scythians.

Q: (L) How did the Scythians get to Egypt?
A: Via Akkad.

Q: (L) Was Sargon a Scythian?
A: Yes.

Q: (L) Were the Hittites a genetically altered group of Scythians?
A: Close.

Q: (L) Where do the Scythians come from?
A: China.

Q: (L) How did they get to China?
A: From the Caucasus.

Q: (L) So, they started off from the Caucasus, went to China, and were later driven back West by the Chinese? Is that it?
A: Yes.

Q: (L) Northern China or Southern China?
A: North.