#austro-asiatic

BANGKOK — New DNA tests show that prehistoric Thais in the northeast came from southern China, while Mon and Khmer people inhabited that region prior to their arrival.

Confirming what had been understood for the first time through DNA testing, Thammasat University Professor Samerchai Poonsuwan presented the test results Monday. The professor of sociology and anthropology and his team analyzed prehistoric bones found in northeastern Thailand and compared them to Thai-speaking people in southern China.

Results showed that the ancient Thais shared DNA with people in southern China, contradicting early history texts that claimed they had traveled south from the Altai mountain range in Central Asia around the borders of Russia, China, Mongolia and Kazakhstan.

While the theory has long been discredited, the DNA results offered the first scientific proof of the theory of Chinese provenance.

“We took skeletons of prehistoric people in the northeast that are about 2,000 to 3,000 years old and extracted their DNA for the first time,” he said. “Twenty-six samples of 100 were taken from the Moon River basin area. The DNA links show they likely came from the south of China not long ago.”

He said they arrived to the area after it had been populated by other groups.

Why? Svantesson’s answer is that there is a cross-linguistic negative correlation between the pitch of a vowel and its length, observed for example in Chinese. In Chinese the length distinctions associated with pitch distinctions are subtle, and there are other factors that affect vowel length, so that low-pitch vowels in certain circumstances can be shorter than high-pitch vowels in different circumstances; it’s therefore pretty clear that pitch is the underlying distinctive feature. But it’s not hard to imagine the length distinctions becoming more exaggerated and categorical over time, which could eventually result in the distinction being reanalysed as one of length rather than tone. What seems to have happened in Hu is the same process, but in reverse, so that length has developed into tone.

(The word khíŋ kòŋ is mentioned because its khíŋ element might be a cognate of Lamet kíŋ ‘head’, in which case it is an example of the paθán ~ phán kind of correspondance involving a high vowel. The kòŋ element appears to have no independent meaning, but the word khíŋ on its own is used to mean ‘tooth’, which makes me wonder how khíŋ kòŋ ends up meaning ‘knee’. Maybe it means something like ‘leg’s tooth’?)

(Another fun fact: one of the relatives of Hu appears to have dropped initial h, and as a result it has the very simple name of U.)

Reference

The writer, when not busy with actual (Sino-Tibetan [ST], Austro-Tai [AT]) rather than fantasied language stocks, has from time to time given some consideration to the basic question here…

Shorto proposed a number of new AN/MK cognate sets, falling for the most part in what the writer termed the ketketbongbong class, involving lexical areas well outside 'core' vocabulary, with a striking attenuation or gap in this key aspect. As summed up by Benedict (1976b: 106):

…the point to be stressed is that a score of ketketbongbong do not one language stock make, since correspondances of this kind have significant value for comparative purposes only when found in association with a corpus of core vocabulary items.

The final clause was italicised lest the point be overlooked, as apparently has occured in the more recent paper by Diffloth (1985).

Quite novel, however, is [Diffloth's] attack upon what he labels 'Swadesh's "basic" notins', which is no less than a frontal assault upon the whole idea of utilising basic or 'core' vocabulary in comparative work. Granted a certain feeling of frustration on his part in being unable to uncover 'core' AN/MK cognate sets, one can hardly folow him in this rash line of thinking. After pointing out that given items of 'core' type can on occasion be replaced through factors such as 'taboo or euphemistic passe-passe', he makes the following summary statement:

Over the millennia, the recurrence of factors like the above [cit. supra] could easily wipe out 100 such 'basic words', or even 200 [i.e. both the standard Swadesh-type word lists], while protecting for us many hidden gems, such as 'to whittle bamboo strips' or 'scruff', not to mention 'smegma' and the like. Benedict may detest it, but the Austric hypothesis is still very much alive. (Diffloth 1985)