Etymology: Some Interesting New Research in Japan

From The New York Times
Finding on Dialects Casts New Light on the Origins of the Japanese People
By NICHOLAS WADE
Published: May 4, 2011

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. The work of two researchers at the University of Tokyo, Sean Lee and Toshikazu Hasegawa, now suggests that the origin of Japonic — the language family that includes Japanese and Ryukyuan, spoken in the Ryukyu island chain south of Japan — coincides with the arrival of the Yayoi.

The finding, if confirmed, indicates that the Yayoi people took Japonic to Japan, but leaves unresolved the question of where in Asia the Yayoi culture or Japonic language originated before arriving in the Korean Peninsula.

Mr. Lee is a graduate student studying language and the mind, not a historical linguist. He has used a statistical tree-drawing method that other biologists have applied successfully to language origins, despite some linguists’ skepticism. The method, called Bayesian phylogeny, depends on having a computer draw a large number of possible trees and sampling them to find the most probable. Each language is represented by a 200-word vocabulary composed of words known to change very slowly.

If any fork in the tree can be linked to a historical event, all the other branch points can be dated. In this case, Mr. Lee knew dates for Old Japanese, Middle Japanese, and the split between the Kyoto and Tokyo dialects that began in 1603 A.D. when the capital was moved from Kyoto to Edo, the early name for Tokyo.

Mr. Lee reasoned that Japanese would have originated with the Jomon if the root of the tree turned out to be very ancient, but with the Yayoi culture if recent. The computer’s date of 2,182 years ago for the origin of the tree fits reasonably well with the archaeological dates for the Yayoi culture, he reported Tuesday in The Proceedings of the Royal Society.

John B. Whitman, an expert on Japanese linguistics who works at the National Institute for Japanese Language and Linguistics, in Tokyo, and at Cornell University, called the new finding “solid and reasonable,” although the date of the Yayoi culture, he said, has now been pushed back to around 3,000 years after a recalibration of radiocarbon dates. That would open an 800-year gap with Mr. Lee’s date but not necessarily change his conclusion.

The question of Japanese origins has had political consequences, with the link to the Yayoi culture having been invoked to justify the annexation of Korea and Manchuria before World War II. After the war, the link with the Jomon culture was emphasized.

Quentin Atkinson, an expert on language phylogeny at the University of Auckland, in New Zealand, said that Mr. Lee’s time scale was plausible but that if Japonic had spread through an agriculturally driven population expansion, his language tree should be much bushier at its root. Mr. Lee said that such earlier versions of Japanese might have disappeared when the island was politically unified about 1,000 years ago.

Genetic studies have suggested interbreeding between the Yayoi and Jomon people, with the Jomon contribution to modern Japanese being as much as 40 percent. Apparently the Yayoi language prevailed, along with the agricultural technology.

A version of this article appeared in print on May 4, 2011, on page A16 of the New York edition with the headline: Finding on Dialects Casts New Light on the Origins of the Japanese People.

The Limits of Etymological Dictionaries

For those of you who do not find the subject absolutely fascinating (like I do), you can skip this post. Can You Trust Your (Etymological) Dictionary? The Oxford Etymologist June 10, 2009 By Anatoly Liberman Liberman discusses the difficulty often encountered in tracing origins of words, and explores two examples, the English words "boy" and "girl."

"At Sixes and Sevens"

[Moses cartoon from BAR] Mr. Don pointed out these intriguing letters in Biblical Archaeology issues for January/February, 2009 and May/June, 2009 -- I have yet to read either magazine! He found both of them in my stack of reading material piled on the kitchen counter: January/February 2009 (p. 68) Queries & Comments AT SIXES AND SEVENS I'm the mad linguist who wrote a caption to the hilarious cartoon showing Moses with the two tables numbered in roman numbers (see Strata, p. 22 of this issue for winning entries). It cracked me up. Here's Moses fresh from speaking with the Almighty in the form of the Burning Bush and jotting down the most important document for all humankind - and in stone, no less - but he's gone and put Roman numerals on his rocks, of all the silly things. of course the romans hadn't even been thought of yet, much less started writing numerals. Let me explain why I was so keen on those numbers. I had just been doing research on number words around the Mediterranean in the Bronze Age. It seems rather astonishing that the words for "six" and "seven" are so similar, not only in Semitic languages (like Hebrew, Akkadian and Assyrian) but also in Indo-European languages (like Latin, Greek, Hittie and Luwian). This is especially strange because none of the other number words are anything alike. Even etruscan, which isn't related to anything else, seems to share those two words. Just think about it: Six and seven in Hebrew are shisha and shiva; Akkadian, shishshu and sebe; Assyrian, shishshu and siba; Latin, sex and septum; Greek, hex and hepta; Sanskrit, shash and sapta. Even in Etruscan seven is semph, and six is either sa or huth (I vote for sa). Very odd, isn't it? I think this is no coincidence. I think somebody borrowed from somebody. I believe it was because all those Sea Peoples, like the Phillistines, were wandering around at the end of the Bronze Age (c. 1200 B.C.). Diana Gainer Via e-mail Ed: Does anyone out there have a better explanation? May/June 2009 (p. 10-11) Queries & Comments "AT SIXES AND SEVENS" Egyptian Sixes and Sevens In the January/February issue Diana Gainer finds that six and seven are represented by similar words in many languages (Q&C, "At Sixes and Sevens"). I also noticed this someyears ago. My primary field of interest is Egyptology. In ancient Egyptian, six is ses and seven is sefekh. There are many other words that sound similar in many ancient languages, such as words for "Mother." It's mysterious, but that's how I like it. Bonnie Long Phoenix, Arizona Hungarian Sixes and Sevens Diana Gainer comments on the similarity of the names of the numberals six and seven in several languages, including English, Latin and Greek, among many others. I may add to this list my native Hungarian in which six is written hat and seven is written he't. This is probably a coincidence though, as Hungarian is not even an Indo-European language, but rather belongs to the Finno-Ugric group that includes Finnish and Estonian besides Hungarian. I don't speak either of the last two, but perhaps a reader who does could confirm (or deny) that in those also the six-seven similarity persists. Andrew Lenard Blomington, Indiana Spanish Sixes and Sevens Diana Gainer surmises that since there was such similarity in the numbers six and seven for such diverse peoples that there must have been an interaction at some point. I fully agree. One might add seis and siete, Spanish six and seven and the Italian and Portuguese equivalents to her list. This may be but one of quiete a number of similarites between civilizations that popped up all over the globe at roughly the same time several thousand years ago. Dale Carter Fellsmere, Florida

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dondelion and I discussed this earlier this morning. I'll let him speak for himself (if and when he gets around to posting here). In the meantime, I was curious about the origins of the phrase "at sixes and sevens," so I did a little quick research and found some interesting information: From The Phrase Finder: Meaning A state of total confusion and disorder, or of disagreement between parties. Origin The derivation of this phrase is rather difficult to trace, not least because it has changed in both form and meaning over the nine centuries or so that it has been in use. The phrase was originally to set on six and seven and is thought to have derived in the 14th century from the game of dice. The meaning then was to carelessly risk one's entire fortune. The earliest citation in print is Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde, 1374: "Lat nat this wrechched wo thyn herte gnawe, But manly set the world on sexe and seuene." The dice game from which the phrase "set on six and seven" is thought to have originated is hazard (an old dice game), which itself has an interesting derivation: ...hazard first came into the language to refer to the dice game (via the Old French hasard and the Spanish azar from the Arabic az-zahr “luck, chance”, based on an Arabic or Turkish word for dice), and only later took on the meaning of danger or risk, or as a verb, to venture something, because the dice game was so risky to bet on. The modern game called craps is a simplified form of hazard. (World Wide Words) None of this, of course, answers the intriguing question as to why "six and seven" show similarities in so many languages belonging to entirely different language families!