Historical linguistics and Austronesian population movements

1. Summary of main points

The class reading by Ritsuko Kikusawa describes several important basic concepts from comparative linguistics, illustrating how it can be used to analyze genetic relationships between various members of the Polynesian language family. Kikusawa starts by explaining how linguistic family trees are like literal family trees, in that they depict how various languages develop from a shared ancestor language. A hypothetical ancestor language, reconstructed by linguists, is called a proto-language, or parent language, its descendants are daughter-languages, and can be described as sister-languages in relation to each other.

Family trees of genetically related languages (languages belonging to the same family) reflect historical migration movements of their speakers, their splitting and differentiations, contacts with other languages that may have occurred, and other factors. As discussed in class on Tuesday, language is something that is constantly changing, with some examples and reasons for change may be communicative isolation (who one is close to, whether people are talking or not talking to each other), use of slang (often a conscious means to show one’s identity as a member of a particular group), media influence, changing technology, and also deliberate, successful efforts at change like the Hawaiian language renaissance.

While languages are constantly changing, daughter languages still retain and share a number of features from their shared parent language, enabling them to be grouped together in a family tree. They can be further organized into subgroups, based on whether they share certain features or innovations (new vocabulary for some technology that didn’t exist in the proto-language, a phonetic change, etc.) which probably occurred before the daughter languages diverged from each other. Direct relationship is not the only possible cause of shared features, however, since features might also just be borrowed from another language.

Kikusawa describes the Comparative Method used by linguistics, which involves systematically sorting cognate words and noting sound correspondences between the languages’ words. Following principles of basic common sense (one must “try to keep the assumed changes…as simple as possible” and, with knowledge of what kind of phonetic shifts are most common, to “consider which of two possible changes is more plausible” p92 ) a linguist can then attempt to reconstruct the original proto-language.

Change from a proto-language in its daughter-languages points to some kind of change that probably occurred in the speakers’ culture or environment, something also mentioned in the second class reading. Robert Blust, describing changes in Austronesian material culture and its reflection in the gain and loss of specific vocabulary terms, points out that archaeological artifacts may exaggerate certain aspects of a culture, and material artifacts may simply be absent for certain time periods. Language is an artifact itself, however, and linguistic analysis can tell as much about people as physical remains can.

2. Other comments

I was surprised by Robert Blust’s mention of the Tasaday, on the Philippines island of Mindanao, and how they were initially believed to be some primitive hunter-gatherer people who had never encountered modern technology.

My previous knowledge of them was just that they were considered a hoax, people who had been called a lost tribe but were actually paid to act for publicity. It was interesting to find out that careful linguistic analysis showed they were probably “a small group of people who…separated form a sedentary, agricultural community some generations in the past”. I looked for more information on the Tasaday, and found a website devoted to the “hoax” which also refers to a University of Hawaii linguist’s analysis of their language.

I thought that Blust’s article was interesting in its take on the limitations of archaeology (and superiority of linguistics). He mentions analyzing physical artifacts and excavations in Taiwan, but not methods like DNA analysis. While searching online for information on Austronesian population movements, I found an article that traces “genetic affinities between aboriginal Taiwanese and populations from Oceania and Southeast Asia”, and which seems to agree with his ideas about the “ancestral line of Proto-Austronesian”.

3. Works Cited

Kikusawa, Ritsuko. 2001. “Comparative Linguistics: a bridge that connects us to languages and people of the past.” Chapter 6 in: Linguistics 102 Introduction to Language Reading Packet. Department of Linguistics, University of Hawaii.

Blust, Robert. 1995. “The prehistory of the Austronesian-speaking peoples: A view from language.” Journal of World Prehistory 9:453-510.

Kivisild and Trejaut et al. “Traces of Archaic Mitochondrial Lineages Persist in Austronesian-Speaking Formosan Populations.” PLoS Biol. 3(8): e247. Published online 2005 July 5. http://www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov/articlerender.fcgi?artid=1166350. Accessed January 27, 2009.

Boese, Alex. “Stone Age Tasaday.” Hoaxepedia. http://www.museumofhoaxes.com/hoax/Hoaxipedia/Stone_Age_Tasaday/. Accessed January 27, 2009.