"Altaic, " and some difficult issues

Outside the East Asian Neolithic heartland, with its extensions into Southeast Asia and Oceania, we have two regions with quite different cultural and linguistic trajectories, in both cases a little difficult to interpret. The first comprises Mongolia and Manchuria. The main language family of northeast Asia is termed Altaic, which has three major subgroups - Turkic, Mongolian (including Mongol, the language of the Great Khans - rulers of Yuan dynasty China), and Tungusic (including Manchu, the language of the Qing dynasty rulers of China from 1644 to 1911). Some linguists also regard Korean, Japanese (both now single languages), and the Ainu language of Hokkaido as being affiliated with Altaic (Ruhlen 1987:127).

Altaic poses two immediate problems. One is the belief of some linguists that it belongs in the Nostratic macrofamily. But in terms of the internal structure of the family, with the deepest subgroups in Mongolia and Manchuria, a Southwest Asian homeland would seem to be impossible. Another problem is that some linguists dispute the veracity of Altaic as a true family, regarding it as several separate families and isolates linked by areal and borrowing factors.' Furthermore, Altaic dispersal cannot at present be equated with the Neolithic. But it can be related, especially in the cases of Japanese and Turkic, to more recent expansions of agricultural and pastoralist populations.

Juha Janhunen (1996) regards the Altaic languages as developing initially in Manchuria and Inner Mongolia, with clear separation into the Turkic, Mongolic, Tungusic, and Japonic subgroups by 2,500 years ago. Prior to this time, linguistic relationships are hard to reconstruct, but the ultimate roots of the whole family probably are to be found amongst the rich Neolithic cultures of Manchuria. Millet farmers with pottery and large villages, different in cultural tradition from the early farmers of the Yellow River, were well established on the fertile southern Manchurian plains by 6000 BC. Early agricultural dispersal for these pioneers, except into Korea, was probably circumscribed by decreasing rainfall in the west (Mongolia), decreasing temperature to the north (Siberia), and other farmers to the south (the early SinoTibetans). During the first millennium BC, however, the Turkic languages

began to spread westward with horse riding and pastoralism from Mongolia toward central Asia, replacing Indo-Iranian languages on the Asian steppes and ultimately arriving in Turkey with the Seljuk invasions of the 11th century AD (Parpola 1999; Nichols 2000:643).

For Japanese, both Janhunen and Hudson (1999, 2003) favor linguistic origins in Early Bronze Age Korea, the language being taken by Yayoi rice farmers across to northern Kyushu during the later part of the first millennium BC. The Yayoi immigrants mixed with the Final Jomon, partly hunter-gatherer inhabitants of the Japanese islands, to form the roots of the Japanese people and language of today. Modern Japanese is not so transparently related to modem Korean that such a history is clear and obvious - Hudson suggests with linguistic backing that Japanese descends from the former Koguryo language of Korea, eclipsed in historical times by the Silla language that forms the basis of modern Korean. Seen from this perspective, however, the spread of the Japanese language with Yayoi rice farmers into Japan about 2,500 years ago can be regarded as an instance of agriculturalist movement into a former huntergatherer territory, albeit not of course a Neolithic movement (Yayoi had bronze and iron). In this regard, the Yayoi dispersal to Japan equates best with the iron-using dispersal of the Bantu speakers in Africa.

The Trans New Guinea Phylum

New Guinea is often reputed to contain some of the highest linguistic diversity in the world, and this may be true in terms of the overall time depth of internal development, without major language replacement from external sources. Apart from coastal pockets of Austronesian speakers whose ancestors arrived after 3,000 years ago, the New Guinea languages belong in several Papuan "phyla," to use the lexicostatistical term applied to them by linguists in the 1970s. In that decade, linguists realized that many of the Highlands languages were remotely related, especially in terms of pronoun sets, and grouped them into a Trans New Guinea Phylum (TNGP).

In his culture-historical surveys, linguist Stephen Wurm (1982, 1983) reconstructed a hypothetical spread of the TNGP languages, firstly from west to east through Highland New Guinea more than 6,000 years ago, then back in an east to west direction from the vicinity of the Markham Valley, this later movement occurring for the most part within the past 3,500 years. Wurm chose this second date owing to the presence of numerous Austronesian loans, especially terms for pigs and dogs, in eastern TNGP languages. Eventually, TNGP languages came to occupy most of the New Guinea mainland, with the marked exception of the Sepik (north center) and Bird's Head (western tip) regions. Five hundred of the 740 Papuan languages recognized by Wurm were stated to belong to TNGP, which also extends to parts of interior Timor, and to the small islands of Alor and Pantar in eastern Nusa Tenggara.

After the early 1980s, the TNGP concept languished almost forgotten for many years. William Foley (1986) did not recognize its existence in his major survey of Papuan languages, noting in general that they had undergone too much borrowing for a family tree model to be applied successfully. Recently, however, linguists Andrew Pawley (in press) and Malcolm Ross have noted that the TNGP is well defined on pronoun sets, but it is very hard to subgroup internally, with about 50 small groups each having only short time depths, suggesting much recent population movement. The phylum seems to be of New Guinea Highlands origin, perhaps eastern rather than western, and it is likely to be deeper in time depth than Austronesian. Pawley also raises, but does not

elaborate, the possibility that the early spread of the TNGP could have been connected with an early spread of agriculture in the Highlands, a spread that commenced archaeologically by at least 6,000 years ago (pages 142-5). It is surely not coincidental that Highland New Guinea witnessed both a very early internal development of agriculture, plus maintenance of a set of indigenous language phyla that successfully resisted encroachment by Austronesian languages. One cannot state the same for the major islands of Indonesia, where Austronesian languages are universal. For TNGP, early Holocene dispersal with swamp and swidden farming techniques seems an option well worthy of consideration.