Toponymic evidence on language locations
Clear evidence for the presence of a Japonic language or languages on the Korean peninsula is provided by the so-called Koguryŏ placenames recorded in the gazetteer chapters 35 and 37 of the twelfth century Korean history Samguk sagi (三國史記 Record of the Three Kingdoms). The crucial data have been known since Shinmura (1916). It consists of entries where a Silla toponym is paired with the original Koguryŏ name for a locality that came under Silla control after the Koguryŏ defeat in 668. Some of the Koguryŏ toponyms renamed by Silla are phonogrammatic, or have an alternate name that is phonogrammatic. A subset of the phonogrammatically transcribed names appears to be related to the meaning of the later Koguryŏ or Silla names.Footnote 8 For example,
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1.
(1a) gives the Silla toponym, obviously shortened from the Koguryŏ name. (1b) gives the Koguryŏ name cited in (1a), plus an alternate phonogrammatic name. The phonogrammatic name is a good fit with “seven layer,” if the former is read as something resembling nan’jɨn (cf. proto-Japonic nana “seven”) and pjet (cf. pJ pe “layer,” Late Middle Korean pʌr id.)Footnote 9
There are two broad interpretations of the Koguryŏ phonogrammatic material. One takes them to represent the Koguryŏ language. This interpretation is adopted in earlier Japanese scholarship, by the Korean scholar Lee Ki-moon (see Lee and Ramsey 2011) and by Christopher Beckwith (see Beckwith 2007). It has been influential among anthropologists, e.g., Hudson (1999). The second interpretation, associated with the Japanese scholar Kōno Rokurō and the Korean linguist Kim Bang-han (Kim 1983), claims that the Koguryŏ phonogrammatic material transcribes the toponyms of linguistically distinct, non-Koguryŏ peoples.
Scholars adopting the first view have arrived at diametrically opposed conclusions about the nature of the Koguryŏ language. Thus, Lee and Ramsey (2011) emphasize the lexical material in the Koguryŏ language relatable to Korean,Footnote 10 while Beckwith (2007) considers Koguryŏ to be a continental relative of Japanese. In contrast, the second view explains why the Koguryŏ phonogrammatic material transcribes words relatable to Japonic and words related to Koreanic. Koguryŏ used phonograms to transcribe indigenous names from languages other than their own. They also devised standard Chinese binomic names for some localities that came under their control; for such localities, the two names coexisted.
From the standpoint of this paper, the important takeaway lesson from the Koguryŏ toponymic data is that a language cognate to Japonic was spoken on the Korean peninsula. This is a point of consensus for all major scholars who have worked on this material. The range of the Koguryŏ toponymns is confined to the region of historical Koguryŏ control, so they provide no information about the southern tip of the peninsula, but the northern range of phonogrammatic toponyms with widely accepted Japonic interpretations extends as far as modern North Hwanghae province, south of the later Koguryŏ capital at P’yŏngyang.
Chronological depth of language families
Both Japonic and Koreanic are relatively shallow language families. Comparative phonological evidence shows proto-Japonic to be somewhat older that the oldest extensive textual attestations of Western Old Japanese in the eighth century. Proto-Ryūkyūan maintains the distinction between proto-Japonic *e and *i and *o and *u in wider range of environments than does Western Old Japanese, indicating that the ancestor of pR diverged from a parent older than WOJ (Hattori 1977–1979). Phonological information like this provides a ceiling but not a floor for the date of the protofamily; however, a radically earlier date would lead us to expect a greater degree of phonological divergence. Hattori’s (1953) glottochronological study estimates a date of 500 CE for the divergence of the ancestors of Early Middle Japanese and Shuri Ryūkyūan. Hattori arrives at this date by adjusting the logarithmic decay function proposed by Swadesh to fit the facts of several known cases of divergence.
A standard criticism of glottochronology is that it assumes a constant rate of vocabulary replacement across languages. In a recent paper, Lee and Hasegawa (2011) attempt to overcome this and other defects of glottochronological approaches using a Bayesian phylogenetic analysis based on lexical data from 59 Japonic varieties. This model assumes a single rate of vocabulary substitution across varieties, but the rate is calibrated on the basis of known historical dates (in this case, those for Western Old Japanese and Early Middle Japanese). The phylogeny selected by Hasegawa and Lee is problematic in its shallower branches, which represent all non-Ryūkyūan branches as descended from EMJ, but it is not clear that this affects their overall results. Lee and Hasegawa estimate a date of 2182 BP for the ancestor of proto-Japonic. This result is important because it disconfirms the possibility of Kofun period (third to sixth century CE) date for pJ, something not completely disallowed by Hattori’s results. However, a Kofun period date for pJ would also be inconsistent with the toponymic evidence for Japonic on the Korean peninsula, unless the toponyms somehow resulted from a later historical movement of Japonic speakers to the continent.
Phonological evidence indicates that proto-Koreanic is even shallower than proto-Japanese. The evidence is similar: data from the Cheju variety show a broader distribution of the back central unrounded vowel/ʌ/than is found in fifteenth century Late Middle Korean texts. Once again, this gives us a ceiling for divergence somewhat earlier than the fifteenth century; once again, if the protolanguage was radically older, we might expect greater phonological divergence.
Neither the phonological evidence nor the statistical evidence (in the case of Japanese) is consistent with a date of protolanguage divergence older than the dates for the beginning of wet rice agriculture, as pointed out by Hudson (1999) and Lee and Hasegawa (2011). This fact alone does not rule out the possibility that proto-Japanese descends from a pre-Yayoi Jōmon language, or proto-Korean from a pre-Mumun Chulmun language. In either case, it is a prima facie possibility that such a language, indigenous to the region prior to the arrival of wet rice agriculture, expanded and replaced previously existing indigenous languages as a result of the demographic expansion associated with the new agricultural technology. In the case of Japonic, however, once again, such a scenario would have a difficult time explaining the toponymic evidence for Japonic on the Korean peninsula.
The scenarios whereby Japonic arrived in the archipelago and dispersed as a result of the Yayoi expansion, and Koreanic arrived in the peninsula and dispersed as a result of the advent of the Korean bronze curved dagger culture, are consistent with the farming/language dispersal model (Bellwood and Renfrew 2002). The dates of these two events, 950 BCE and 300 BCE, respectively, are also consistent with the gap between the chronological ceilings for dispersal of the two families, before 700 CE for Japonic and before 1,450 CE for Koreanic. In both instances, we know that the actual date of dispersal must be earlier, but we do not know how much. Even Lee and Hasegawa’s date, first century BCE, leaves a 900-year lag between the archaeological event and the linguistic evidence for dispersal.
The remarkable non-diversity of Japonic and Koreanic can be explained by two factors. The first is a founder’s effect, the phenomenon by which genetic diversity is reduced when a small population settles a new area. The claim that a serial founder’s effect is discernible in linguistic variation has been made by Atkinson (2011), among others. In the case of Japonic, we might expect founder’s effects to have occurred as a result of the movement of relatively small populations from the Korean peninsula to Kyūshū, and again from Kyūshū to the rest of the archipelago. Crudely put, the effect can be conceptualized as a local reduction in linguistic diversity compared to the home population. The same effect would be anticipated in the establishment of Koreanic in the south central peninsula, and again as it expanded throughout the peninsula.
The second factor is archaeohistorical. Both the Yayoi expansion in Japan and the spread of the Korean bronze curved dagger culture were subject to bottleneck effects, to borrow another term from evolutionary science. Kobayashi (2007) accounts for the relatively slow spread of Yayoi culture to the east in terms of the “walls” (壁 kabe) put up by the progressively more robust Jōmon cultures to the east in the archipelago. In the case of Korea, the Chinese commanderies in the north of the peninsula imposed a bottleneck until their demise in the early fourth century CE. Release of each bottleneck results in a new dispersal and founders effect. These effects leave phonological traces; thus, the categories of lexical accent are less complex in eastern Japonic varieties, while Koreanic varieties in regions to the north and east, as well as Cheju, lack lexical pitch accent altogether.
Note that the founders effect scenario presupposes demic diffusion. Thus, the relative nondiversity of Koreanic and Japonic provides further support for the view that the speakers of the protolanguages arrived from elsewhere.
Rice and related agricultural vocabularies
Vovin (1998) discusses possible external cognates for the ten Japanese terms related to rice agriculture in (2). The proto-Japonic reconstructions I cite are slightly different from Vovin’s.
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2.
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(a)
*jinaC 2.4 “riceplant”Footnote 11
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(b)
*mə/omi 2.1 unhulled rice
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(c)
*jənaC 2.1 “hulled rice”
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(d)
*kəmə/aC 2.3 “(hulled) rice”
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(e)
*ipi 2.3 “cooked rice”
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(f)
*po 1.3a “ear of grain”
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(g)
*ta 1.3a “ricefield”
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(h)
*nuka ?2.3 “rice bran”
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(i)
*ko “flour, powder”
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(j)
*nəri “starch, rice glue”
Vovin suggests cognates for four of these, (2e), (2g), (2i), and (2j) from Koreanic, with cognates for (2e) in Tungusic and Turkic, for (2g) in Mongolic and Turkic, and for (2i) in Tungusic as well. He finds no external etymologies for (2b), (2c), and (2h). Vovin specifically rejects Austronesian cognates proposed in earlier research, but he suggests Austroasiatic cognates for (2a), (2d), and (2f). Sagart (this issue) has proposed an alternative Sino-Tibetan-Austronesian etymology for (2d).
As this discussion suggests, it is not a straightforward matter to identify cognates in this lexical domain in Northeast Asia, and it is not straightforward to distinguish inherited cognates from loans. In this section, I will confine myself to some general observations about rice-related vocabularies in Korean and Japanese and possible relations between them as they relate to the Shandong–Liaodong dispersal hypothesis.
As Vovin observes, some of the items in (2) are the products of internal semantic specialization, such as (2b) *mə/omi “unhulled rice” < *mə/om- “pound” + *-i nominalizer, and (2e) *ipi “cooked rice,” which Vovin derives in a similar way from a verb *ip- “eat.” These derivations raise the possibility that the ancestor language lacked specialized terms for “unhulled rice” and “cooked rice.” Similarly, (2f) and (2i) are not specialized rice-related terms. The lack of specialized vocabulary specifically dedicated to rice is more visible in Korean, where the terms in the semantic role of (2c-d) psʌr H < *pʌsʌr and (2e) pap L both designate hulled and cooked grains, respectively, of any type. The Korean (and Altaic) cognates that Vovin suggests for (2e), (2g), (2i), and (2j) are all unspecialized: they mean “eat,” “field, plain,” “flour, powder,” and “malt.” Corresponding to (2), the only semantic category with a Korean term specialized for rice is (2a) Late Middle Korean pjə H “riceplant.”
These facts are consistent with the Shandong/Liaodong dispersion hypothesis outlined in “The Shandong/Liaodong dispersion hypothesis” section. If the language families commonly grouped together as Altaic are related to Japonic, they presumably dispersed from Shandong prior to Japonic since their historical ranges are more remote. Even in the case of Koreanic, if Ahn’s hypothesis that the Korean-style bronze dagger culture entered the peninsula from central Liaoning is correct, Koreanic may represent an earlier, pre-rice cultivation dispersion from Shandong. Any rice cultivators left behind in the greater Shandong region after Miyamoto’s third dispersion were absorbed by the expansion of Sinitic, so no trace of their languages remain there. Cognate vocabulary between the surviving languages dispersed from Shandong precedes rice cultivation.
This interpretation is supported by the semantics of cognate agricultural vocabulary in Korean and Japanese, as illustrated in (3).
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(3)
(3a–c) are excellent semantic and phonological fits, but they are often rejected as loans (e.g., Vovin 2010) on the assumption that agricultural vocabulary is too recent to be inherited. But none of these terms are dedicated to rice agriculture. Given the antiquity of the first Shandong/Liaodong dispersion (5500 BP), these terms may represent a shared inheritance as old as five millennia. (3d) is a rice-related term in Koreanic, but if the Japonic item is cognate, the original meaning was not specialized for rice agriculture. (3e) also represents a semantic shift, and an item unrelated to rice. The Japanese term must be quite old since it provides an etymology for Chinese bíqí 荸薺 < pidzej “Chinese water chestnut” (Eleocharis dulcis), which is otherwise unetymologized.
Summing up the results of this section, Japonic gives some evidence for agricultural vocabulary cognate with other languages in Northeaast Asia, but none of this vocabulary is dedicated to rice. Koreanic shows relatively little vocabulary dedicated to rice at all. These facts are consistent with a dispersal of some languages, including Koreanic, from Shandong prior to the advent of wet field rice cultivation in that area. The cognate agricultural vocabulary shared by Koreanic and Japonic precedes wet rice agriculture.