How Many Independent Rice Vocabularies in Asia?

The process of moving from collecting plants in the wild to cultivating and gradually domesticating them has as its linguistic corollary the formation of a specific vocabulary to designate the plants and their parts, the fields in which they are cultivated, the tools and activities required to cultivate them and the food preparations in which they enter. From this point of view, independent domestications of a plant can be expected to result in wholly independent vocabularies. Conversely, when cultivation of a plant spreads from one population to another, one expects elements of the original vocabulary to spread with cultivation practices. This paper examines the vocabularies of rice in Asian languages for evidence of linguistic transfers, concluding that there are at least two independent vocabularies of rice in Asia. This suggests at least two independent starts of cultivation and domestications of Asian rice.


Japanese and Korean
The Japanese and Korean peoples cultivate temperate japonica varieties. The two languages may be genetically related (Whitman 1985;to appear), but while the inherited vocabulary that these languages share includes an agricultural component ('field', 'millet'), clear evidence for rice-related words is missing (Robbeets, p.c. July 2011). Japanese and Korean thus probably acquired rice cultivation after their separation (Unger 2008). Below we will see that the Japanese word kome 'dehusked rice' is a probable loanword from a pre-Austronesian language, suggesting that the linguistic ancestors of the Japanese acquired cultivation of (Japonica) rice from speakers of an eastern language within the macro-family I call Sino-Tibetan-Austronesian, with whom they were once in contact.

Austronesian
The Austronesian family is generally regarded as originating in a migration to Taiwan of fishingand-farming groups from the mainland, c. 3500-3000 BCE. The proto-language first diversified in Taiwan; a migration out of Taiwan c. 2000 BCE resulted in the establishment, perhaps in the Philippines, of an Austronesian language ('PMP') ancestral to all the Austronesian languages outside of Taiwan. Knowledge of rice by the proto-Austronesians is widely recognized by linguists based on two reconstructed items: proto-Austronesian *Semay 'rice as food' and *beRas 'husked rice'. The latter includes a monosyllabic root 2 *-Ras with meaning 'fruit, flesh' etc. implying that at some point, perhaps before proto-Austronesian (but conceivably still in proto-Austronesian) the meaning was 'fruit, especially dehusked rice'. The Formosan vocabulary of millet has been under-recorded by investigators: it is possible that reflexes of *beRas mean 'millet grain' in more languages than is currently assumed. 3 Large quantities of carbonized rice grains were discovered in 2002-2003 at Nan Kuan Li, a lowland site on the west coast of Taiwan dated c. 2800-2200 BCE (Tsang 2005), confirming linguistic reconstructions. The same site has also yielded carbonized grains of the millet Setaria italica, again in large quantities. A term for Setaria italica: *beCeŋ, had been reconstructed to proto-Austronesian. The Nan Kuan Li site attests to co-cultivation of rice and Setaria italica by the early Austronesians on Taiwan as early as the first half of the 3rd mill. BCE. Today western Austronesian peoples cultivate tropical japonicas and, in lowland locations, indica varieties. Both rice and millet were abandoned by the eastern (Oceanic) Austronesians as taro cultivation and 2 Austronesian roots are meaning-associated syllables that recur at the end of independently reconstructible words, without the preceding syllable(s) being recognizable morphemes. They represent pre-proto-Austronesian monosyllabic words. See Wolff (2010?). 3 In Puyuma, a language of SE Taiwan, bəras means 'husked grain of rice or millet' (field notes, september 12, 2002).
Sagart Rice and Language Symposium, Cornell University, 22-25 September, 2011 5/32 arboriculture presented attractive alternatives. Reliance on fishing was never interrupted. Japonicas dominate among the traditional landraces maintained by the Austronesians in Taiwan; indica varieties seem to have been introduced into Taiwan after 1300 CE by Chinese settlers from Fujian, and even earlier in Borneo, before the Austronesian migration to Madagascar in the 1st millennium CE (below).
Visitors to Taiwan report no indigenous irrigated rice fields (outside of Chinese wet fields) until the Japanese occupation . Yet the Formosan vocabulary of rice shows that rice cultivation by the early Austronesians was not limited to upland dry fields: a proto-Austronesian root *-na 'flood-land' occurs in words meaning 'wet field' and 'riverside', suggesting lowland rice was cultivated on seasonal flood lands along rivers. The root occurs as a bound morpheme in Tsou cxana 'wet rice field' (analyzable as cxa-< proto-Austronesian *CeNaq 'mud' plus *na 'floodland'), and as the second syllable in e.g. Paiwan pana 'river' (includes dry river bed, and low land along river) (Ferrell 1982); in Kavalan Zena 'field/wet field', etc. In addition there are indigenous words for 'rice seedling' and 'transplant rice seedlings' in the Tsouic languages (Tsuchida 1976:157), Bunun and Kavalan, although no proto-Austronesian term can be reconstructed.

Austronesian and Tai-Kadai
Based on shared innovations in the personal pronouns, numerals 5-10 and morphological innovations, Sagart (2004Sagart ( , 2005Sagart ( , 2009 argues that Tai-Kadai is a subgroup coordinate with PMP within the Austronesian family, which returned to the mainland after 2000 BCE. Since the Tai-Kadais are rice farmers, one expects that at least some of the rice vocabulary of Austronesian will be found in Tai-Kadai. Two items attest to this: proto-Austronesian *-na 'floodland' ; Proto-Kra *na A 'rice-field' (Ostapirat 2000:229). Proto-Tai na: A 'paddy field' (Pittayaporn 2009).
It is interesting that the Tai-Kadai name of the irrigated rice field is of Austronesian origin, while the name of the dry field is of Austroasiatic origin. This suggests that the Tai-Kadais moved to the mainland carrying lowland rice agriculture with them, and acquired upland rice cultivation from their new Austroasiatic neighbors. A problem is that Austronesian peoples in Formosa cultivate both highland and lowland rice. We propose the following explanation: the Austronesian expansions were led by fishermen who were looking for good fishing grounds in river estuaries, cultivating rice on the river sides by taking advantage of seasonal flooding, as a complement to fishing. These 4 The assertion is often made that the distinction between japonica and indica rices was known to the Chinese about 2000 years ago, as 粳 jing1 (japonica) vs 秈 xian1 (indica). While these meanings are those attached to these characters today, it is not at all certain that they designated japonica and indica varieties 2000 years ago. The word xian1 first occurs in a now-lost version of the Fangyan, a c. 1 CE work on words occurring in languages of China other than standard Chinese, as quoted in the Ji Yun, an 11th century dictionary. It says <<江南呼粳為秈>> "Xian1 is the name of Jing1 rice south of the Yangzi". As to 粳, it is defined under a slightly different graphic form in the Shuo Wen, a character dictionary of 120 CE as <<禾+亢, 稻屬。>>"Jing1 is a kind of rice". In a text from the Jin dynasty 265-419 CE we learn that Jing was dependent on irrigation: "Jīng and tú rice are nourished by water and irrigation, while Setaria and Panicum are sown in upland fields" (晉左思<<魏都賦>>: "雨澍粳稌,陸蒔稷黍"). In a lexicographical text dated c. 543 CE we learn that Jing was non-sticky "jīng means non-glutinous rice 稻 (玉篇: << 粳, 不黏稻>>). It would appear, therefore, that the term 秈 xian1 designated nonglutinous lowland rice from south of the Yangzi.
would be coastal people who did not practice cultivation of upland rice and did not have the corresponding landraces with them. The Austroasiatics, in contrast, were specialized in upland/swidden rice, and transmitted the technology, landraces and attendant vocabulary to the Tai-Kadais.

Sino-Tibetan
The Sino-Tibetan family is thought to be composed of two branches, Chinese vs.  (Wang 1989) and in Xishanping in eastern Gansu c.
2600-2350 BCE (Li et al. 2007). Wheat, introduced from the west, is also found at Xishanping c.
2600 BCE (Li et al. 2007). The availability of these new grains made possible the abandonment of rice by some Tibeto-Burman groups. The following comparison, attested in two geographically and phylogenetically distant members of the family, implies knowledge of rice by the proto-Sino-Tibetans: Old Chinese 米 *C.mˤ[e]jʔ > mejX > mǐ 'millet or rice grains, dehusked and polished' 5 , Proto-Bodo-Garo (Joseph and Burling 2006) *mai 1 'rice, paddy, cooked rice'.
The semantics point to rice grain in the final stages of processing, either ready for cooking or cooked. Chinese extended the term to millet grains, Bodo-Garo to rice in general.
There is concern, recently voiced by van Driem (2009), that the sound correspondences on Sino-Tibetan words for 'rice' may not be regular. Similarly Blench (2009) states that there is no evidence that the proto-Sino-Tibetans knew rice -indeed, that they were farmers. It is true that 5 This form is reconstructed with vowel /i/ in Baxter-Sagart v. 1.00; we now reconstruct *e because two words with 米 as phonetic are read mjie and mjieX in MC; if it were *-ijʔ we would expect MC mjijX.
correspondences within Sino-Tibetan are not so well understood, in particular those relating to initial stop manner and to tone (Sagart 2006); in addition we do not have a reliable reconstruction of proto-Sino-Tibetan which would allow us to say that Old Chinese 6 C.mˤ[e]jʔ and proto-Bodo-Garo *mai 1 are the regular outcomes of proto-Sino-Tibetan *such-and-such. At least it can be said that good parallels can be found for all of the segmental and suprasegmental sound correspondences that this comparison implies-cognate decisions in Sino-Tibetan studies at this stage are based on nothing else-: for the initial, proto-Bodo-Garo *m-normally corresponds to Old Chinese *m- (Table 1); proto-Bodo-Garo main vowel *a sometimes corresponds to words with main vowel *e in Chinese (Table 2); Old Chinese final *-j normally corresponds to proto-Bodo-Garo *-i in closing diphthongs (Table 3); and proto-Bodo-Garo tone 1 and Old Chinese final *ʔ match in a significant number of forms (Table 4).
proto-Bodo-Garo Old Chinese dream jV3-maŋ 夢 *C.məŋ-s > mjuwngH > mèng 'dream' lose Gɯ 1-ma 無 *ma > mju > wú 'not have' name muŋ 1 名 *C.meŋ > mjieng > míng 'name'    Dimasa bere 'to bear fruit' The Tibeto-Burman part of the comparison is due to Benedict (1972), and to Matisoff (2003) for the Dimasa form. Dimasa, a close relative of Boro, has e for Tibeto-Burman *a in other forms, and regularly loses final *-s. The Chinese cognate was identified by Zhengzhang Shangfang. Note the nasal element in the onset in Chinese and Tibetan. It is unclear whether the -b-was lost in Chinese or gained in Tibeto-Burman. In either case, the nasal has to be old. Lushai raʔ < *ras 'fruit; to bear fruit' is clearly related but shows no trace of a labial pre-initial. Either the preinitial was lost or we are dealing with a related word at Sino-Tibetan level.
In addition, the Sino-Tibetan languages share a word for Setaria italica: proto-Sino-Tibetan, like proto-Austronesian, has no specific word for 'rice field'. There is only one reconstructible item for 'field', something like *liŋ: Written Tibetan zying < *lying 'field, ground, soil, arable land' : 田 *lˤiŋ > den > tián 'field; to hunt'. Outside of Written Tibetan the term also occurs in Lepcha lyăŋ, Cuona leŋ¹³, Hayu jing 'dry field' (see the STEDT database), although some of these forms could be borrowed from Tibetan.

Objections to a N. China homeland for Sino-Tibetan
Identification of proto-Sino-Tibetan with a late stage of Yangshao is controversial. A tradition of research regards Sino-Tibetan as spoken by non-agricultural groups in central or southern Asia, and Chinese as intrusive in East Asia. Haudricourt and Strecker (1991) view the Chinese as originating in sheep herders from central Asia who became dominant over a Hmong-Mien speaking peasantry specializing in rice, borrowing their agricultural and commercial vocabulary. Sagart (1995b) showed that the alleged loans in the commercial vocabulary include characteristic Chinese morphology and must in fact be loans in the other direction. Sagart also rejected the views that the Starostin envisioned a Sino-Tibetan homeland in the Himalayan region; he assumed a Chinese migration east out of the Sino-Tibetan homeland after 3000 BCE. In his view (Starostin 2008) the archaeological Yangshao culture is best equated with proto-Altaic (Altaic is a much-disputed macro-family composed of Turkic, Mongolic, Tungusic, Japanese and Korean). However, the archaeologically documented presence in the middle Yangshao culture of rice and of a welldeveloped fishing component are not easily reconciled with the absence of corresponding terms in proto-Altaic: a more attractive match for proto-Altaic is the Hongshan culture in Liaoning province (Robbeets, p.c. to LS, July 2011), a culture of farmers of Panicum and Setaria, without rice, contemporary of Yangshao. Robbeets's views seem sound.
Starostin held that the pre-Chinese acquired agriculture at the end of their eastward migration: millet from the Altaic peoples, rice from the pre-Austronesians. In support of that view he listed some agricultural terms (2008) that he thought are not found in Tibeto-Burman, and that he treated as Altaic loanwords into Chinese. A prominent example is the name of the millet Setaria italica: 8 稷 *[ts]ək > tsik > jì. The source of the borrowing according to him is the PA reconstruction *ǯii úgi 'Panicum miliaceum' in Starostin, Dybo andMudrak (2003:1547-8). This reconstruction is based on proto-Turkic *yügür 'millet', proto-Tungusic *jiya / *jiye 'millet' and proto-Korean *cwok 'millet'.
There are two serious problems here. First, this set does not match the sound correspondences observed on the more constrained set of Altaic etymologies discussed in Robbeets (2005 on Li Huilin (1983:29) against the judgment of Bray (1984), Chang Kwang-chih (1980:147) and Fogg (1983). 9 Robbeets expects proto-Altaic *ǯ to be reflected as t-in Turkic, not y-; by her correspondences, no proto-Altaic vowel matches the array on the set by Starostin, Dybo and Mudrak; the medial consonant in Tungusic should be -g-, not -y-; and no explanation is provided for final -r in the Turkic forms.

Sino-Tibetan-Austronesian
Sagart (most recent 2005) argues that the Austronesian and Sino-Tibetan families are genetically related as two branches of the Sino-Tibetan-Austronesian macro-family. This claim is predicated on the observation of sound correspondences on basic vocabulary and of morphological parallels with cognate markers. The sound correspondences obtain between the main syllable in Old Chinese words and the last syllable of Austronesian words. Sagart (2008) places the proto-Sino-Tibetan-Austronesian homeland in the same region as that for proto-Sino-Tibetan: this is based on the sharing by Sino-Tibetan and Austronesian of specific names for rice and millet, with the same correspondences as the rest of the shared vocabulary (   Coblin (1986:31). Coblin reconstructs a glottal stop in proto-Sino-Tibetan, evolving to Old Chinese -t or -k depending on vowel context; but his proposal is not easily reconciled with the needs of tonogenesis in Chinese. 11 Levelling of linguistic diversity by northern Chinese even applies to Chinese dialects, more diverse in SE China, despite the fact that the historical cradle of Chinese is in N. China.
The correspondence between proto-Austronesian *Semay and Old Chinese *C.mˤ[e]jʔ are regular according to the sound correspondences in Sagart (2005): 12 all of m -m, a -e (also a -i) and y -j are well attested.
The correspondence between Old Chinese final -k and proto-Austronesian -ŋ in 'Setaria' above is unexplained: we would expect either k-k or ŋ -ŋ. Yet Old Chinese -proto-Austronesian parallels for k -ŋ exist. The same alternation is frequent within Sino-Tibetan and even within Chinese. 13 Perhaps the Austronesian form incorporates a nasal suffix.
This must mean that proto-Sino-Tibetan-Austronesian was a precursor of proto-Sino-Tibetan in the same region, between the middle or lower Yangzi and the middle or lower Yellow river. We tentatively equate proto-Sino-Tibetan-Austronesian with Middle Yangshao, c. 4500 BCE -the date of the earliest layer in Baligang, assuming that other similar sites will see the light in the same region or closer to the eastern seaboard at similarly early, or even earlier dates. Rice remains from earlier sites like Jiahu in the same region are either from rice collected in the wild or not fully domesticated (Fuller et al. 2007).
Rice cultivated by proto-Sino-Tibetan-Austronesian speakers must have been japonica, since both Because co-cultivation of Setaria and japonica rice is characteristic of the Sino-Tibetan-Austronesian expansion, one may suppose that acquisition of japonica rice as a second cereal with different humidity requirements from Setaria was crucial in accelerating demographic growth and geographical expansion; domesticated pigs (probably fed setaria-derived products), fishing, hunting and gathering provided the necessary adaptability component.
It is noteworthy that proto-Austronesian *beRas 'dehusked rice', Old Chinese 糲 *([m]ə-)rˤat > lat > lì 'dehusked but not polished grain' and Tibeto-Burman words like Written Tibetan m bras 'rice; fruit' correspond phonologically according to the correspondences given in Sagart (2005). This means that the word was part of the proto-Sino-Tibetan-Austronesian language, although it may have meant no more than 'fruit; dehusked grain of cereal', as Tibeto-Burman and Austronesian independently attest.
Neither proto-Austronesian nor Sino-Tibetan have a specific word for 'rice field' although both have a generic term: the same is implied of proto-Sino-Tibetan-Austronesian. We have seen that the early Austronesians may have cultivated lowland rice on floodable river sides, which we have suggested were called *na; this is, as we saw, the inherited Tai-Kadai word for the wet rice field. It is noteworthy that a term matching this *na in pronunciation and meaning occurs in Sino-Tibetan: Old Chinese 洳 *na-s > nyoH > rù 'wet ground', Written Tibetan na 'meadow'. It is possible that rice was first cultivated on floodland along riversides in north China, before the technology of irrigation was adopted. BCE. In this model, Dawenkou culture farmers spoke a sister language of proto-Sino-Tibetan, ancestral to proto-Austronesian, which would have had for 'rice ready to cook/cooked' a cognate of proto-Austronesian *Semay, a point further discussed in the next section.

Transmission of rice by the pre-Austronesians to the pre-Japonics ?
There is growing agreement among Japanologists that the settlement of Japan by Japonic speakers was effected in the second half of the first millennium BCE by a people ('Yayoi') from the Korean peninsula, where evidence for a now-extinct language ('Old Koguryo') related to Japanese can be detected in toponyms. Beyond Korea, Unger (2008) places the pre-Japonics in Shandong. Robbeets (p.c., July 2011) also has in mind a Shandong origin of the pre-Japanese. My own placement of the pre-Austronesians in south Shandong's Dawenkou culture (Sagart 1995a) makes them close neighbors of the pre-Japonics. While arguments for a genetic relationship between Japanese and Austronesian are not credible (Vovin 1994), contact between them is a possibility. The practice of tooth evulsion (extraction of the lateral incisors in boys and girls as a puberty rite) supports this: it originated in Dawenkou c. 4000 BCE (Han and Nakahashi 1996) and is found in exactly the same form among the early Formosans, e.g. in all adults skulls at the Nan Kuan Li East site in western Taiwan, c. 2800-2500 BCE (Pietrusewsky et al. 2009). 14 Brace and Nagai (1982) describe tooth evulsion among the Yayoi people in Japan and propose that the custom was passed on to contemporary Jomon people, who (they argue) regarded that custom as a manifestation of higher civilization. If the pre-Austronesians and pre-Japonics were in contact in Shandong, this furnishes an opportunity for the transmission of both rice cultivation and tooth evulsion from the former to the latter. A likely linguistic signature of the cultural transmission of rice is the Japanese word kome 'dehusked rice', Old Japanese *kome 2 , proto-Japonic *kəmai or *kəməi. Neither of these proto-Japonic forms look like native Japanese words, the first because it would violate Arisaka's laws on cooccurrence of vowels, and the second because one would expect to find komo-alternating with kome in modern compound words (I am grateful to M. Robbeets and to J. Unger for these explanations). Proto-Japonic had no h-sound and treats foreign /h/ as k: therefore a possible source of proto-Japonic *kəmai or *kəməi is a foreign *həmai or *həməi. This is very close to proto-Austronesian Semay, if one assumes that the sibilant at the beginning of this word changed to h-, a frequent change cross-linguistically. 15 14 "Tooth ablation, in this case most likely a rite of puberty, was observed in all of the adult Nankuanli East individuals examined in this study. With a single exception, the pattern observed was the intentional removal of both maxillary lateral incisors and canines well before the time of death." (slide 19) 15 Amis (SE Taiwan) hmay 'cooked rice' is treated by Blust and Wolff as the outcome of proto-Austronesian *Semay.
However proto-Austronesian *S should give s-in Amis; Amis h-reflects proto-Austronesian *h. The Amis word could go back to a proto-Austronesian *hemay, identical with a possible source of J. kome.

From whom did the proto-Sino-Tibetan-Austronesians get rice ?
Judging
Van Driem (2009)  reconstructs proto-Loloish *m-lyak L 'to lick'. The word 'pound' is onomatopoetic: the resemblance between the Hmong-Mien and Chinese forms is not necessarily explained in terms of inheritance or contact. Phonologically 'field' and 'cakes' could be loans in either direction, but (like the other forms in van Driem's list) they are not rice-specific terms, which weakens the argument that they are loans from Hmong-Mien. 'Field' moreover has Tibeto-Burman cognates (above).

Austroasiatic
The Austroasiatic family is composed of languages spoken between Vietnam and the Indian subcontinent. Its geographical unity has been dislocated by the expansions of Indo-Aryan, Tibeto-Burman, Tai-Kadai and Austronesian languages: this implies that the Austroasiatic family was already geographically spread out while these expansions were underway. Unlike Hmong-Mien, Austroasiatic was shielded from Chinese influence by its southerly location. The age of the family is not known but the impression is one of substantial time depth, perhaps broadly similar to that of the Sino-Tibetan family. The traditional view of the family's structure opposes a western group: the Munda languages, spoken in eastern and central India, to the rest ('Mon-Khmer'). This view is increasingly called into question as a convincing body of uniquely shared Mon-Khmer innovations has never been presented (Sidwell 2009). The location of the Austroasiatic homeland is much discussed. It is broadly agreed that Munda linguistic typology shifted from a southeast Asian type to a south Asian type. This suggests an an adaptive change following a migration from southeast to Austroasiatic, this will shift the center of gravity of the family, and its homeland, further towards the east. Diffloth (2005) gives a list of proto-Austroasiatic rice-specific terms (  Table 6: proto-Austroasiatic rice-specific vocabulary (Diffloth 2005) 'Rice bran' #pheːʔ has a certain resemblance with proto-Hmong-Mien *mphii ɛk 'chaff/husk' but it is not clear whether this should be regarded as a chance resemblance or a meaningful one. Other than that, the only significant match between this set and another language group is the term 'rice grain': #rəŋkoːʔ which, as we have seen, was borrowed by Tai-Kadai.
Diffloth notes the absence of terms relating to irrigated rice cultivation such as the wet rice field. An interesting item in this connexion is 'dibbling stick', a tool used by the more conservative MK groups to make holes in the ground in which rice seeds are planted. Unless this term is not ricespecific, it appears to point to rice cultivation in dry fields. Ferlus (2010) lists other, more geographically restricted forms: proto-Katuic *s-rɔː 'paddy, raw rice', also found in Mon, Khmer and Sora (Munda) and a form *s-ŋɔʔ 'paddy, raw rice' found in Palaungwa, Khmu and Mon. In addition he identifies minor forms such as *cɛh, *haːl and *saː, all 'raw rice, paddy'. None of these appears to have been borrowed from an outside source, or to have been loaned to an outside group.
Knowledge of rice by the PAustroasiatics naturally raises the question whether rice cultivation in south Asia ultimately goes back to a start of rice cultivation by Austroasiatic-speaking peoples. This could have happened in either of two ways: under the hypothesis of a south Asian homeland, the PAustroasiatics could be the first domesticators of rice in north India. Under the hypothesis of a southeast Asia homeland, the Mundas could have migrated west, carrying with them rice cultivation.
The first theory is illustrated by Kuiper's andWitzel's work. Kuiper (1948, 1950) identifies a Munda substratum in the Rgveda, based on what he interprets as prefixation patterns. Witzel (2000) follows Kuiper, speaking of "para-Munda", meaning a now-extinct western branch of Austroasiatic. Krishnamurti (2003:38) comments that "the main flaw in Witzel's argument is his inability to show a large number of complete, unanalyzed words from Munda borrowed into the first phase of the Rgveda". In the absence of specific Austroasiatic words, identification of a Munda-related language as the prefixing substratum language in the Rgveda is doubtful. Other prefixing candidates are Tibeto-Burman and Burushaski. A Tibeto-Burman presence in NW India at the time of the Rgveda should not at all be deemed impossible; Burushaski probably belonged to a significantly diversified language family before becoming an isolate; a third possibility is an extinct prefixing language. In support of a Munda role in south Asian agriculture, Witzel (1999) argued that the proto-Koraput Munda form *ə-rig 'Panicum miliare' (Zide and Zide 1976)  The second theory-that rice agriculture was introduced to south India by the Mundas on their westward migration from the Austroasiatic homeland in southeast Asia-is defended by archaeologists Glover & Higham (1996:419), 19 Higham (200219 Higham ( , 2009) and Bellwood (2005): a migration in the 3rd mill. BCE would have brought the Mundas to Eastern India and, with them, rice cultivation. Blust (1998) supports that view from linguistics. He assumes a genetic relationship of proto-Austroasiatic with proto-Austronesian within "Austric", a construct which, following earliers authors (Schmidt 1906, Shorto 2006, Reid 1994) but unlike Reid (2005) he views as monophyletic. He maintains that the absence of lexical evidence for Austric is an argument in favor of its great age. He claims the Austric expansion resulted from the domestication of rice, an event he places -against archeological plausibility-in Yunnan c. 9000 BCE. A serious problem with the Austric-rice-expansion idea is the absence of any shared rice-specific vocabulary between proto-Austronesian and proto-Austroasiatic (Sagart 2003). A further problem specifically with the view that the PAustroasiatics introduced rice cultivation to India is the conspicuous absence of any Austroasiatic rice-specific vocabulary in south Asian languages, whether Indo-Iranian or Dravidian.
Recently Ferlus (2010) has sought to remedy the absence of Austroasiatic-Indo-Aryan matches in rice vocabulary by connecting the south Asian term vrihi etc. to a putative proto-Austroasiatic word *C.rac "rice", supposedly brought by the Mundas, with rice, to south Asia. The argument for this Austroasiatic reconstruction is very indirect and the supporting evidence very flimsy, however.
One thing is worth mentioning when one considers the Austroasiatic vocabulary of rice: the list of proto-Austroasiatic terms above -like the list earlier given by Zide et al (1976) and the more recent one by Ferlus (2010)-does not include any obvious loans from outside sources, be they east or south Asian. This situation implies a largely self-contained tradition of rice: it makes it possible that one start of rice cultivation in Asia is due to linguistics ancestors of the Austroasiatics. We will discuss this point further in our conclusion.

South Asia
McCouch and her group have documented the transfer into indica of domestication genes from japonica rice. This requires contact between peoples growing indica and those growing japonica.
The Tibeto-Burmans are sino-Tibetans and members of the Sino-Tibetan-Austronesian macrofamily whose earliest speakers grew japonica rice just north of the mid-Yangzi domestication

Illustration 2: The extensive contact front between Indo-Aryan and Tibeto-Burman languages
The first point is the phonetic identity between a Dravidian term for 'paddy': Tamil vari 'paddy', Telugu vari 'paddy' (Burrow 1984), on the one hand, and the Austronesian languages Malagasy vary 'rice' and Nadju Dayak (Borneo) bari 'cooked rice'. Neither Austronesian form is relatable to any of the inherited Austronesian terms for 'rice'. Adelaar (2009)  Vietnam and distributed in the drought-stricken provinces for seed. The following year, rice from the Cham empire was displayed in front of assembled provincial officials by the Song emperor.
"Cham rice" was described as differing from Chinese rice in that it had long and thin grains, no awns, and was early-maturing. Zhou Shilu comments on the Song history passage, arguing that the rice obtained from the Chams must be indica rice, and that the event described in the Song history was the occasion on which indica rice was introduced to China on a large scale. He adds that modern-day peasants in Guangdong and Fujian refer to indica rice as "Cham rice".
In both the Borneo and Chinese cases, indianized states (Srivijaya, the Chamic state) played the role of intermediaries between India and East Asia.

Recapitulation
Let us recapitulate the main points of our discussion: 20 The author thanks G. Second for bringing this text to his attention.
• there exists linguistic evidence that the Sino-Tibetans, proto-Austronesians and their linguistic ancestors the proto-Sino-Tibetan-Austronesians, cultivated rice. The proto-Sino-Tibetan-Austronesians were originally Setaria farmers who had acquired rice from their southern neighbours. There is however no hard evidence that specific rice-related words in proto-Sino-Tibetan-Austronesian languages were borrowed from the pre-Hmong-Miens.
• The Hmong-Mien lexicon of rice includes a majority of Chinese loanwords.
• Japanese rice agriculture may have been acquired at the contact with pre-proto-Austronesian speakers, perhaps in Shandong: the word kome appears to match proto-Austronesian *Semay and related forms in the other Sino-Tibetan-Austronesian languages.
• Austronesian japonica rice was brought 'back' to the southeast Asia mainland by the Tai-Kadais; but the Tai-Kadais borrowed dry rice vocabulary and techniques from the Austroasiatics with whom they came into contact.
• The Tibeto-Burman languages have a very long front of contact with the Indo-Aryan languages, suggesting domestication genes from japonica came in rice plants grown by Tibeto-Burman speakers; there is a possibility that south Asian terms for 'rice' such as Vedic vrihi were borrowed from Tibeto-Burman.
• The Austroasiatic family has a reconstructible vocabulary indicating dry rice cultivation, without any evidence of lexical borrowing from any other source (although there are Austroasiatic loans in the Tai-Kadai rice vocabulary).
• The Indo-Aryan and Dravidian rice vocabularies include no Austroasiatic words.
• The Malagasy and Nadju Dayak terms vary 'paddy' and bari 'cooked rice' are loans from Dravidian, a probable indication of the introduction of Indian rice varieties into insular southeast Asia.

Conclusion
We are now in a position to give a preliminary answer to the question in the title of this paper: two, at least.
One is the very self-contained proto-Austroasiatic vocabulary of rice, and the other, the rest of the rice vocabularies of Asian languages, wich are potentially related by vocabulary transfers. 21 This suggests the following hypothetical model. 21 To the exclusion of Korean; but geography practically excludes a start of rice cultivation by Korean peoples.
The fact that proto-Austroasiatic linguistic typology is very similar to that of the East Asian groups (Sino-Tibetan-Austronesian, Hmong-Mien) implies a geographical proximity of proto-Austroasiatic with these groups (Sagart, in press  This hypothetical model of the spread of rice and languages in Asia is offered for falsification to colleagues at this symposium.