Proto-Tungusic in time and space

• Main Authors: Martine Robbeets, Sofia Oskolskaya
• Format: Book Part
• Language: English
• Published: Language Science Press 2022
• Subjects: Evenki; Tungusic languages; Siberia
• Online Access: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.7053373

Although there is a general consensus among historical comparative linguists that the Tungusic languages are genealogically related and descend from a common ancestral language, the internal structure of the family, its age, homeland and prehistoric cultural context remain subject to debate. In addition to four competing concepts of classification, the linguistic literature yields a wide range of time estimations for the family covering more than a millennium as well as four different proposals with regard to the location of the homeland covering Eastern Siberia and Manchuria. Here we will combine the power of traditional comparative historical linguistics and computational phylogenetics to shed light on the prehistory of the Tungusic languages. Our aim is to build on a recent Bayesian verification of the Tungusic family and examine its implications in determining a plausible time depth, location and cultural context of the ancestral proto-Tungusic speech community. We will compare spatial inferences based on two different statistically well-supported Tungusic classifications, namely one in which the break-up of Manchuric constitutes the first split in the family as well as a North-South classification with a northern branch including Even, Evenki, Negidal, Oroqen, Solon, Oroch and Udehe as opposed to a southern branch including Manchuric and Nanaic languages. Situating Proto-Tungusic in time and space, we will estimate the break-up of Proto-Tungusic in the beginning of the first millennium and place its homeland in the area around Lake Khanka. Our study pushes the field forward in answering some tantalizing questions about the prehistory of the Tungusic family, providing a quantitative basis for some conflicting hypotheses and in triangulating linguistics, archaeology and genetics into a holistic approach to the Tungusic past.