Austro-Tai

Austro-Tai is a hypothesis that the Kradai (Tai-Kadai) and Austronesian language families of southern China and the Pacific are genealogically related.

The Kradai languages contains numerous cognates with Austronesian which were noticed as far back as Schlegel in 1901. [Schlegel, G. (1901). Review of Frankfurter’s Siamese grammar. "T’oung Pao" 2:76-87.] These are considered to be too many to explain as chance resemblance (Reid 2006). The question then is whether they are due to language contact—that is, borrowing—or to common descent—that is, a genealogical relationship.

The evidence

The first proposal of a genealogical relationship was that of Paul Benedict in 1942, which he expanded upon through 1990. This took the form of an expansion of his Austric phylum, and posited that Kradai and Austronesian had a sister relationship within Austric. This was not generally received well by linguists for a variety of reasons: Austric as a whole had not been demonstrated; Benedict dealt mostly with typological evidence, which could be explained as areal features; he erroneously included a number of demonstrable Chinese loans in his reconstruction; and his methods of reconstruction were idiosyncratic and considered unreliable. For example, Thurgood (1994) examined Benedict's claims and concluded that since the sound correspondences and tonal developments were irregular, there was no evidence of a genealogical relationship, and the numerous cognates must be chalked up to early language contact.

However, the fact that many of the Austro-Tai cognates are found in core vocabulary, which is generally resistant to borrowing, continued to intrigue scholars. There were later several advances over Benedict's approach: Abandoning the larger Austric proposal; focusing on lexical reconstruction and regular sound correspondences; including data from additional branches of Kradai, Hlai and Kra; using better reconstructions of Kradai; and reconsidering the nature of the relationship, with Kradai possibly being a branch (daughter) of Austronesian.

Ostapirat (2000) reconstructed proto-Kra, one of the least-well attested branches of Kradai. In (Ostapirat 2005) he presents fifty core vocabulary items found in all five branches of Kradai, and demonstrated that half of them—words such as "child, eat, eye, fire, hand, head, I, you, louse, moon, tooth, water, this, etc.," can be related to proto-Austronesian by regular sound correspondences, a connection which Reid (2006) finds convincing. ["Data such as these [Ostapirat (2005) and Sagart (2005)] establish beyond any doubt that a genetic relationship exists between the two families." (p 741)]

Austronesian is characterized by disyllabic roots, whereas Kradai is predominantly monosyllabic. It appears that in Kradai, the first vowel reduced and then dropped out, leaving a consonant cluster which frequently reduced further to a single consonant. For example, the proto-Austronesian root *qudip "live, raw" corresponds to Kra "kt^hop" and Tai "dip."

In proto-Kradai, there appear to have been three tones in words ending in a sonorant (vowel or nasal consonant), labeled simply A, B, C, plus words ending in an stop consonant, D, which did not have tone. In general, Austronesian words ending in a sonorant correspond to A, and words ending in a stop correspond to D. This accounts for most of the words. There are also a few cognates with B and C tone. From Indic borrowings it appears that tone B was originally a final "h" in Kradai, and some of the corresponding Austronesian roots also end in "h," such as AN *qəmpah "chaff", Kam-Sui "paa"-B (Mulam "kwaa"-B), though there are few examples to go on. Tone C seems to have originally been creaky voice or a final glottal stop. It may correspond to *H, a laryngeal consonant of uncertain manner, in proto-Austronesian (AN *quluH "head", Thai "klau"-C), but again the number of cognates is too low to draw firm conclusions.

Sagart (2005) builds on this data with a newly described Kra language, Buyang, which—apparently alone among the Kradai languages—retains the disyllabic roots characteristic of Austronesian. Some examples are:

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The relationship

Among scholars who accept the evidence as definitive, there is disagreement as to the nature of the relationship. Benedict attempted to show that Kradai has features which cannot be accounted for by proto-Austronesian, and that therefore it must be a separate family coordinate with Austronesian (a sister relationship). Ostapirat concluded that these reconstructed linguistic features are spurious. However, he could not rule out the possibility that Kradai tone cannot be explained, and so leaves the question open pending further reconstruction of proto-Austronesian. He supports the consensus hypothesis of several scholars that proto-Austronesian was spoken on Formosa or adjacent areas of coastal China, and that the likely homeland of proto-Kradai was coastal Fujian or Guangdong as part of the neolithic Longshan culture. The spread of the Kradai peoples may have been aided by agriculture, but any who remained near the coast were eventually absorbed by the Chinese.

Sagart, on the other hand, holds that Kradai is a branch of Austronesian which migrated back to the mainland from northeastern Formosa long after Formosa was settled, but probably before the expansion of Malayo-Polynesian out of Formosa. The language was then largely relexified from what he believes may have been an Austro-Asiatic language. Robert Blust(1999) suggests that proto-Kradai speakers originated in the northern Philippines and migrated from there to Hainan island (hence the diversity of Kradai languages on that island [Ostapirat holds that Hlai split from Tai in southern Gwangdong and only then migrated to Hainan.] ), and were radically restructured following contact with Hmong-Mien and Sinitic.

However, Ostapirat maintains that Kradai could not descend from Malay-Polynesian in the Philippines, and likely not from the languages of eastern Formosa either. His evidence is in the Kradai sound correspondences, which reflect Austronesian distinctions that were lost in Malayo-Polynesian and even Eastern Formosan. These are proto-AN *t and *C, also *n and *N, which were distinct in proto-Kradai but which fell together as *t and *n in proto-MP and Eastern Formosan; and *S, which is *s in proto-Kradai but *h in proto-MP. There are also Austro-Tai roots which are not attested from Malayo-Polynesian, such as *Cumay "bear". (Western MP has *biRuaŋ.)

Sagart proposes an Eastern Formonan–Malayo-Polynesian connection with Kradai, based on words such as proto-Kradai *maNuk and Eastern Formosan *manuk "bird", as compared to proto-Austronesian, where the word for "bird" was *qayam, and *maNuk meant "chicken", and a few other words such as *lima "five" and *-mu "thou" which have not been reconstructed for proto-Austronesian. However, Ostapirat notes Kradai retains the Austronesian *N in this word, which had been lost from Eastern Formosan and Malayo-Polynesian, and that a change in meaning from "chicken" to "bird" could easily have happened independently, for example among proto-Kradai speakers when they borrowed the mainland word *ki "chicken" (cognate with Old Chinese *kej and Miao /qai/).

Sagart suggests that Austro-Tai is ultimately related to the Sino-Tibetan languages and has its origin in a Neolithic communities of the coastal regions of prehistoric North China or East China. Ostapirat, by contrast, sees connections with the Austro-Asiatic languages (in Austric), as Benedict had. Reid notes that the two approaches are not incompatible, if Austric is valid and can be connected to Sino-Tibetan.

Notes

Bibliography

*Benedict, Paul K. (1942). "Thai, Kadai and Indonesian: a new alignment in south east Asia." "American Anthropologist" 44.576-601.
*Benedict, Paul K. (1975). "Austro-Thai language and culture, with a glossary of roots". New Haven: HRAF Press. ISBN 0875363237.
*Benedict, Paul K. (1990). "Japanese/Austro-Tai". Ann Arbor: Karoma. ISBN 0897200780.
*Blench, Roger (2004). [http://homepage.ntlworld.com/roger_blench/Language%20data/Geneva%20paper%202004.pdf "Stratification in the peopling of China: how far does the linguistic evidence match genetics and archaeology?" (PDF)] Paper for the Symposium : Human migrations in continental East Asia and Taiwan: genetic, linguistic and archaeological evidence. Geneva, June 10-13.
*Carr. M. (1986). "Austro-Tai *Tsum(b)anget 'spirit' and Archaic Chinese *XmwângXmwet [Chinese characters for huanghu] 'bliss"'. Tōkyō: Tōkyō Gaikokugo Daigaku.
*Li, Hui (2005). "Genetic structure of Austro-Tai populations". PhD Thesis of Human Biology, Fudan University. [http://bbs.sinodino.com/archiver/showtopic-26834.aspx]
*Ostapirat, Weera. 2005. "Kra-Dai and Austronesian: Notes on phonological correspondences and vocabulary distribution." Laurent Sagart, Roger Blench & Alicia Sanchez-Mazas, eds. "The Peopling of East Asia: Putting Together Archaeology, Linguistics and Genetics". London: Routledge Curzon, pp. 107-131.
*Reid, LA (2006). "Austro-Tai Hypotheses". Pp. 740-741 in Keith Brown (editor in chief), "The Encyclopedia of Language and Linguistics," 2nd edition.
* Sagart, Laurent. (2002). [http://halshs.ccsd.cnrs.fr/docs/00/08/50/59/PDF/canberra.pdf "Sino-Tibeto-Austronesian: An updated and improved argument." (PDF)] Paper presented at Ninth International Conference on Austronesian Linguistics (ICAL9). 8-11 January 2002. Canberra, Australia.
*Sagart, L. 2004. "The higher phylogeny of Austronesian and the position of Tai-Kadai." "Oceanic Linguistics" 43.411-440.
*Sagart, Laurent 2005. "Sino-Tibetan-Austronesian: an updated and improved argument." Laurent Sagart, Roger Blench & Alicia Sanchez-Mazas, eds. "The Peopling of East Asia: Putting Together Archaeology, Linguistics and Genetics". London: Routledge Curzon, pp. 161-176.
*Thurgood, G. (1994). "Tai-Kadai and Austronesian: the nature of the relationship." "Oceanic Linguistics" 33.345-368.