LINGUIST List 28.4710

Thu Nov 09 2017

Calls: Tungus, Anthro Ling, Genetic Classification, Historical Ling, Lang Documentation, Socioling/Estonia

Editor for this issue: Kenneth Steimel <kenlinguistlist.org>

Date: 07-Nov-2017
From: Andreas Hölzl <hoelzlandreasweb.de>
Subject: The Tungusic Language Family through the Ages: Interdisciplinary perspectives
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Full Title: The Tungusic Language Family through the Ages: Interdisciplinary perspectives

Date: 29-Aug-2018 - 01-Sep-2018
Location: Tallinn, Estonia
Contact Person: Andreas Hölzl Thomas E. Payne
Meeting Email: < click here to access email >

Linguistic Field(s): Anthropological Linguistics; Genetic Classification; Historical Linguistics; Language Documentation; Sociolinguistics

Language Family(ies): Tungus

Call Deadline: 14-Nov-2017

Meeting Description:

The interdisciplinary workshop emphasizes on the diachronic dimension, tracing the development of Tungusic languages from prehistory and the earliest attestations to the present day.

Tungusic (or Manchu-Tungusic) is an endangered language family that encompasses about twenty languages located in Siberia and northern China. They are distributed over an enormous area that ranges from the Yenissei river in the west to the Kamchatka Peninsula in the east (Janhunen 2012). Recent years have seen a considerable interest in this language family (e.g., Malchukov & Whaley 2012). The proposed workshop has the overarching goal of bringing together researchers from different countries and disciplines to create opportunities for mutual exchange. The workshop emphasizes on the diachronic dimension, tracing the development of Tungusic from prehistory and the earliest attestations to the present day. In recent decades it has become clear, however, that historical linguistics alone cannot answer all questions concerning the development of a language family, especially as concerns the time and urheimat of the speech community of the proto-language. While the focus will lie on the interpretation of the history of the Tungusic language family, we welcome classical comparative studies, as well as original synchronic studies of individual languages, and encourage participants to engage in an inter-disciplinary dialogue with disciplines such as archaeology, ethnology, genetics, or history.

For example, a recent study that combined archaeology, genetics, and linguistics came to the conclusion that the direct ancestors of the Tungusic speaking Ulchi have been living in Manchuria for at least 7700 years, which suggests a remarkable genetic continuity (Siska et al. 2017). It goes without saying that genetic continuity does not necessarily imply linguistic continuity, which at any time could have been disrupted by language shift.

Andreas Hölzl, University of Zurich
Tom Payne, University of Oregon

Call for Papers:

In order to solve such problematic issues, we welcome innovative thinking from as many different perspectives as possible. The time-frame for possible contributions can range from prehistory to the 21st century. Possible topics for presentations include, but are not restricted to the following:

- Fieldwork reports and the investigation of endangered Tungusic languages, changes in the structure of moribund languages, and language shift to Chinese or Russian (Janhunen 2005).

- The reevaluation of previously published materials on Tungusic languages such as word lists from the 19th century and their importance for our understanding of the historical development of individual languages (Alonso de la Fuente 2017).

- Progress in the decipherment of the two Jurchen scripts (ca. 12th to 15th century) that represent the oldest attestation of Tungusic languages (Golovachev et al. 2011).

- Comparative investigations and reconstructions of Proto-Tungusic, conclusions regarding the internal structure of the Tungusic language family, and an evaluation of previous work in the area (Doerfer 1978).

- Questions regarding the time, place, and speech community of proto-Tungusic and the modelling of the subsequent spread of the individual languages. Here and in the following point we especially welcome data and results from archaeology (Kim 2013), ethnology (Sasaki 2011), genetics (Duggan et al. 2013), and history (Zgusta 2015).

- The critical evaluation of wider connections of Tungusic such as to the Khitano-Mongolic language family. With the recent progress in the decipherment of the extinct neighbouring language Khitan (Apatóczky & Kempf 2017), new possibilities for research in this area are opening up. These include the investigation of loanwords in Tungusic languages or the potential genetic relationship between Tungusic and Khitano-Mongolic in what has been called the Khinganic hypothesis (Janhunen 2012).

The workshop will be held at the 51st Annual Meeting of the Societas Linguistica Europaea in Tallinn, 29 August - 1 September 2018. The deadline for submission of provisional abstracts with max. 300 words is the 14 of November 2017. After the acceptance of the workshop, full abstracts will be required by the 15 of January 2018. Papers for the workshop can also be submitted for the general call for abstracts (http://sle2018.eu/call-for-papers). Each presentation will be 20 minutes long, followed by a discussion of 5 minutes. The publication of workshop proceedings is planned and will be submitted to Language Science Press in Berlin (http://langsci-press.org/). See Call for Papers for additional information.

Please email Andreas Hölzl at hoelzlandreasweb.de with questions or concerns.

References:

Alonso de la Fuente, José A. 2017. An Oroch word-list lost and rediscovered: A critical edition of Tronson’s 1859 pseudo-Nivkh vocabulary. Bulletin of SOAS 80(1). 97–117.

Apatóczky, Ákos Bertalan & Béla Kempf. 2017. Recent developments on the decipherment of the Khitan small script. Acta Orientalia Academiae Scientiarum Hung. 70(2). 109–133.

Doerfer, Gerhard. 1978. Classification problems of Tungus. In Gerhard Doerfer & Michael Weiers (eds.), Tungusica, Band 1: Beiträge zur Nordasiatischen Kulturgeschichte, 1–26. Wiesbaden.

Duggan, Ana T. et al. 2013. Investigating the prehistory of Tungusic peoples of Siberia and the Amur-Ussuri region with complete mtDNA genome sequences and Y-chromosomal markers. PLOS ONE 8(12). e83570.

Golovachev, V. et al. 2011. Tyrskie stely XV v.: Nerebod, kommentarii, issledobanie kitajskix, mongolskogo i chzhurzhens’skogo tekstov. Sankt Petersburg: Nauka.

Janhunen, Juha (ed.) 2003. The Mongolic languages. London.

Janhunen, Juha. 2005. Tungusic: An endangered language family in Northeast Asia. International Journal of the Sociology of Language 173. 37–54.

Janhunen, Juha. 2012. The expansion of Tungusic as an ethnic and linguistic process. In Andrej Malchokov & Lindsay J. Whaley (eds.), Recent Advances in Tungusic Linguistics, 5–16. Wiesbaden.

Kim, Alexander. 2013. Osteological studies of archaeological materials from Jurchen sites in Rusia. Journal of Song-Yuan Studies 43. 335–347.

Malchukov, Andrej & Lindsay J. Whaley (eds.). 2012. Recent Advances in Tungusic Linguistics. Wiesbaden.

Pakendorf, Brigitte. 2014. Historical linguistics and molecular anthropology. In Claire Bowern & Bethwyn Evans (eds), The Routledge handbook of historical linguistics, 627–641. New York.

Sasaki, Shiro. 2011. Sacred places and masters of hunting luck in the forest worlds of the Udege people of the Russian Far East. In Peter Jordan (ed.), Landscape & culture in northern Eurasia, 257–278. Walnut Creek.

Siska, Veronika et al. 2017. Genome-wide data from two early Neolithic East Asian individuals dating to 7700 years ago. Science Advances 3. e1601877.

Zgusta, Richard. 2015. The peoples of Northeast Asia through time. Precolonial ethnic and cultural processes along the coast between Hokkaido and the Bering Strait. Leiden.


Page Updated: 09-Nov-2017