1.2.4 History and Interaction of Human Populations of Pre-tribal Epoch According to Linguistic Data Interdisciplinary Approach)
Alexei S. Kassian
Project Leader
Project period
2020-2025
Context of Research Project within a Subject of Human Capital
Replenishing modern human capital is hardly possible without knowing the history of the mankind. A more detailed acquaintance with our past allows us to rethink the prospects and avoid many mistakes. Along with genetics and archaeology, comparative historical linguistics today is one of the three disciplines underlying interdisciplinary research on the prehistory of human populations, ancient migrations, genealogical and areal connections of the world’s ancient population. Comparing the basic (i.e. culturally independent) vocabulary today is the most popular and justified method of reconstructing phylogenetic trees for the languages under study. The integration of the results into the CLLD lexical database format, which is popular today, will make it possible to exchange data with similar foreign projects
Project Aim
Collecting 110-word lists for the languages of the world, primarily for regions in which active migration processes have taken place over the past 10 thousand years; create genealogical classification construction of the surveyed languages; conduct interdisciplinary research with geneticists and archaeologists on the reconstruction of prehistoric migrations and connections between ancient human populations, as well as translate databases into the international CLLD format
Project Objectives:
- Collecting high-quality lexical lists for a number of regions whose ancient pre-written history is not clear enough, which will allow reconstructing the basic part of the dictionary for the proto-languages of these language groups and families
- Reconstructing lexical lists for proto-languages of a deeper level
- Making a phylogenetic analysis of material with implications for interdisciplinary research in collaboration with geneticists and archaeologists
- Porting databases to the CLLD format, which is popular now among modern researchers
Key Findings
2020
In collaboration with paleogeneticists from David Reich Lab (Harvard University, USA), the first stage of research on the oldest migrations of human populations in Beringia and Alaska has been carried out: lists of the basic vocabulary of the Nivkh, Chukchi-Kamchatka language families and the Na-Dene language family have been collected and analyzed. Under the aegis of the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History (Jena, Germany), an online database Moscow Lexical Database (MosLex) has been launched, containing annotated lists of the basic vocabulary of the languages of the world. The database has been created using Cross-Linguistic Linked Data technology developed at the Max Planck Institute, and has been included in the official catalog of databases of this institute
2021
Collection of lexical lists for Athabaskan languages has been implemented. An interdisciplinary study has been conducted in collaboration with geneticists on the settlement of America. The collection and reconstruction of lexical lists for Indo-European languages has been carried out. New methods of linguistic phylogeny have been developed. Input data (both initial data collection and subsequent processing: elimination of word-formation drift and homoplastic optimization) of linguistic phylogeny have been prepared
2022
A study on the genealogical classification of the Turkic family languages has been conducted. Formal methods have been used to obtain a tree that fully satisfies the ideas about the history of the Turkic peoples, their migrations and contacts with each other. The presented analysis confirms the status of the Chuvash language as the first outlier and suggests the subsequent multifurcation of the Proto-nuclear Turkic language into eight branches. It is revealed that the Siberian Turkic group is a purely areal unity, i.e. The Yakut-Dolgan, Tuva-Tofalar, Khakass-Mrass, Saryg-Yugur and Altai clades do not form; the Mountain Altai language is united with the Kipchak languages in a separate taxon, this does not show particularly close relations with the Kyrgyz, who belong to another Kipchak subgroup; and Karluk is a low-level taxon within the Kipchak clade.
Map of Turkic languages
Publications
Kassian, A., Zhivlov M.,Starostin G., Trofimov A., Kocharov P., Kuritsyna A., Saenko M. Rapid radiation of the inner Indo-European languages: an advanced approach to Indo-European lexicostatistics. Linguistics 59, no. 4 (2021)
Conferences
International Conference on Comparative Historical Linguistics Readings in Memory of S. Starostin (RU) (Moscow, Russia, June 24-25, 2021)
Expert seminar The History and Interaction of Human Populations of the Pre-written Epoch According to Linguistics Data in collaboration with David Reich Lab (Harvard University) (RU) (Moscow, Russia, November 14, 2021)