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Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies 1st Edition
by Jared M. Diamond (Author)
语言的演变 – Austronesian
It is also surprising that Indonesians and Filipinos are so similar to tropical Southeast Asians and South Chinese in other physical features besides light skins and in their genes. A glance at a map makes it obvious that Indonesia offered the only possible route by which humans could have reached New Guinea and Australia 40,000 years ago, so one might naively have expected modern Indonesians to be like modern New Guineans and Australians. In reality, there are only a few New Guinean–like populations in the Philippine / western Indonesia area, notably the Negritos living in mountainous areas of the Philippines. As is also true of the three New Guinean–like relict populations that I mentioned in speaking of tropical Southeast Asia (Chapter 16), the Philippine Negritos could be relicts of populations ancestral to Wiwor’s people before they reached New Guinea. Even those Negritos speak Austronesian languages similar to those of their Filipino neighbors, implying that they too (like Malaysia’s Semang Negritos and Africa’s Pygmies) have lost their original language.
All these facts suggest strongly that either tropical Southeast Asians or South Chinese speaking Austronesian languages recently spread through the Philippines and Indonesia, replacing all the former inhabitants of those islands except the Philippine Negritos, and replacing all the original island languages. That event evidently took place too recently for the colonists to evolve dark skins, distinct language families, or genetic distinctiveness or diversity. Their languages are of course much more numerous than the eight dominant Chinese languages of mainland China, but are no more diverse. The proliferation of many similar languages in the Philippines and Indonesia merely reflects the fact that the islands never underwent a political and cultural unification, as did China.
Details of language distributions provide valuable clues to the route of this hypothesized Austronesian expansion. The whole Austronesian language family consists of 959 languages, divided among four subfamilies. But one of those subfamilies, termed Malayo-Polynesian, comprises 945 of those 959 languages and covers almost the entire geographic range of the Austronesian family. Before the recent overseas expansion of Europeans speaking Indo-European languages, Austronesian was the most widespread language family in the world. That suggests that the Malayo-Polynesian subfamily differentiated recently out of the Austronesian family and spread far from the Austronesian homeland, giving rise to many local languages, all of which are still closely related because there has been too little time to develop large linguistic differences. For the location of that Austronesian homeland, we should therefore look not to Malayo-Polynesian but to the other three Austronesian subfamilies, which differ considerably more from each other and from Malayo-Polynesian than the sub-subfamilies of Malayo-Polynesian differ among each other.
It turns out that those three other subfamilies have coincident distributions, all of them tiny compared with the distribution of Malayo-Polynesian. They are confined to aborigines of the island of Taiwan, lying only 90 miles from the South China mainland. Taiwan’s aborigines had the island largely to themselves until mainland Chinese began settling in large numbers within the last thousand years. Still more mainlanders arrived after 1945, especially after the Chinese Communists defeated the Chinese Nationalists in 1949, so that aborigines now constitute only 2 percent of Taiwan’s population. The concentration of three out of the four Austronesian subfamilies on Taiwan suggests that, within the present Austronesian realm, Taiwan is the homeland where Austronesian languages have been spoken for the most millennia and have consequently had the longest time in which to diverge. All other Austronesian languages, from those on Madagascar to those on Easter Island, would then stem from a population expansion out of Taiwan.
WE CAN NOW turn to archaeological evidence. While the debris of ancient village sites does not include fossilized words along with bones and pottery, it does reveal movements of people and cultural artifacts that could be associated with languages. Like the rest of the world, most of the present Austronesian realm—Taiwan, the Philippines, Indonesia, and many Pacific islands—was originally occupied by hunter-gatherers lacking pottery, polished stone tools, domestic animals, and crops. (The sole exceptions to this generalization are the remote islands of Madagascar, eastern Melanesia, Polynesia, and Micronesia, which were never reached by hunter-gatherers and remained empty of humans until the Austronesian expansion.) The first archaeological signs of something different within the Austronesian realm come from—Taiwan. Beginning around the fourth millennium B.C., polished stone tools and a distinctive decorated pottery style (so-called Ta-p’en-k’eng pottery) derived from earlier South China mainland pottery appeared on Taiwan and on the opposite coast of the South China mainland. Remains of rice and millet at later Taiwanese sites provide evidence of agriculture.
Ta-p’en-k’eng sites of Taiwan and the South China coast are full of fish bones and mollusk shells, as well as of stone net sinkers and adzes suitable for hollowing out a wooden canoe. Evidently, those first Neolithic occupants of Taiwan had watercraft adequate for deep-sea fishing and for regular sea traffic across Taiwan Strait, separating that island from the China coast. Thus, Taiwan Strait may have served as the training ground where mainland Chinese developed the open-water maritime skills that would permit them to expand over the Pacific.
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发表于 2019-10-15 20:19:05
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