needs of speakers who cultivate and consume a particular plant. Some words may be inherited from the vocabulary of the ancestral hunter-gatherers who collected the plant in the wild: especially names for the parts of the cultivated plant— the stalk, leaves, ears, grains, husks, awns, etc. Others, such as the name of the plant, will probably have to be created anew, since during a shift to cultivation gathering of the wild plant will continue for a while and speakers will need two distinct names for the wild and the cultivated plant. For the purposes of this paper, the most interesting words are those whose earliest documented meaning is specific to rice. All the models we have for the expansion of rice suppose that rice cultivation spread across language boundaries. This paper aims, first, at documenting vocabulary transfers which can be taken as the linguistic side of transfers of rice cultivation; second, at identifying chains of language groups linked together by transfers of rice vocabulary and third, at identifying lack of rice vocabulary transfers between groups. The inference is that if languages show no evidence of having borrowed any rice-specific words from any other group, their linguistic ancestors may have been involved in an independent start of cultivation. Naturally, when rice cultivation spreads across a language boundary, we do not expect that the entire rice vocabulary of the donor language will be borrowed by the receiving language: new words can easily be created using the receiving language’s own resources: for instance, a new word for ‘irrigated paddy field’ may easily be created by compounding ‘water’ with ‘field’ or ‘ground’. Especially if the speakers of the receiving language already cultivate another cereal, words relating to that other cereal can be re-used for rice. But with certain notions, a lexical borrowing is the more likely option. Especially with the name of the dehusked, ready-to-cook grain, a group adopting rice cultivation will have first become acquainted with ready-tocook rice grains through trade, as an exotic food: objects of trade normally spread with their name.
East Asian language families with a reconstructible rice vocabulary
In certain East Asian language families, rice-specific terms may be reconstructed using the comparative method from the descendants back to the proto-language. The following language families and subgroups have a reconstructible vocabulary of rice-specific terms: Austronesian, Austroasiatic, Tai-Kadai (branch of Austronesian), Hmong-Mien (a.k. a. Miao-Yao), Sino-Tibetan, Korean and Japonic. The following do not: Tungusic, Mongolic and Turkic. This means that the speakers of proto-Austronesian (c.3000 BCE), protoSino-Tibetan (c.3500–4000 BCE), proto-Austroasiatic (date unknown, perhaps comparable to Sino-Tibetan), proto-Tai-Kadai (c.1000–500 BCE), proto-Hmong-Mien (c.500–200 BCE), Korean (?) and Japonic (c.300–500 CE) knew rice and—presumably—cultivated it.
East Asian rice vocabularies
Japanese and Korean
The Japanese and Korean people cultivate temperate japonica varieties. The two languages may be genetically related (Whitman 1985, 2011), but while the inherited vocabulary that these languages share includes an agricultural component (‘field’, ‘millet’), clear evidence for rice-related words is missing (Robbeets, p.c. July 2011). Japanese and Korean thus probably acquired rice cultivation after their separation (Unger 2008). Below we will see that the Japanese word kome ‘dehusked rice’ is a probable loanword from a preAustronesian language, suggesting that the linguistic ancestors of the Japanese acquired cultivation of (japonica) rice from speakers of an eastern language within the macrofamily I call Sino-Tibetan-Austronesian, with whom they were once in contact.
Austronesian
The Austronesian family is generally regarded as originating in a migration to Taiwan of fishing and farming groups from the mainland, c.3500–3000 BCE. The proto-language first diversified in Taiwan; a migration out of Taiwan c.2000 BCE resulted in the establishment, perhaps in the Philippines, of an Austronesian language (‘Proto-Malayo-Polynesian’) ancestral to all the Austronesian languages outside of Taiwan. Knowledge of rice by the proto-Austronesians is widely recognized by linguists based on three reconstructed items: proto-Austronesian *pajay ‘rice plant’, *Semay ‘rice as food’ and *beRas ‘husked rice’. The latter includes a monosyllabic root[1]*-Ras with meaning ‘fruit, flesh’ etc. implying that at some point, perhaps before proto-Austronesian (but conceivably still in proto-Austronesian), the meaning was ‘fruit, especially dehusked rice’. The Formosan vocabulary of millet has been under-recorded by investigators: it is possible that reflexes of *beRas mean ‘millet grain’ in more languages than is currently assumed.[2] Large quantities of carbonized rice grains were
discovered in 2002–2003 at Nan Kuan Li, a lowland site on
- ↑ Austronesian roots are meaning-associated syllables that recur at the end of independently reconstructible words, without the preceding syllable(s) being recognizable morphemes. They represent pre-protoAustronesian monosyllabic words. See Wolff (2010).
- ↑ In Puyuma, a language of SE Taiwan, bəras means ‘husked grain of rice or millet’ (field notes, September 12, 2002).
