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| Asian Civilization Research from the Perspective of the Linguistics |
| Cheng Gong1,2, Liu Jiaqi1 |
1.School of International Studies, Zhejiang University, Hangzhou 310058, China
2.The Institute of Asian Civilizations, Zhejiang University, Hangzhou 310058, China |
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Abstract This paper explores the possible ways that linguistics, broadly construed as the study of both the spoken and written forms of human language, can contribute to the understanding of Asian civilizations. It is argued that insights may be gained by investigating the following fields of research. The first one concerns the genesis and disposal of language families. One striking fact about Asia is that it was the homeland of some of the most important phyla of languages, as 7 out of the world’s top 10 language families originated from two regions at the two extremities of this continent. One is the Futile Crescent, with Afro-Asiatic, Indo-European, Caucasian, and, possibly, Dravidian (which may be traced back to the now extinct Elamite) families; and the other is the Yangtze-Yellow River Basin, with Sino-Tibetan, Tai-Kadai, Austro-Asiatic, Austronesian, and the Miao-Yao (Hmong-Mien) families. These families together command 5.3 billion speakers, accounting for about 74% of the world’s population today. Moreover, the top 10 languages with the largest number of speakers all belong to these families. This prominence in language can be profitably employed in the studies of Asian civilizations, especially if we take the well-known Farming/Language Dispersal Hypothesis as a guideline, according to which early civilizations were brought about by the advent of agriculture, which offered better substance economy than hunting-gathering, leading to a dramatic increase in population, sedentary villages and towns, and the essential social and productive foundations of the first civilizations.The second area that linguistics may shed lights on the study of Asian civilizations is language contacts, by which speakers of different languages (or different dialects) interact with one another, leading to a transfer of linguistic features in various degrees. Such contacts offer a glimpse into the intimacy and the frequency of the interactions between and among different population groups, and more importantly, the nature of loanwords and other features into the contacting languages. The study of contact-induced areal diffusion, where similarities of linguistic features in terms of construction types, grammatical categories and organization of lexical and grammatical meaning, is also a helpful source of information about the communications of different populations as in the well-known case of Mainland Southeast Asian area. Moreover, interethnic communications are also evidenced by special languages which mixed features from different languages such as pidgins and creoles, as well as mixed languages generated in multilingual settings, including Sri Lankan Malay, and some varieties of Chinese like Daohua, Wutun and Tangwang languages. Intimate connections between population migration and language contacts can also be profitably investigated in the study of Asian civilizations.Writing, widely considered as one of the most important products of human civilization, is undoubtedly yet another area that linguistics can contribute to the study of civilizations in Asia. Early Asian civilizations and their writings may be deciphered in tandem as Asia is the land that witnessed the invention of the world’s first writing system, the cuneiform script, as well as the ancestor of most alphabetic systems, the Phoenician alphabet. Major script families can unveil a lot about the spread and spheres of different civilizations. There are three of them: Brāhmī, Arabic, and Chinese, representing Hinduism-Buddhism, Islam, and Confucianism respectively. Moreover, the huge amount of literature in the form of translation testifies the intensity of cultural exchanges on the continent.Building on a demonstration of the significance of linguistics in the field of Asian civilization studies, the present paper further examines some possible directions that linguistics can be better integrated into the study of Asian civilizations. It is suggested that while an increased willingness and greater efforts are needed, a synthesis with adjacent disciplines is required, as each discipline has its own advantages and limitations. So far as linguistics is concerned, its advantage over some other disciplines such as archaeology and genetics lies in the fact that it has a complete database in living languages and a reconstructed database from anciently written languages. Its limitations, however, are obvious, given the fact that present technologies do not permit the reconstruction to go too far beyond preliterate times. It is therefore argued that linguists need to update their technology, and, more crucially, take a multidisciplinary approach with which they can build in-depth cooperation with scholars from adjacent disciplines such as archaeology and genetics, so as to make greater contributions to the study of Asian civilizations.
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Received: 06 April 2021
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2022, Vol. 52 
