Language Relations across Bering Strait
Reappraising the archaeological and linguistic evidence
In 1962, Morris Swadesh (1907-1967), the linguist, anthropologist and prominent McCarthy era victim best remembered for his much-debated theory of dating linguistic divergence by a cognate count on a word list of 'core vocabulary' known as 'glottochronology', wrote a paper entitled 'Linguistic relations across Bering Strait' (American Anthropologist, 64). With typical swashbuckling briskness, he attempted to show that the by then well-established Eskimo-Aleut linguistic family straddling the Arctic gateway to the New World was genealogically related to the Chukchi-Koryak-Kamchadal language family of Siberia, also known as 'Luoravetlan', a term derived from the Chukchi autonym meaning 'real human being'.
By WOLFGANG BEHR
Already in 1924, Edward Sapir (1884-1939) had mused about this imposing remote connection in a letter to Alfred Kroeber (1876-1960), yet little substantial work had ensued. Even earlier, an intra-Siberian long distance link between Chukotko-Kamchatkan and Uralic (sometimes including 'Altaic') had been proposed by Martin Frobisher (ca. 1535-1594), the Elizabethan explorer of the Northwest Passage, which was resuscitated by the eminent Danish linguist Rasmus Rask (1787-1832), and further developed by such illustrous scholars as Christiaan C. Uhlenbeck (1866-1951), Aurélien Sauvageot (1897-1988), Roman O. Jakobson (1896-1982), Karl E. Bouda (1901-1982), Demitri B. Shimkin (1916-1994), and Knut Bergsland (1914-1998), in various impressionistic papers during the 1940s and 1950s.
Slightly altering Swadesh's title, Fortescue sets out on a full-fledged study of the linguistic typology and prehistory of the languages clustering around the Beringian bottleneck. Once again contributing to, and making excellent use of the tremendous recent progress in the linguistic reconstruction of all language families involved, Fortescue also draws upon the rapidly accumulating body of archaeological and genetic evidence to develop integrated scenarios of the 'Greater Beringian' past. The book's central thesis is that Eskimo-Aleut, Uralic, Yukagiric, and, with certain reservations, Chukotko-Kamchatkan (including Itelmen), all derive from a common 'Uralo-Siberian' (US) ancestor, believed to have been spread out over a more southerly Siberian habitat between lake Baykal and the Sayan region some 8000 years BP. The speakers of the proto-languages are thought to have migrated from this forested interaction zone to their present locations in successive, partly overlapping northward movements along the great riverine pathways of Siberia during the late Mesolithic.
Wise enough to consider proof of the US hypothesis by exclusive recourse to the comparative method impossible, Fortescue combines straightforward historical reconstructions of each family with diagnostic bundles of typological features. This generates complex linguistic profiles, which may indicate divergence from a common ancestor, or in less favourable situations, of prolonged contact. The US ancestor, crystallizing through lexical correspondences detailed in several hundred cognate sets, is thus not conceived of as a proto-language sensu stricto, but as a 'mesh' a cover term for anything ranging from Sprachbunds, to mixed languages to 'conventional' proto-languages. The mesh concept, obviously again inspired by Swadesh's use of the term ('The mesh principle in comparative linguistics', Anthrop. Linguistics, 1.2 (1959); not quoted) has to be sharply distinguished from megalocomparativism in the vein of Ruhlen and his followers. Pushing the comparative method as far as it goes, combining it with non-trivial clusters of typological properties, and integrating the results into a geographical framework, brings to mind the work of the late Mantarô J. Hashimoto (1932-1987) on 'typo-geography' and 'language diffusion on the Asian continent'. It is doubtful, however, whether Fortescue's morphosyntactically oriented approach would be equally well applicable to the linguistic families Hashimoto was most concerned with -- Sino-Tibetan, Tai-Kadaic, 'Altaic', and Austroasiatic -- since their descendants are morphologically rather impoverished, and thus offer less surface hold for the unravelling of remote genealogies.
Delineating the characteristics of the envisaged hyperborean mesh naturally implies consideration of many unrelated language families or meshes, both to the south of US (Tungusic, Nivx, Yeniseian, Mongolic, Turkic, Koreanic, Japonic) and in the New World (Eyak-Athabaskan-Tlingit +- Haida, i.e. Sapir's 'Na-Dene', Salishan, Wakashan, Chimakuan, i.e. Frachtenberg's 'Mosan'). Fortescue does an excellent job of comparing data from many non-US languages with his framework of diagnostic US typological parameters. He occasionally invokes contact-induced remote convergence beyond US as an explanatory device, thus necessitating mind-boggling time frames. Yet he is consistently modest enough to stress the hypothetical character of such speculations. The book may therefore be regarded as a well-balanced plea for the further integration of linguistic typology into the study of historical linguistics, and, with its inclusion of archaeological data, as an enlivening interdisciplinary approach to 'long-range' linguistics beyond the prevailing internecine atmosphere.
Fortescue's decision not to place too much emphasis on mitochondrial DNA studies, without assuming a totally defeatist position on prehistoric population genetics, seems fully warranted in retrospect. The widely popularized correlation between Greenberg's tripartite linguistic (from Amerind to Na-Dene to Eskaleut) New World entry theory with haplotype group distributions during the early and mid-1990s always seemed simply too good to be true. It has meanwhile given way to a bewildering variety of competing analyses based on much increased sample sizes, and extending to nuclear DNA and Y-chromosome polymorphisms. During the last five years almost every conceivable settlement scenario from an early single entry to complex back- and forward movements correlating with up to ten distinctive haplogroups has been entertained in the literature (cf. M.V. Mousalve et al., Proc. Roy. Soc. London, B, 266/1434, 1999; Y.B. Starikovskaya et al., Am. J. Hum. Genet 63.5 (1998); T. Schurr, American Scientist, (May-June 2000)). What is becoming increasingly clear is, it seems, an old truism: while geographical distance of populations tends to correlate with genetic proximity, there is no clear-cut relationship between genetic distribution and linguistic affiliation. This caveat also applies to another much quoted coincidence between genetic arguments for an early colonization of the Americas and linguist Johanna Nichols' assumption (Language, 66 (1990)) that the diversity of North American Indian languages would require a time depth of at least 35.000 years bp, and must thus long predate the Clovis (before 13.500 bp) and even the more recently recognized Chilean Monte Verde (before 14.500 bp) archaeological horizons. As Daniel Nettle has shown (Proc. Nat. Acad. Sci. USA, 96 (1999)), Nichols' linguistic argument is flawed, since it assumes that language stock diversity accrues diachronically at a constant rate, while empirical models and simulations would predict that, if anything, the contrary was the case.
Throughout the book, Fortescue stresses that, the chronic dischronicity and dislocation of genetic and linguistic affiliations in the Beringian, and, indeed, the entire Pacific rim area, reflects the common occurence of wholesale language shift, sustained interaction or admixture, and, indeed, many instances of language extinction. Much of this was conditioned by the subsistence patterns of small-scale hunter-gatherer populations moving back and forth over a vast territory. The varying climatic conditions, generating sharply limited intervals for passages to the New World, as well as temporary cul-de-sac refuges on the American side of the bottleneck, constitute unique diachronic slots and spatial points of reference. They are precious parameters for the modelling of the interaction between population and language movements in prehistory, to be tested in other linguistic areas. Fortescue convincingly shows that the patterning of shared, but globally aberrant linguistic properties on both sides of the Bering Strait bottleneck, is suggestive of some four or five separate entries into the New World. There the 'funneling turbulence' caused the periodically available narrow land bridge, would have resulted in linguistic mingling in the 'residual zone' around the intake side, and in the accelerated fanning out of unusual traits into the vast 'spread-zone' of the Americas on the output side.
If there is any drawback to this exciting book, it is the unpleasant typography of its hastily edited computer printout. There are numerous typing errors, missing references and more suchlike mistakes, but it seems that this occasional sloppiness never affects primary data. The poor layout is more painful with the fifty-three useful hand-drawn maps (pp. 252-304), some of which plot the geographical distribution of the languages over time (nos. 1-8), others showing the clustering of the crucial typological feature bundles (nos. 9-53). Finally, the three-page general index should have been supplemented by an index verborum, including protoforms.
On balance, this brave, but prudent book deserves to be read by specialists from all sciences dealing with the prehistory of Trans-Bering Strait contacts as well as by historical linguists interested in methodologies of deep comparison. And if all these theoretical trajectories of remote relationships strike the reader as too elusive to be easily palatable, I recommend reading the book against the canvas of Fred Mayer's wonderful photographs of the 'forgotten peoples', with whom Fortescue is dealing as a sober linguist should (Vergessene Völker im wilden Osten: Sibirien, Zürich: Scalo (1993)). Peoples, whose quickly obsolescing languages are of paramount importance for a fuller understanding of Eurasian prehistory and settlement in the Americas. Peoples, it must be added, whose chances for linguistic and ethnic survival over the next decades are deplorably poor.
Michael Fortescue, Language Relations across Bering Strait. Reappraising the Archaeological and Linguistic Evidence (Open Linguistic Series), London and New York: Cassell (1998), x + 307 pp., ISBN 0-304-70330-3.
Dr Wolfgang Behr is Reader in Chinese History and Philosophy at Ruhr-University, Bochum, Germany.
E-mail: Wolfgang.Behr@ruhr-uni-bochum.de