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The Liao River in northeast China extends 1,400 kilometers. (provided by Wikimedia Commons)

Korean is one of several Transeurasian languages like Japanese, Tungusic, Mongolian and Turkish. The 98 so-called Altaic languages are distributed in a wide area from Turkey to Mongolia in the west and Korea, Japan and the Kamchatka Peninsula of the Russian Far East.

The most distinctive characteristic of Transeurasian languages is the grammatical order of the object preceding the predicate. Other unique traits are the lack of conjunctions or related pronouns found in English, vowel harmony between vowels of the same type, and modifiers coming before nouns.

The origin of Transeurasian languages has spurred heated debate in academia because of the complicated history of population, language dispersion and agricultural transmission in such a vast area. The roots of such languages were generally considered to trace back to nomads active in the Central Asian plains some 4,000 years ago. In their journey from East to West, these travelers are believed to have managed the world’s widest spread of languages.

Yet the results of a joint international study led by the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History in Germany have findings vastly different from those of conventional wisdom. In a paper published in the international journal Nature, researchers from 35 think tanks in 11 countries including Korea said triangulation based on data from historical linguistics, archaeology and paleogenetics found that the roots of Transeurasian languages came from a language spoken by millet farmers around the Liao River in China about 9,000 years ago.

Millet is a grain that was cultivated before rice farming began.

Millet, a golden grain, was the primary crop prior to rice. (provided by Wikimedia Commons)

The researchers created a linguistic family tree with 3,193 agricultural and food-related vocabulary sets in 98 languages in the region and analyzed data on similarities between artifacts from 255 historical sites and dating of 269 ancient crops from historical sites; 19 ancient genomes collected from the Amur River, Korea and Japan, and 23 previously released ancient genomes from the Transeurasian region; and the genomes of 2,000 modern people.

The team found that the expansion of the Transeurasian language originated with millet farmers in the Liao River valley of northeastern China migrating east and west 9,000 years ago in the early Neolithic period. The population there is said to have increased in the early days of millet cultivation, some 9,000 to 7,000 years ago, causing people to disperse. Some of them went east 6,500 years ago and formed the roots of the Korean language after reaching the west coast of the Korean Peninsula and Primorsky Krai in Russia.

Rice farming, in general, tends to retain populations because it requires additional labor, the team said. Millet grows well in barren land but has a low yield per unit area, thus showing a pattern of expanding settlements.

The team said a new analysis of ancient Korean genomes from Yokji Island in South Gyeongsang Province found that the Jomon people — ancestors of the Japanese previously believed to have existed only in Japan — lived on the island and reproduced with the natives there.

Later, residents of Liaodong and Shandong in China 3,300 years ago moved to the Korean Peninsula and added rice, barley and wheat to their crop, and 3,000 years ago, these crops were found to have spread to Kyushu, Japan. As prehistoric Japan transitioned from the Jomon to the Yayoi period, the team said a “linguistic shift” toward the Japanese language occurred.

Researchers work at an excavation site on Japan’s Miyako Island. (provided by the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History)

Martine Robbeets, a Max Planck researcher who spearheaded the study, told the British daily The Guardian that while the progenitors of the Transeurasian languages grew broomcorn millet in the Liao River valley, the originators of the Sino-Tibetan language family farmed foxtail millet at roughly the same time in China’s Yellow River region, paving the way for a separate language dispersal.

This “agricultural hypothesis” featuring farmers in the areas around the Liao River in northeastern China 9,000 years ago completely contradicts the longstanding “pastoralist hypothesis” based on the era, region and lifestyle of nomads in Central Asia’s plains 4,000 years ago. Thus, further research into the former study’s results is needed.

“Powerful nations such as Japan, Korea and China are often pictured as representing one language, one culture and one genetic profile. But a truth that makes people with nationalist agendas uncomfortable is that all languages, cultures and humans, including those in Asia, are mixed,” Robbeets said.

By Kwak No-pil, senior staff writer

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