While trying to figure out if Muskogean (the language family to which Choctaw and Chickasaw, among others, belong) is considered to be part of any larger grouping (apparently some people take it for granted it’s part of the “Hokan-Siouxan” group while others treat it as independent, Wikipedia calls Hokan itself “a hypothetical grouping of a dozen small language families spoken in California and Mexico” and says “few linguists today expect Hokan as a whole to prove to be valid,” and I’m certainly not qualified to even have a thought about the matter), I ran across an interesting paper (pdf file; abstract here) by Prof. George Aaron Broadwell called “Reconstructing Proto-Muskogean Language and Prehistory: Preliminary results” that’s chock-full of the kind of detailed lexical comparisons and reconstructions I so enjoy. One thing that makes it exotic from the point of view of someone trained in Indo-European (where the inherited vocabulary includes terms for ‘beech,’ ‘birch,’ ‘wolf,’ and ‘salmon’) is the list of “Reconstructable Proto-Muskogean terms,” which includes words for chestnut, chicken snake, chickenhawk, chigger, chinquapin, chipmunk, civet cat (?), clam/spoon, copperhead, corn, cotton, and crawfish, to take only the c‘s (the full list is on pages 15-16 of the paper). But what impelled me to post about it is the point he makes about a common problem in historical linguistics:
How can we reconcile the presence of a word for corn
with the generally accepted archaeological position that corn was not present in the southeast until considerably later, ca. A.D. 700?…
A common approach in dismissing linguistic evidence that does not correlate with the archaeological results is to suggest that the reference of the words has changed through time (cf. Renfrew 1988). For example, the word for corn might have originally referred to some other grain. When corn was introduced to the southeast the word for the older grain might have been applied to the new-comer.However, it seems unlikely that speakers of all the different languages in the family would have coincidentally decided to call the new grain the same thing. Once a language has split into two mutually unintelligable daughter languages, the speakers do not consult with each other about naming new phenomena.
The unlikeliness of this hypothesis increases when we realise that we must also assume that the words for shucking corn and corn riddle originally applied other actions and objects, and that once again widely separated people have coincidentally chosen the same words for actions and objects associated with the new grain.
I therefore conclude that presence of a word for corn in Proto-Muskogean constitutes a genuine conflict between the linguistic and archaeological data.
I wish all historical linguists were so forthright about the difficulties involved in trying to correlate linguistic and archeological evidence.
Oh, and I learned a new word, lamb’s-quarters (Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate, the copyeditor’s bible, hyphenates it; the AHD does not), the common name for Chenopodium album, a kind of goosefoot that M-W says is “sometimes used as greens” but AHD simply, and unkindly, calls a “weed”; it’s taahwa in Creek and taani’ in Chickasaw. You can get a USDA “plant profile” here, see some more pictures here [link dead as of 2017], and get ideas about collecting and eating it here [link dead as of 2012]. I’d still like to know how it got its striking name, though.
I was smiling right through that excerpt; I only realised when I was fifteen or so that the “Corn” in “Corn Flakes” implied a specific grain, the old usage having stayed around on the east coast of the Atlantic.
Of course the development of the meaning in English doesn’t have anything to do with the development of the word for Maize in Muskogean, but using ambiguous language [well, yes, it’s not, really, because it’s clear Broadwell is using American English–still some part of me is aware of the possible confusion] to describe ambiguous data is the sort of approach to saying nothing at all that I would laugh at from Flann O’Brien.
Is this the same paper where he discusses the problems of branches of Muskogean? I think it’s interesting how the four or seven languages of Muskogean are classified in more ways ways by different linguists than you might think possible for such a relatively small and transparently related family.
Yes, it’s the same paper.
Lamb’s-quarters: One theory says that the mature leaf looks like a cut of lamb’s meat––the quarter. An article at http://www.rawfoodinfo.com/articles/art_LambsQuarTreasury.html says another common name for it is “mutton tops”, which supports the looking like a cut of meat theory. Not sure how that fits in with looking like a goosefoot (Linneaus)or with its zillions of other common names: baconweed, cenizo blanco, dirtweed, dirty dick, fat hen, frost blite, hélunjóli, hvidmelet gåsefod, jauhosavikka …
“However, it seems unlikely that speakers of all the different languages in the family would have coincidentally decided to call the new grain the same thing. Once a language has split into two mutually unintelligable daughter languages, the speakers do not consult with each other about naming new phenomena.”
Not necessarily, cf the problems with the word for ‘whiskey’ in Iroquois languages (all ‘cognate’ compounds meaning ‘fire-water’). Basically the diferent groups decided on the same word, a compound of ‘fire’ and ‘water’, which were both terms cognate between the different languages. That way you get a nice set of regular correspondences of an item that obviously post-dates the breakup of the family. The same is true for “washing machine” in Yolngu.
Does he happen to mention the Dravidian-origins theory?
OED: 1773 J. HAWKESWORTH Voy. III. 442 We also once or twice met with a plant like what the country people in England call *Lamb’s quarters, or Fat-hen. Evelyn (1699) does not mention it (or any of its other common names).
The meaning, I would guess, comes not from the part of the garden where the lambs hang out, but from some no longer obvious visual similarity between the leaf and the hindquarters of a lamb either living or dead.
On preview (long lunch), I see Janet has already brought up this theory. To lamb’s quarters, goosefoot, and fat hen, add pigweed for 4 domestic animal common names.
Also, I would take all the archeological dates for corn reaching a particular latitude with a considerable amount of salt.
Yes, corn could have been known before it was widely grown.
The linguistic time depth estimate is based on Swadesh’s standard rate of change, but I think I’ve heard of cases where this is known to give a very wrong estimate. Also, Johanna Nichols suggests languages with head-marking typology may destroy cognate evidence faster than dependent-marking languages that make up most of the familiar large Old World families.
Chenopodium/goose foot was actually a domesticated plant in the eastern US. It is now a common weed, but 2kya it was domesticated for larger seeds and was used extensively along with marsh elder and others as a major cereal until maize became important.
Archaeologists only have a few direct data points for the introduction of maize into Eastern US and it is very possible this date may change as new finds get dated. The best evidence is that it arrives circa AD 700, but it could have arrived earlier. At the beginning, it was used as as a minor food crop. Despite its unimportance as food early on, it appears to be ceremonially very important and is found in some interesting ritual contexts. This might be the clue to unravelling the linguistic mystery.
BTW, our best evidence is that betwen 1000-1200 AD maize becomes an important staple crop and begins to be used for 30-80% of the caloric intake. Our evidence for this comes from carbon isotpe analysis of skeletal remains and it is pretty unambiguous.
Patrick, are those dates just for the South-East US or for elsewhere too?
Edward Sapir, in the 1920’s, connected the Muskogean Indian languages most closely with Hokan-Siouan. Other linguists since then have felt that Sapir’s assesment was premature and have suggested Algonquin and even Mayan as closer relatives instead. I’m partial to Algonquin myself but still, nobody really knows.
Where an item or technology diffuses gradually from one group to the next, it seems quite plausible that the ones to whom it is new will calque the term used by those from whom they have acquired it, since it is very likely that they will understand their neighbors’ language. This process will lead to pseudo-cognates whose actual time-depth is less than it appears to be.
Also, a comment on Hokan, which is a group that I have studied. Nobody but the most extreme long-rangers takes Hokan-Siouan or any form of Macro-Hokan seriously anymore. There just isn’t decent evidence for them. Even core Hokan is considered unproven, and very likely not a family. Some of the “core Hokan” languages probably are related, but others are doubtful. In particular, it is fairly widely thought that Chumashan does not belong with the rest.
This is an interesting case in that there has never been any good evidence for Hokan. Hokan was cobbled together with tiny bits of evidence, almost all of it nothing but words that vaguely resemble each other. The sets of putative cognates were mostly tiny, regular sound correspondances non-existant. Hokan is to a large extent a relic of a period of unfettered speculation.
Thanks, Bill — I love hearing from people who are actually au courant with subjects where I have to depend on whatever snippets I happen upon.
Clarie – Those dates are definiely for the southeast, which I know best, and for much of the eastern U.S at least as far north as Ohio and Maryland. It would have been later for the northen part (New England, Great Lakes area) because maize required some genetic changes to adapt to the shorter summers.
Marianne Mithun in The Languages of Native North America (which is a fun book, Hat, you should consider getting a copy) doesn’t mention Hokan-Siouan at all, let alone any relationship between it and Muskogean. Hokan, Macro-Siouan (including Caddoan and Iroquoian) and Gulf (which hypothetically includes Muskogean together with various other Southeastern languages) are listed as “stocks”, in the sense of hypothetical related groups above the level of the family. Mithun is skeptical of all of them, particularly Gulf. Of Hokan she says
My mummy told me when I was little that they were called ‘lamb’s quarters’ because they were soft like little lambs. Folk etymology is grand! Lamb’s quarters were called ‘melde’ in Saxon, which is thought to be the root of such place names as Milden and Melbourn (Cambridgeshire). The plant was a staple food in Europe since prehistoric times – according to my well thumbed copy of Richard Mabey’s -Food for Free-, ‘. . . the seeds formed part of the last, ritual gruel fed to Tollund Man.’ The young leaves are quite tasty, rather like spinach.
Long ago Mary Haas connected Algonquian to Muskogean in a grouping she called ‘Macro-Algonquian’ (funnily, it wasn’t called ‘Macro-Muskogean’). No one takes this grouping seriously anymore, especially not Algonquianists. The two families are NOTHING alike typologically, save for being head-marking.
I thought there were basically TWO theorized groupings of Muskogean — one that has Chickasaw/Choctaw as the first branching, as opposed to the other that has Creek/Seminole as the first branch. Everyone seems to agree that these are the two ‘ends’ of the family, with Koasati/Alabama and Mikasuki intermediate between them.
The presence of a reconstructible word for corn in Proto-Muskogean doesn’t surprise me much. If archaeology has corn present in the southeast at AD 700, it probably was known a few centuries before that. At 500 AD the Muskogean languages probably weren’t that different yet, and they were probably still geographically pretty close together, so it seems entirely possible that some Muskogean dialect borrowed the word and passed it to all the others. If none of the dialects had undergone any of the relevant diagnostic sound changes yet, this borrowing would be indistinguishable from an inherited Proto-Muskogean etymon.
A similar analog from Algonquian is that Proto-Algonquian has a cleanly reconstructible word for ‘seal’, as in the animal. However, most people are rather uncomfortable locating the Proto-Algonquians anywhere where there were seals — the only candidate locations would be Hudson Bay, Lake Ontario, or the Maritimes, none of which work well for various reasons. So the compromise position now is that most researchers think the word arose at a later time after PA had broken up (but not by too much), and that the word was simply passed around among different sister dialects/languages.
David: Koasati and Mikasuki at opposite ends of the spectrum? From my readings, Koasati is closest to Alibamu, then Appalachee, and then Mikasuki. Mikasuki is often described as a language descended from Hitchiti. This passage at Access Geneology says http://www.accessgenealogy.com/native/tribes/creek/creekhist.htm
“The people speaking the cognate Hitchiti and Koasati were contemptuously designated as “Stincards” by the dominant Muscogee. The Koasati seem to have included the ancient Alibamu of central Alabama, while the Hitchiti, on lower Chattahoochee river, appear to have been the remnant of the ancient people of southeast Georgia, and claimed to be of more ancient occupancy than the Muscogee.”
A former student of Mvskoke, I have had a soft spot for Koasati for decades. It’s one of the most robust of Native American languages – 98% of the tribe in Louisiana still speak it. Hope they weren’t hit too bad by the latest Hurricanes.
Also,there were outlying languages like Natchez which are classified as tentatively within Muskogean. Natchez was spoken into the 1940s by the Sam family, with whom Mary Haas worked. Watt Sam’s son, Archie Sam, a noted Creek traditionalist and keeper of the flame for Natchez identity, continued searching for speakers of Natchez until his death in 1996.
Here is a comparative vocabulary of Atakapa, Tunica, Natchez and Chitimacha: http://www.native-languages.org/famgul_words.htm
Compare to Muskogean: http://www.native-languages.org/fammus_words.htm
Oops! Sorry David, I misread your post concerning Koasati / Mikasuki. Apologies. And my sources equating Natchez with Muskogean are out of date… that’s the problem of living 1000 kilometers from the nearest decent English language library.
As for Muskogean, what I meant was that the greatest distance in the family is clearly between Chickasaw/Choctaw on one hand, and Creek/Seminole on the other. Koasati/Alabama and Hitchiti/Mikasuki are intermediate between them, and share several isoglosses with both.
Natchez MIGHT be very distantly related to Muskogean, but it’s not ‘a Muskogean language’. It’s typologically rather similar to Muskogean, but that doesn’t necessarily mean anything. It’s very hard to find convincing cognates between Natchez and Muskogean. I personally think Natchez is just an isolate.
There’s a very nice sketch of Natchez by Geoff Kimball (speaking of Koasati) just published earlier this year in the Scancarelli/Hardy volume ‘Native Languages of the Southeastern United States’. Considering he worked entirely off fieldnotes from seventy years ago, he managed to figure out quite a lot.
Epazote is a Mexican chenepodium closely related to goosefoot/lambsquarters. It’s traditionally added to beans as a pot herb, where it’s believed to be an anti-flatulent.
If you’ve got a decent mercado in the area, you should be able to pick up some dried epazote year-round. (I’ve always found it in one of those cellophane packets hanging near the dried whole chilis.) Try adding it to a big pot of pinto beans. It’s got kind of a funky/musty taste that’s off-putting at first, and then you start to want more. “Oh, that’s strange,” you’ll say. “I don’t think I like it. Maybe one more taste….”
Yeah, I used to eat epazote when I lived in Astoria, Queens, with its booming Mexican population. Ever had huitlacoche? Sounds so much better than “corn smut”! Tastes good, too, and not like anything else I’ve ever eaten.
Hmmm. So far the comments haven’t mentioned the *other* lambs-quarters, Trillium erectum, also known colloquially as bethroot, birthroot, wakerobin, Indian balm, Indian shamrock, squaw root, and ground lily. That such an intriguing common name would be applied to two such distinct plants demonstrates the usual failing of common names. Alas, all my sources are silent as to the origin/association with lambs and quarters.
Unrelated languages in the New World? What happened to the paradigm of three waves of migration that was published with such fanfare ca. 1983?
Amerind, Na-Dene and Eskimo-Aleut. (Or was one of those Athabascan?) Blood types, dental patterns, and linguistics aided by computer analysis was said to have made sense out of it and archeologists pinned down the last two migrations to 2000BCE and 4000BCE although the first might be any of several times before 12000BCE. And they all originated in practically the same neighborhood in what is now northwestern China.
The second wave settled west of the Rockies and the third wave got stuck in the Arctic because the first wave was already well established everywhere else. And Kennewick Man couldn’t possibly be an ancestor of the Indians who live in Washington now because their ancestors didn’t arrive until 5,000 years after he died.
This was all starting to make nice neat sense, and now you say that there are languages in North America that don’t seem to be related to any others? What happened to the three-migration model?
BTW, you can grow your own epazote and save a fortune. Talk about a weed. If you can’t get the seeds online, buy the freshest stalks you can find and stick them in pots with Rootone. We live surrounded by redwoods with only a few hours of direct sunlight per day in the summer and the epazote practically took over our greenhouse.
GF: What happened to the paradigm of three waves of migration that was published with such fanfare ca. 1983?
It made a splash among non-linguists, but is still as bad as before as concerns linguistics.
Nobody contests the two, later Northen waves (Eskimo-Aleur and “Na-Dene”), which involve very obvious, very distinctive language families which have long been identified as such (except that hardly anyone still includes Haida under Na-Dene), but the people of the “first” migration from Asia (which probably occurred in “bursts” over a long period) were probably already diverse linguistically if not so much genetically: there are still many unrelated languages in China, there were probably many more of them in the past, and most of the migrants were probably not “Chinese”, although intermarriage through millennia would have blurred genetic distinctiveness.
The “evidence” for “Amerind” presented by Greenberg and Ruhlen is so full of errors of both data and methodology that the results cannot be taken seriously by competent persons. My own feeling is that the currently accepted classification of the languages of the Americas into about 120 separate language families (including Eskimo-Aleut and the reduced Na-Dene) is probably wrong, and that the number of superfamilies comparable to Indo-European will turn out to be much smaller, with “Amerind” split into a number of smaller units. But there is still a lot of work to be done before these results become established on a firm basis.
So much work, so little time, nobody wants to do it, and the main source of data perishes every day. There will come a time when we not only don’t know what went on, we won’t be able to know what went on.
~~ gloom, despair, excessive misery ~~
John Cowan: it’s worse than you think. A peculiarity of the field of North American native linguistics which repeatedly struck me is that a disturbing amount of data on various languages is never published because it doesn’t fit into gate-keepers’ presuppositions and theoretical orientation.
Or, of course, because nobody cares: a senior scholar in the field told me that there exists a reconstruction of the proto-language of an (accepted) North American language family, arrived at during a series of workshops some decades ago, which was never published because no academic press was interested. As a result, copies of the reconstruction were (when I was told this story, which was about three years ago) only in the hands of the three workshop organizers, one of whom was suffering from Alzheimer’s, one of whom was in prison, and the last of whom had mysteriously disappeared soon after his retirement.
Combine the above with the extreme hostility felt by many speakers of these languages regarding any claim that their languages “came” from anywhere, the racial identity politics and associated games that come with the topic, and you have a disturbingly warped field.
I heartily recommend a blog, “That moniyaw linguist” (moniyawlinguist.wordpress.com) if you (or anyone reading this: I suspect Marie-Lucie would like it) want to get a better idea as to what the field is like. Its author is an American in Canada who specializes in Plains Cree: if you go through the archives of you not only will learn a great deal about Plains Cree and other Algonquian languages, you will also learn a lot about some of the not-so-pleasant aspects of Academia and race relations in the Canadian West(and yes, I’m the Etienne who comments there).
~~ if it weren’t for bad luch, I’d have no luck at all ~~
M-L, a Hokan question. In a soft, impressionistic way langauges like Chimariko and Atsugewi feel like their structures are like Caddoan and Iroquoian, and considering the distnaces, that makes you wonder. Maybe languages have kind of a structual trajectory that carries them in the same general direction even after they separate. And those two Cali languages feel pretty different from Miwokan, well, South Sierra Miwok at least, which have an almost SAE feel.
I remember and old paper, maybe by Mary Haas or one of her first generation students, that compared verbal manner prefixes between Caddoan, and Siouan, as well as pronouns. Maybe it included Iroquoian. Long time ago. There is oral history to the effect that the Caddoans and the Iroquoians had a common ancestry, as some kind of entity.
Etienne: I like that blog. Thanks!
Jim, I am sorry but I know next to nothing about Hokan, except that “Hokan-Penutian” has always referred to a geographical not genetic grouping (the two groups have many representatives in Califonia). Miwokan is one of the Penutian families, and the Indo-European-like structures of some of these families were noticed by Sapir. I think that Caddoan and Siouan are often considered related, but I don’t know about Iroquoian. Mithun’s book would probably mention these controversies (Iroquoian is her major specialty).
—My own feeling is that the currently accepted classification of the languages of the Americas into about 120 separate language families (including Eskimo-Aleut and the reduced Na-Dene) is probably wrong, and that the number of superfamilies comparable to Indo-European will turn out to be much smaller, with “Amerind” split into a number of smaller units. But there is still a lot of work to be done before these results become established on a firm basis.
I am quite sure that Greenberg never claimed that Amerind was comparable to Indo-European in age.
Given Amerind’s dating to 14000 BP (or even earlier, if we include time in Beringia), it’s actually more than twice as old as Indo-European and should be compared with something more ancient, like proposed Nostratic or Eurasiatic.
*I don’t believe Amerind theory, but on different grounds – it seems apparent that there were two waves of advance into prehistoric America. One, represented by Clovis hunters from Beringia and second, a bit earlier, from coastal hunter-gatherers. The second group appears related to the Pacific coastal peoples similar to Ainus or ancient inhabitants of Philippines and Southeast Asia.
If at least some Indian language families are descended from the latter, their divergence from the other Amerindian groups could be measured in tens of thousands of years.
Etienne: a disturbing amount of data on various languages is never published because it doesn’t fit into gate-keepers’ presuppositions and theoretical orientation.
One problem is that most journals want to publish articles that will support particular theories, especially the fashionable ones deriving directly or indirectly from Chomsky’s work. Graduate students are also encouraged to publish this sort of thing. “Raw” or almost raw data can seldom be made to fit into the theoretical straitjacket, and therefore they are of no interest to the journals, for which the ideal format is a lot of theoretical discussion with a sprinkling of supportive data for some facet of the theory.
If at least some Indian language families are descended from the latter, their divergence from the other Amerindian groups could be measured in tens of thousands of years.
And any relationship would now be irrecoverable.
SFReader: I am quite sure that Greenberg never claimed that Amerind was comparable to Indo-European in age.
I am not talking about age. Most of the established families included among the ones constituting “Amerind” are of the order of Romance or Slavic. Larger subgroupings (which would be of the order of Indo-European) are not generally accepted (rightly or wrongly) but Greenberg used them uncritically.
Given Amerind’s dating to 14000 BP (or even earlier, if we include time in Beringia), it’s actually more than twice as old as Indo-European and should be compared with something more ancient, like proposed Nostratic or Eurasiatic.
This recommendation might be true IF “Amerind” was a valid construct and the starred forms given by Greenberg or Ruhlen represented genuine reconstructions based on solid data and methodology. None of these assumptions can be entertained given the huge number of errors and the lack of a solid basis for the starred forms, which G and R say are NOT means as reconstructions (but in that case, one wonders what they are meant to represent). The Nostraticists (whatever one thinks of their work) do accept Indo-European classifications and Proto-Indo-European reconstructions and the methodology that led to them, and do not attempt to classify the Nostratic languages and to reconstruct Proto-Nostratic from a haphazard collection of modern forms similar to each other in most of the languages of Eurasia, without regard to phonological correspondences or to things like the strong possibility of borrowings.
As for “dating” the non-existent “Amerind” (even you admit you don’t believe in it) I don’t think for a moment that migration into the Americas stopped for ever (or would still be impossible if it had not been for Columbus) after the land bridge was flooded over about 14,000 years ago. The Asian coast of the Pacific is full of peninsulas and islands, which would have allowed people with even simple boats to follow the coastline, encountering very few long stretches of open water. The major North Pacific current also curves from Japan along the Aleutians towards Alaska, British Columbia and California, and brings all sorts of flotsam to North America, occasionally including wrecked fishing boats from Asia. There have been fishing cultures with boats for millennia along the Asian coast, and during that period there have been climate fluctuations, the warmer times affording relatively safe and pleasant conditions for sea travel. If the indigenous inhabitants of Taiwan were able to use their boats to go South and ultimately (over a few thousand years) spread all over the Pacific Ocean, is it totally unlikely that some of them might have followed the coast and the currents North and East and entered the Americas, only a few millennia ago? And other peoples could have done the same at different times.
oops: … the starred forms, which G and R say are NOT meant as reconstructions…
Regarding pre-Columbian contact post-separation. There are two accepted cases – Eskimo expansion circa 1000 AD throughout Arctic Canada all way to Greenland(from Bering sea area, but probably from American side. But they came there from Siberia another millenium earlier)
And Na-Dene expansion, which is much older, 6000-5000 BC, probably.
I wouldn’t exclude possibility of others, but so far haven’t seen any evidence
–The Asian coast of the Pacific is full of peninsulas and islands, which would have allowed people with even simple boats to follow the coastline, encountering very few long stretches of open water.
The problem is that the Aleutian islands were inhabitted continously for 9000 years (and current Aleuts appear to be their direct descendants).
This would make very hard for any incoming tribes to use this 2000 km long island chain to cross from Asia to America.
In 18th century, it took about 50 years for Russians who had firearms, artillery and European sailing ships to conquer the archipelago.
Hard to see how any Stone Age tribal group could have done anything like this
SFR, Why do you need to involve conquest? We are not talking about armies, but more likely small groups of people. A hunting or farming people needs land to provide its livelihood, and existing occupants can be in the way, but a fishing people only needs a small allotment of land as a base from which to go to sea, in a region where fish and shellfish are abundant enough to be more than sufficient for the local population. For examle, for centuries people from Western Europe went to Newfoundland every year to fish for cod, yet the fishers themselves were not the ones to impose governments on the native people, nor did they make war with the natives or with each other for access to the fishing grounds, which in those days seemed inexhaustible. Even in the modern period, the arrival of a few Europeans in Africa or Asia or the Pacific Northwest did not necessarily lead to conquest (at least at first): like the Phoenicians and Greeks in the Mediterranean, the newcomers first established trading posts, some of which later evolved into cities, but they did not try to conquer the hinterland: peaceful relations were essential to commercial success.
As an example (at a later period) of Polynesians travelling to America, there is the case of the Polynesian-type Chumash canoe, on islands near Los Angeles. An archeologist (Terry Jones) and a linguist specializing in the Chumash language (Kathryn Klar) have established that the distinctive canoe-building technique used in one of the islands, together with a few associated words, must have come from Polynesia. According to them, a single Polynesian individual could have been sufficient to introduce the Chumash to the technique and the words, although that seems less likely than one or more boatloads of travellers. The boatbuilder(s) would have had to live among the Chumash for some time (and to learn the language) in order to have such an impact, but there is no evidence that the interaction was not peaceful. Going back to the Aleutians, a group of Asian migrants could have stayed in a small section of the first island, later moving to the next island, etc, without “conquering” the island chain, instead moving East from time to time until they reached a place on the mainland where they could settle permanently. I don’t mean that one small group would have eventually peopled the continent (where humans were already established), since others could have followed the same route from time to time.
—Why do you need to involve conquest? We are not talking about armies, but more likely small groups of people. A hunting or farming people needs land to provide its livelihood, and existing occupants can be in the way, but a fishing people only needs a small allotment of land as a base from which to go to sea, in a region where fish and shellfish are abundant enough to be more than sufficient for the local population.
I’ve read enough 17-18-19th centuries accounts of peoples of far Northeast Siberia, Alaska, Aleutian islands, Pacific Northwest, etc to understand sheer imposibility for these warlike peoples to engage in a benevolent behaviour of the sort you describe.
Any small group of people arriving to these waters would have been immediately killed or enslaved (or perhaps even worse if some contemporary accounts of ritual cannibalism are believed)
SFR, we are talking about hundreds, possiblly thousands of years ago, in places which were mostly sparsely populated. Why do you think there are so many small pockets of unrelated languages along the West Coast, in places where there are few possibilities for settlement because the coast is so rugged? Those warlike people you are talking about also traded with each other and intermarried, in addition to fighting. Fighting was suspended during the fishing season, sometimes allowing several tribes to use the same fishing grounds (whether freely or in return for some payment). And new slaves with valuable skills making them indispensable can survive in a new environment, eventually blending with the population (perhaps that was the Chumash case). Also, a single fishing boat drifting away from home would indeed be vulnerable, but (like the Polynesian ancestors) deliberate migrants probably travelled in groups, including families, and carried weapons as well as food and other supplies, so instead of being killed by the inhabitants of a new place, migrants arriving at, say, a small cove might themselves have killed the few people they found there, and claimed the place for themselves.
I’ve read enough 17-18-19th centuries accounts of peoples of far Northeast Siberia, Alaska, Aleutian islands, Pacific Northwest, etc to understand sheer imposibility for these warlike peoples to engage in a benevolent behaviour of the sort you describe.
Come on. Those peoples became “warlike” at least in part because of the behavior of the Russians they encountered, who immediately tried to kill or enslave them. As m-l says, we know nothing about the behavior of the indigenous populations millennia before the Russian conquest, and it is ludicrous to extrapolate from much later historical accounts.
Etienne, I apologize, but I accidentally deleted your comment — please repost it.
Jim: I believe Bill Poser once left a comment on a thread here at Casa Hat to the effect that scholars no longer believe in Hokan as a language family, and regard what (non-coincidental) similarities there are as being due to language contact.
As for Caddoan, Siouan and Iroquoian: all three have been suspected of being related. Based on what data I have seen (I am a historical linguist, but not an Americanist, so take this with a (modest) grain of salt) the case for a Caddoan-Iroquoian genetic relationship seems stronger than the case for either being related to Siouan.
SFReader: the Aleutian Islands may indeed have been inhabited for 9000 years or thereabouts, but the very fact that a single language, Aleut, itself part of a larger family (Eskimo-Aleutian), was spoken throughout the Aleutians shows very clearly that the inhabitants of those islands did not remain in “splendid isolation” for 9000 years, and for all we know they may have shifted languages repeatedly. For all we know perhaps they spoke a Penutian language before shifting to Proto-Aleut (I mention this possibility because the distribution of Penutian languages does suggest a maritime spread).
Marie-Lucie: of course, the migrations which brought Eskimo-Aleutian and Na-Dene to the New World needn’t have been the only later migrations to the New World. But such migrations might not have left new languages or language families: after all, no Polynesian language was durably transplanted to the New World, but this is no argument against the claim of Polynesian-Chumash contact.
Polynesian-type Chumash canoe
I actually read “Chuvash” for “Chumash” here and was thoroughly croggled. The Chuvash speak a highly aberrant Turkish language and live in Central Russia!
The Nostraticists (whatever one thinks of their work)
Nostraticists are probably wrong; Greenbergians are not even wrong. This is, as Mark Twain said in a different context, the difference between lightning and the lightning bug
-the Aleutian Islands may indeed have been inhabited for 9000 years or thereabouts, but the very fact that a single language, Aleut, itself part of a larger family (Eskimo-Aleutian), was spoken throughout the Aleutians shows very clearly that the inhabitants of those islands did not remain in “splendid isolation” for 9000 years, and for all we know they may have shifted languages repeatedly.
I wonder about mechanism of language change in such remote era.
Russians conquered Aleuts, reducing their population severalfold in the process, enslaved the men and had sex with their women (so thoroughly that modern Aleut “Y-chromosomes were characterized to haplogroups of mostly Russian, Scandinavian and Western European origin (approximately 85%), which is in stark contrast to the 3.6% of Aleut mtDNA lineages identified as non-Native American, and thus indicating a large degree of asymmetrical gene flow between European men and Aleut women.”)
And despite all this, Aleuts did not switch to Russian language (though if Russian rule continued for another century, they might have done this)
So I ask again, how the tribal group speaking proto-Aleut language managed to force their language on aboriginals? Was their conquest even more drastic?
— Those peoples became “warlike” at least in part because of the behavior of the Russians they encountered, who immediately tried to kill or enslave them.
I disagree strongly. We have plenty of suggestive info about pre-contact indigenous societies – fortified villages, interclan and intertribal warfare (including acts of genocide), competition over hunting, fishing or grazing (in case of reindeer tribes of arctic Siberia) grounds, widespread slavery (and in the Pacific Northwest even something resembling a slave-based class society)
All this happening without any Russian or European influence.
—-As m-l says, we know nothing about the behavior of the indigenous populations millennia before the Russian conquest, and it is ludicrous to extrapolate from much later historical accounts.
That’s true. But I think the opposite assumption
is even further from truth.
Marie-Lucie:
All examples you list would not result in transfer of whole languages from Asia to Americas.
The last one (armed band killing another local small group and settling there) looks possible, but not on the scale necessary (five thousand kilometers of island and coast hopping from Asia to America killing locals on the way – sounds scary, but unrealistic)
Etienne: For all we know perhaps they [the Aleuts] spoke a Penutian language before shifting to Proto-Aleut (I mention this possibility because the distribution of Penutian languages does suggest a maritime spread).
I totally agree about the Penutian languages, since most of them are strongly correlated with rivers emptying into the Pacific. (“Penutian” is not generally considered a genetically homogenous group, although I believe it will eventually be recognized as such).
… no Polynesian language was durably transplanted to the New World, but this is no argument against the claim of Polynesian-Chumash contact.
Polynesian languages are spoken in the Pacific, practically all of them on small islands. They are part of the very large Austronesian family, the cradle of which has been determined to be Taiwan, on which around 15 different (but related) languages are attested. It was from Taiwan that the ancestors of the Polynesians departed in boats, starting several thousand years ago and eventually colonizing most of the lands found there. All the maps of the Austronesian expansion show sea routes leading South from Taiwan, but it is unlikely that no Taiwan aborigines ever ventured into other directions, specifically North and Northeast, at least at times of favourable climactic conditions. If any of these Northerners made it to America and left some kind of linguistic legacy, one would expect this legacy to come from Northern and Northeastern languages rather than from the ancestor of the Polynesian languages, which was presumably in the South of Taiwan.
The Polynesian-Chumash contact which I mentioned above is not thought to have involved more than a very few men (even just one man has been potulated, but I think this is unlikely), and the only traces of their passage (thus far) are the “Chumash canoe” (which is not typical of all of the Chumash populations, most of which use a different craft) and a handful of words. This contact must have been relatively recent (a few centuries at most) for the Polynesian words to still be recognizable.
[The book I cited is “Polynesians in America: Pre-Columbian contacts with the New World”, ed. by Terry Jones and others, Altamira Press, 2011. There are 12 contributors, mostly archeologists, and the contacts documented are mostly from South America, plus the Chumash case. The editors deliberately chose to concentrate on factual evidence (archeological and linguistic) of specifically Polynesian contact, and not to discuss more controversial topics.]
SFR: All examples you list would not result in transfer of whole languages from Asia to Americas.
A small community migrating (not necessarily all at once), bringing advantages of some kind (technology, stronger social organization, etc) at a time of favourable climactic conditions, could prosper and therefore attract natives to itself. Their language, learned by others, would become altered, but there would still be (at least for a time) traces of its origin. If conditions in the country of origin were such that emigration from one area was common at certain times, there could have been periods of one-way travel bringing more and more migrants along the same route.
The last one (armed band killing another local small group and settling there) looks possible, but not on the scale necessary (five thousand kilometers of island and coast hopping from Asia to America killing locals on the way – sounds scary, but unrealistic)
I don’t mean that one small group of newcomers would systematically kill natives along their way (the local population would certainly resist), only that this possibility might have existed in some cases and at least some of the migrants would have come prepared for hostile encounters. Of course, a single small group would not have covered thousands of miles at one go, or subsisted with their language intact for very long, but if there was a succession of small-scale migrations including families (or at least women) coming from the same Asian region, there could have been eventually a large enough core population that they would have extended their territory, and their language could have survived and even spread, although influenced by the local language(s).
Indeed. Consider all the speakers of the Taishan dialect of Cantonese in all the Chinatowns of the world: the result of “small-scale migrations” that “have extended their territory, and their language [has] survived.”
Another curious case of language survival
The village settled by only two ethnic Russian males who came with their Eskimo/Aleut wives and mixed children. And the entire village ended up becoming native Russian-speakers (until 1950s, anyway).
But I suspect their experience was uniquely 19-20th century – literacy, school, Russian Orthodox Church, etc.
Jim (sorry, I should have written this in my earlier comment): I smiled at your reference to Miwok as being almost SAE. You will be pleased to hear that none other than Edward Sapir himself, in sketching out the main features of Penutian (to which Miwok belongs), pointed out that Penutian was oddly similar, typologically, to… Indo-European.
SFReader: language shift in far northern locations is by no means rare. Yakut, in Siberia, spread (quite recently) because its speakers had mastered the art of breeding horses in this cold climate, which gave them a major advantage over speakers of other Siberian languages. Evenki, at an earlier date, had spread throughout Siberia because of its speakers’ mastery of reindeer breeding/riding.
Social organization can be the driving force too: the expansion of Proto-Cree throughout Northern Canada (from the Rocky Mountains to Labrador: one of the most geographically extensive cases of pre-modern language spread) after 500 AD or so (meaning that Proto-Cree expanded over territory that had been inhabited for millennia) has been argued (I’ve a reference, should anyone want it) to be linked with Proto-Cree speakers’ extensive family/social network, which facilitated long-distance trade: hence Proto-Cree-speakers’ neighbors were quite anxious to marry/have their children marry these newcomers (Proto-Cree speakers) or their children in order to gain access to this trade.
It would have taken just a few generations for Cree to replace the earlier languages under such circumstances. Especially since Proto-Cree would have been the only common language for all these local groups wishing to trade via the extended trade network created by these Proto-Cree-speaking newcomers…
And indeed this is how language shift takes place most of the time: not with a group of armed and hated invaders suddenly showing up on your doorstep some unfortunate morning, but with some new group you come into contact/start trading with. Knowledge of these newcomers’ language becomes desirable if not vital for some reason(s) or other, leading adults to ensure that their children acquire it, with the next generation taking the new language and the advantages deriving from its knowledge for granted, leading the next generation to think of the “new” language as theirs, which in turn leads to the next generation having this “new” language as their first language, eventually leading to the original language being forgotten.
More broadly, “extreme” environments (tundra, desert…) are ones where language shift/spread frequently occurs. I think this is because in such environments establishing/maintaining long-distance trade can be a life-or-death matter, because the local ecology is so limited.
Hence the spread of Yakut and Evenki in Siberia, of Eskimo-Aleut in the far North of the Americas, of Tuareg Berber in the Sahara, of Uto-Aztecan over the American Southwest/Sonora desert, of Iranian and later Turkic over Central Asia, of Tibetan over the vast Tibetan Plateau…
Conversely, it is telling that extreme linguistic diversity (indicating that there hasn’t been any language spread in a long while) is found in places like (pre-modern) California, New Guinea, the Caucasus: that is to say, areas with very rich local biological resources. Local groups could and did deal/trade with their neighbors, of course, but tellingly, it never was a life-or-death matter: a small tribe in any of the above environments didn’t *need* outside trade as a matter of survival.
A very interesting analysis; I’ve never thought of it like that.
Etienne, excellently put.
—some new group you come into contact/start trading with. Knowledge of these newcomers’ language becomes desirable if not vital for some reason(s) or other, leading adults to ensure that their children acquire it
Do you really need to learn a foreign language for trade?
Those 18-19th century accounts tell me that no, successful trading is quite possible with both parties speaking not a word in language of a partner.
Sometimes a trade jargon would develop if contacts were long-lasting (see Chinook jargon), but in most remote places people wouldn’t even need that.
Now, long-term tribal alliances involving extensive intermarriage – that would create a need to learn another language!
But I suppose this requires a full tribe suddenly showing up, not small groups of people.
I thought Etienne was describing the spread of English!
And they all originated in practically the same neighborhood in what is now northwestern China.
This year there was news that the ancestral home of the Native Americans was traced to the Altai Mountains.
Maybe this is a better article.
SFR: a full tribe suddenly showing up, not small groups of people.
In Polynesia there were exploratory voyages by small numbers of people, who returned home to report, and those early voyages were followed by larger-scale voyages by families bringing with them food, supplies and even animals such as dogs and chickens. Although current thinking about voyaging in the North Pacific tends to imagine only very small-scale, usually involuntary trips, some of the voyages must have involved much larger numbers.
Bathrobe: from what I understand the Altai Mountains aren’t so much the homeland of the ancestors of the first Natives of the Americas as an area whose genetic commonalities with Natives of the Americas is due to both being “peripheral”, geographically, from an Eastern Siberian perspective. In effect both preserve, genetically, what must have been (12 000 or so years ago) the “typical” Siberian genetic profile.
SfReader: a common language is indeed required if a *long-term trading relationship” is what you are after: extensive negociation and trust-building are rather difficult enterprises without a common language.
Incidentally, I strongly suspect that the spread of Indo-European followed a dynamic much like what I sketched above. For some reason people believe that, if Indo-European was the language of the first humans who domesticated the horse (which seems likely), it follows that Indo-European spread as the language of a horse-riding warrior elite.
This always struck me as dubious: in the Americas groups such as the (post-contact) Mapuche or Sioux became first-rate horse-riding warrior cultures, and ultimately succumbed to European expansion because horses were the least of the advantages Europeans enjoyed.
By contrast, we are expected to believe that Proto-Indo-European was spoken by a warrior culture whose sole advantage over its neighbors was its domestication of the horse. And that it overran everything in Eurasia from Ireland to India, without anyone on this vast territory learning anything about horse domestication before it was too late. The examples of the Sioux and the Mapuche seem to indicate that this is a rather unlikely scenario.
It seems to me that the spread of Indo-European is better explained if we consider that horses, combined with wagons/wheeled vehicles generally, would have caused an economic revolution wherever they were first introduced, allowing trade on a large scale between groups which would previously have remained comparatively isolated from one another. And in the context of this massive expansion of trade Proto-Indo-European would have been the obvious lingua franca.
Wagons and chariots both, judging from Greek and Irish epic.
Wagons and chariots both, judging from Greek and Irish epic.
Etienne: I like your interpretation of the IE spread. According to what I have read (I don’t remember where), domestication of the horse for drawing vehicles preceded its use for riding, especially riding for military purposes. (Occasional riding, eg by children, must have occurred, but that is different from training horses – and riders – specifically for those purposes).
The reconstructed vocabulary of PIE has words not only for horse but for cow, sheep, pig, goose, animals which have much more limited mobility than horses. Warriors on horses can travel far and fast, cows can travel far but not fast (witness the pastoral nomad cultures of Africa), and pigs and domestic geese don’t like to travel at all. Mounted warriors could not possibly have taken any of those animals with them, but horses drawing wagons could have walked along with people and cows, and carried pigs and geese on long trips, as well as less mobile people (children, elders, etc) and whatever was intended for trade.
The ancient Greeks and Irish had both wagons and chariots, but that was long after the breakup of Indo-European.
Marie-Lucie: Nevertheless, words for wheeled vehicles and their parts are reconstructible to PIE; they tend to be about chariots in Greek and Celtic and wagons in the other branches.
Marie-Lucie, John Cowan: just to be clear I am not denying that Indo-European may indeed have been the language of a horse-riding warrior culture (perhaps making use of war-chariots). What I am saying is that this is irrelevant to the dynamics of the spread of Indo-European which I proposed above. That is to say, the introduction of horse-drawn wagons would have triggered an economic revolution which would have favored the spread of Indo-European.
If my guess is right, then whether Proto-Indo-European was originally the language of a warrior culture or not is unrelated to the history/dynamics of its spread.
Etienne: Oh, I agree. But economics, we might say, is the continuation of war by other means.
The other Polynesian-American contact that’s now pretty much beyond doubt is the sweet potato, which spread from the Americas as far west as New Zealand. It used to be thought that this was natural transmission, but sweet potato seeds don’t survive immersion in salt water, and DNA work shows that the Polynesian varieties descend from the cultivated plant, not from one of its wild relatives. What is more, the Polynesian name kumara (in Pascuan and Maori, ‘uala in Hawai’ian), is suspiciously close to Quechua k’umar(a). (However, the sweet potatoes of the Philippines and other non-Polynesian areas were brought there by Europeans.)
Nature news item.
Unfortunately, the Polynesian origin of the Chumash canoe has now been thoroughly debunked: the Chumash canoe arose because of the need for seaworthy boats that could reach the mainland from the (California) Channel Islands. There is the possibility that some South American chickens, of which we have only the bones, were Polynesian in origin — but new DNA research has apparently debunked that too: it was never more than marginal.
So that leaves only the sweet potato as tangible evidence of contact.
Etienne: … Edward Sapir himself, in sketching out the main features of Penutian (to which Miwok belongs), pointed out that Penutian was oddly similar, typologically, to… Indo-European.
The word “Penutian” was first coined by the anthropologists/linguists Kroeber and Dixon for a group of five language families of California (which had several other such groups), and Sapir’s typological description fits four of those language families. Two features in particular are reminiscent of IE languages: verbs with several stems depending on tense and mood (as in Greek and Latin) and noun declensions indicating cases. As Sapir expanded his classification out of California to other languages, he expanded the name Penutian to more languages, first Northward into Oregon, Washington and British Columbia, and later Eastward along the Columbia River and the neighbouring plateau. But he does not seem to have changed the overall description, which is less applicable to the more Northern languages.
Sapir’ first inkling that the “Penutian” languages of California were not an isolated group came when he looked at these languages after working with Takelma, formerly spoken mostly in Southern Oregon but also right across the California border, which he had researched with the last speaker (writing an impressive grammar of the language). Indeed Takelma verbal structure is very similar to that of the Miwokan and Yokutsan languages of California, while most of the other Oregon languages Sapir classified (at least tentatively) as Penutian are quite different from them in this respect.
Much work still needs to be done, mostly on the Oregon languages, which are all extinct. I have been chipping away at it for some years.
Back in 2005…
The second paragraph is quoted and cited in this presentation, which finds a core Hokan grouping to be about as old as Indo-European. The same author has published this paper on, wait for it, comparative paradigmatic morphology.
Quotes from the paper:
“My own position is that the genetic relationship between most languages usually subsumed under Hokan is highly likely, and that the existence of the Hokan family can be taken as a working hypothesis, subject to further proof or refutation.”
“For the purposes of the present paper, the following languages and families will be regarded as Hokan: Karuk, Chimariko, Shastan, Achumawi-Atsugewi (Palaihnihan), Yana, Pomoan, Salinan, Yuman, Seri, and Oaxaca Chontal (Tequistlatecan). I suspend my judgment with regard to poorly attested languages/families like Esselen, Coahuilteco, Comecrudoan and Cotoname. Another poorly documented language, Cochimi, is generally considered as related to Yuman (Mixco 1978). Following Kaufman (1989), I do not accept a Hokan affiliation of Chumashan. I also do not include Washo and Tol (Jicaque), although these languages might be related to Hokan on a deeper level. Washo was regarded as Hokan by virtually all supporters of the Hokan hypothesis. However, it has so few reliable matches with the rest of Hokan in the basic lexicon that its membership in the Hokan family seems improbable. If Washo and/or Tol will ever be shown to be related to Hokan, it will only be through comparison with reliable Proto-Hokan reconstructions, rather than with isolated morphemes in individual Hokan languages.
While reconstructing tentative Proto-Hokan forms, I will use the system of sound correspondences proposed by Kaufman (1989: 84–93).”
Apparently Hokan is not so hokey after all.
I have to say, a lot of those word lists at the end do not look like they show convincing correspondences to me, but of course I know nothing about these languages. I hope someone who does will respond.
Or just ignore the word list at the end of the presentation for the time being and go straight to the morphology in the paper…
Yes, I don’t understand why he bothers with lexicostatistics at all. The morphology is much more convincing. But it’s also five years ago, and you’d think there would be progress (or lack of it) on comparison of lexical roots since then. Maybe there are so few people working on Hokan that new papers could just as well be published by SETI.
Apparently Hokan is not so hokey after all.
“Not so hokey” is a good assessment. Zhivlov’s papers clarify some things, but they are still a first step. Contact is a huge issue, which he doesn’t address: consider Numic adopting an elaborate system of instrumental verbal prefixes, following its neighbors. The hither/thither morphemes which Zhivlov discusses, the clearest system in the paper, could in part have spread by contact.
I do find it encouraging that Zhivlov is willing to keep Washo out. Pickiness is a virtue.
Maybe there are so few people working on Hokan that new papers could just as well be published by SETI.
That is exactly right. Zhivlov’s papers are the first to be published on comparative Hokan in a long time, though a bit of work is being done on individual recognized families.
While on that subject, there’s a remarkable new paper (the first of two): Amy Miller, Phonological developments in Delta-California Yuman, IJAL 84(3), 383, 7/2018. Quote:
In other words, there is language documentation that has been done very recently and can still be done on these Hokan languages, all within one or two hours drive of the California-Mexico border. Miller finally concludes,
Moscow School: very basic vocabulary (in particular the more stable half of Swadesh’s list of the 100 most stable meanings) is considered stronger evidence than morphology. After all, it works between modern IE languages that have almost no morphology in common, like English and Farsi.
Other than this reference, I guess:
Kaufman’s other cited paper is indeed from 1989.
This is an updated version of his 1988 paper. Like that one, it has reconstructions, but not the source materials for these reconstructions, presumably for lack of space. Zhivlov has gone back to the sources (and some more up-to-date ones) to retrace Kaufman’s steps, among other things.
Kaufman’s notes are at AILLA, in Texas, and have been getting organized and digitized over the past several years (the guy is enourmously prolific.) Supposedly they will be available online soon.
Yay!
More info here.
The Hokan notes are for some reason password-restricted.
Kaufman’s revised version of the 1988 paper is here, not the earlier link, which is a separate paper.
From 2017…
Likewise unfortunately, the link no longer works. It leads to a Berkeley site that holds enormous numbers of texts and audio files in and about languages of California, including Chumash, but I can’t find that paper.
Here you go.
Oh! I should have thought of that. #Neuland
I’ve read articles about the idea of South American/Polynesian contacts and the genetic evidence. Only yesterday in reading a reply to a David M comment at Language Log did I learn that the words for sweet potato in Hawaiian and various other Polynesian languages are cognate (or strikingly similar) to those in several S. American languages.
The great big paper on the population genetics of Pacific sweet potatoes is in open access.
Thanks. That includes a brief reference to the Polynesian and Quechua sweet potato words.
The Chumash canoe paper is officially here, and at academia.edu.
To complicate matters, this paper uses genetic evidence to support non-human introduction of the sweet potato into Polynesia.
Thanks @Y
Discussion is continuing at the Log. From your ref:
I think this is the paper that is widely discreditted, as having used idiosyncratic gene analysis and suspicion of contaminated/denatured samples. “Thousands of years” is not plausible.
@Ryan the words for sweet potato in Hawaiian and various other Polynesian languages are cognate (or strikingly similar) to those in several S. American languages.
‘Cognate’ is not at all the same thing as “strikingly similar”. ‘Cognate’ means we know when, where and how a word travelled. In its travels it would be subject to regular sound changes (including the receiving speakers adapting/mis-hearing it to fit their language’s sound patterns). So — almost by definition — it would not be “strikingly similar” in sound.
BTW the people whose pronunciation is so strikingly similar live a long way up the Andes; there’s no evidence they went anywhere near the coast. So we have to posit Polynesian sailors who sailed orders-of-magnitude further across the Pacific than any other voyages as at that time (c. 1100 CE, when settlement had only reached Samoa/Tonga, maybe Cook Islands) _and then_ climbed orders-of-magnitude higher than any mountain in their homelands _and then_ learnt of the crop and how to cultivate it, and its name _and then_ come all the way back with only a few roots/seeds and a single word. There’s other S.America languages on the coast that have words probably cognate to *kumara, but their pronunciation is not strikingly similar. So now we have to posit sound changes by Polynesians from the littoral speakers’ version that amazingly landed right back at the Andean pronunciation.
That remarkable alleged sound-alike — and that these similarities are being touted by people who know nothing about language transmission [**] — to me is the best evidence _against_ it being a cognate. (That’s “best” out of an exceedingly poor proffering.) Plus that there is no solid evidence of how the speaker interaction is to have happened. Plus (and with all due respect to the amazing skills of Polynesian sailors/navigators) I know enough about deep-sea voyaging to plain disbelieve anybody got that far without a desalinator.
Anyhoo, since discussion is continuing at the Log [***]. Let’s not darken Hat’s door with it. (He’s already made his position clear.)
[**] I include there Prof Mair, who seems to enthusiastically endorse all sorts of crackpottery about long-distance language and cultural exchange.
[***] My posts there keep being blocked. So far they’ve eventually got unblocked. But my latest (chasing up David M’s cites) not yet. With Hat’s permission, I might post it here if it doesn’t appear tomorrow.
You mean where Mair suggests Polynesian Moa= fowl may be related to Galician Moa=millstone/gizzard?
There’s other S.America languages on the coast that have words probably cognate to *kumara, but their pronunciation is not strikingly similar.
As I recall, most of the languages of the Pacific coast of South America are long extinct, and several are entirely undocumented. Arguments ex silentio appear rather weak in such a context.
Anyhoo, since discussion is continuing at the Log [***]. Let’s not darken Hat’s door with it. (He’s already made his position clear.)
No, no, I’m loving it — it’s right in the LH wheelhouse, and I’m not following the Log thread any more (Mair exceeded my irritation threshold). Pray continue!
exceeded my irritation threshold — me in 2015 or so, that’s why I’m here innit. (I don’t bear many grudges, but those I do I take seriously).
Sweet potatoes growing wild all over central Polynesia for thousands of years?
He doesn’t; he “just” says he doesn’t know what to make of it.
Also, didn’t the 2013 paper actually find one on the coast of Ecuador?
where Mair suggests Polynesian Moa= fowl may be related to Galician Moa=millstone/gizzard
Obviously both are loans from Western Oti-Volta, e.g. Dagaare noɔ, Kusaal nua “fowl.”
For the n/m change, cf Kusaal nyɔɔr “nose” = Moba miɛl “nose.” These things happen all the time.
The ocean-spanning exploits of the Western Oti-Volta speaking peoples are legendary.
My posts there keep being blocked
I foolishly attempted to comment a while back on Mair’s post on Kusunda, where he was credulously repeating the BBC claim that Kusunda lacks negatives, and my comment was deleted within minutes. It was subsequently reinstated, and made the subject of another post by Mark Liberman. I’ve no idea what’s going on with that site these days, but it surely put me off any further interaction with it. I can’t take the drama. I think that when Mair (as often) vaguely suggests something without actually outright endorsing it as fact, if you contradict it, he gets upset at your uppitiness while simultaneously reserving the right to bridle at the supposed implication that he actually did endorse it.
(The Kusunda thing is actually based on a grain of truth, mirabile dictu. Various well informed Hatters commented about it on Liberman’s post, to good effect.)
I like the level of discussion here better than on LL, pardon my boosterism.
That’s OK, so do I.
That LANGUAGE LOG thread simply gave me a headache. Sigh. There are some sane people there, one of whom observed that Japanese “arigato” could all too easily be mistaken for a borrowing from Portuguese “obrigado”, especially since there are known instances of Portuguese loanwords in Japanese (we know for a fact that “arigato” is not one of them). Mair’s reaction to this sensible observation reminds me why I have neither left comments there nor read anything there (except if attention is drawn to a particular post by someone here at the Hattery) in nearly a decade.
Something nobody seems to have pointed out is that Polynesian languages have an amazingly small number of phonemes and syllable types, so that the odds of finding a coincidental look-alike in a Polynesian language for a word with the same or a similar meaning in some other language are disquietingly high (I think I once pointed out here that the same is true of Basque).
What I find very suspicious is that:
A- The similarity of Polynesian and Quechua */kumara/, which has been known/noticed in scholarly circles for some time, does not seem to have spawned any attempt by Polynesian and Quechuan linguistics scholars to seek to reconstruct the various segments of the various proto-forms; and
B- No other instances of alleged borrowed vocabulary shared by Polynesian and Quechua have been proposed by anyone.
Now, if it could be shown that the Polynesian forms are exactly what would be expected of a loan from Quechuan at the relevant time period, and/or that other words within this same semantic field likewise fit in with our understanding of Polynesian and Quechuan linguistic (especially phonological) history, then the case for this instance of pre-Colombian trans-continental experiment in trans-cultural culinary cultural appropriation (no less evil for being unlinked to white supremacy-sorry, it is hard not to parody this sort of garbage when you are exposed to it daily) would be strengthened. Considerably.
Now, the fact that nobody has tried to do so may be indicative of the catastrophic decline of serious historical linguistics, but I wonder whether some scholars (with the relevant qualifications) have taken a look at it (both */kumara/ and possible other cognates) and quietly concluded that it is fatally flawed in some fashion. Since nobody likes to learn that the punch has been spiked, it may be some time before this negative conclusion is published.
Etienne: Sure there is a Polynesian reconstruction!
I don’t know about Quechua, but the word might be a Wanderwort anyway, borrowed by the putative Polynesians from some coastal language.
…and indeed, cumal is attested in a coastal language of Ecuador, so there’s no need for Polynesians to climb up into the Andes. They could well have landed, found one thing worth taking home, took it and the word for it.
The 2013 paper linked above – open access! – is not just about genetics; it presents the rest of the accumulated evidence as well.
I second the comments about Language Log; thank goodness for this place!! I will repeat the plea I made there for someone to check out this paper if they can:
Adelaar W.F.H. (1998), The name of the sweet potato. A case of pre-conquest contact between South America and the Pacific.
I obviously don’t know exactly what’s in it, but it could well be the place to find answers to questions about dates and forms for the Proto-Quechuan word and its descendants.
Thank you @everybody, then I’ll continue (speaking as the obrigado/aragatō guy. My post at the Log did get unblocked, and DavidM made a sensible response to it.)
didn’t the 2013 paper actually find one [a language] on the coast of Ecuador?
Yes, that’s the Cañari language with word *[kumal]. that DavidM says could only have been borrowed as */kumara/.
Ref Etienne’s question/Y’s chart, once */kumara/ got into Proto-E-Polynesian at CE 1100, the sound changes to the daughter languages are all perfectly regular — including some ‘reverting’ from /r/ to /l/.
What I haven’t seen is any commentary that *[kumal] fits the sound pattern of the applicable S.American languages at the applicable time. Note it’s only a few S.American languages that have that word (as at today), and all of them have a more common word for the darn potatoes. IOW can we reject that the word travelled _from_ Polynesia to S.America much later (probably by European agency)?
@Y borrowed by the putative Polynesians from some coastal language.
_If_ it’s a borrowing, the chief problem I see with the sound-alike is the sounds are suspiciously close, given it’s hypothesised the borrowing was 1,000 years ago.
And if it’s a borrowing, (why) was it the only borrowing? Of all the wondrous things you might find in S.American cultures at the time, were tubers the only thing you brought back? The Polynesians did/do value meat (pigs, chickens, they were at least partly responsible for killing off the last of the Moa in NZ — that’s a contentious comment, don’t broadcast it). Given how scarce is wildlife on the islands, you’d bring back protein, not starch surely!
But my chief difficulties are with that ‘If”: There’s not a skerrick of material evidence of Polynesians in S.America. (There’s maybe suspicions of some human gene exchange, but very far from clear whether that’s at the applicable date, or after European contact.)
And Polynesian expansion was by island-hopping. We know they didn’t get from Cook Islands to Aotearoa/NZ direct — much too far — because Kermadecs named ‘Rangitahua’ = the Stopping-off Place, and archaeological finds there. It’s more than double the distance from Cook Islands to NZ to get to the S.America coast from the nearest settled/visited Polynesian island . (But that was settled only much later/after the kumara got to more central Polynesia.)
And the Polynesians were superb masters of navigation. Unlike stupid Heyerdahl, they started their voyages _against_ the known prevailing winds, expecting that if they didn’t make landfall, they’d get blown back home, because prevailing ‘innit. To get the huge distance to S.America would need the prevailing winds to not prevail for an extraordinary stretch of time.
With long sea voyages, the chief constraint is carrying enough fresh water. You can catch fish, so you won’t starve. You can collect rainwater/overnight condensation (Heyerdahl experimented with that). You can stop off at islands with rainwater pools — but there’s no islands en route to S.America. You’d simply die of dehydration.
Given how all the Polynesian cultures are great oral historians and myth-builders, with plenty of tales of remote ancestor lands and arduous sea voyages, you’d think somebody would mention travelling an order-of-magnitude further East than any settled island, and finding a land mass that clearly wasn’t an island, and bringing back a food staple.
I’m going to dismiss the sound-alike as coincidence. (Perfectly respectable purely-Te Reo Māori derivation given on the Log. 😉 ) But how do I explain the crop getting West to meet the expanding Polynesians? It seems the tubers/their seeds wouldn’t survive that much salt water/they’d need to be floating on something. Speculation: perhaps the Quechua have something to do with it/that would match the timing: the Humboldt current flows Northwards up the coast of S.America, then Westwards towards the islands. There was trade from Quechua lands up to Meso-America, starting around CE 800. One/some of their balsa rafts got blown off course and drifted on the current, ending up somewhere in the Marquesas/(what is now) French Polynesia — also where Heyerdahl ended up, and where one of the gene-analysis papers guesstimates was the point of landfall. Polynesians exploring Eastwards in advance of settling found them, and spread them back.
Of course that speculation (with no evidence behind it) doesn’t override my default position: we shall never know.
Aargh! Now the Hattery is eating my posts. Mr Hat would you be so kind …
@Andy, the Adelaar paper is here, to you only 30 Euros. Tantalisingly in the preview I can see Campbell’s 1997 warning
@DavidM found one thing worth taking home, took it and the word for it.
Chiefly, I don’t think Polynesians ever got there (see my reasoning in durance vile). But _if_ they did and interacted with the culture enough to find a word for a thing — only “one thing”? Really?
Penelope to Odysseus: You go off to sea for months/years! I’d given you up for dead! You’ve met these people and heard their language. You come back all pleased with yourself, and all I get is bloody tubers!
Andy, Thanks for the Adelaar reference (in Janse, ed., Productivity and Creativity: Studies in General and Descriptive Linguistics in Honor of Ε. M. Uhlenbeck).
A few relevant points from that paper:
— kʰumara is a starchy variety of sweet potato, in contrast to the sweet apichu.
— Sweet potatoes were grown in coastal areas and in tropical lowlands, not in the highlands.
— Cognates of the word are used in Quechua varieties of tropical lowland Colombia, Ecuador, and NE Peru, where sweet potato is still cultivated. It is also used in Cuzco, in the highlands of southern Peru, whose inhabitants “entertain regular contacts with tropical areas which they have colonized in the past.”
— Brand (1971) has previously suggested, apparently without evidence, that kʰumara is not a Quechua word but was borrowed from Cañari. Adelaar dismisses this, for lack of evidence, but now we know that it was in fact recorded in Cañari.
— Adelaar argues that Quechua was spoken in central coastal Peru in the past.
— Some Quechua varieties of tropical NE Peru use kumal and kumala. “There is no ready explanation for the use of l instead of r. It may be due to a local substratum, considering the fact that l was not originally found in Quechua.”
Thanks @Y, and … the ‘ pre-conquest contact between South America and the Pacific’ part says?
Adelaar seems to research only native American languages.
@AntC: Adelaar doesn’t have anything informed to add regarding Polynesian contact. He assumes the dates for East Polynesian colonization accepted at the time, which are now known to be too early. He suggests that it’s more “economical” to assume a one-way trip from the continent rather than a round-trip from Polynesia. He speculates that if kumara were borrowed into Aymara, it would bear an initial stress, and wonders if that explains the initial stress on the word in Māori (it doesn’t: this is regular stress for Māori.)
Why not? They were looking for a place to settle and found one that was already settled, so they took some provisions and sailed home. 😐 There’s really no reason to think they stayed more than a few days.
There’s really no reason to think they stayed more than a few days.
Again, _if_ they ever got there, they’d be totally knackered and close to death. They’d have to spend a long time recuperating and restocking for an almost-as-arduous [**] journey back.
You seem to think these guys are on some sort of Carnival Cruise. ‘Pacific’ is a total mis-nomer; the place is deadly.
[**] Going back with the prevailing winds/currents wouldn’t be quite so bad. But you’d probably loop back [Humboldt current] a long way north of where you set out from. There’s 2,000km of just nothing to navigate by. Whereas with island-hopping, although you’re out of sight of land, there’s cloud patterns, bird flight paths, swell formations and that mysterious Te lapa light phenomenon.
Sheesh! I can see I’m talking to a bunch of land-lubbers. Did Odysseus have an easy time navigating? And he was in a relatively well-frequented bathtub.
Well, the Ioannidis et al. paper suggests that they stayed long enough to get some local passengers to come along for the return trip.
Mr Hat would you be so kind …
Freed from durance vile; thanks for letting me know.
AntC: What is this supposed Maori etymology? I didn’t find it (but wouldn’t believe it if I did.)
Words can match randomly, sure. They even more often almost-match. But how likely is it that the only Polynesian cultivar of South American coastal origin happens to have a perfect phonological match with one of only a handful of words for it in the languages of coastal South America?
> Penelope to Odysseus: You go off to sea for months/years, and all I get is bloody tubers!
Odysseus to Penelope: Gimme a few minutes. [Returns with a skyphos filled with sweet potato fries for their teenaged kids ]. Let’s see if they call them bloody tubers.
Penelope [watching the kids eat]: All right maybe it was worth it, but still, I did miss you.
More fun: a number of old prehistoric skeletons discovered on Mocha Island, off the coast of central Chile, show a feature called the rocker jaw, very common among Polynesians, rare elsewhere, and especially rare in the Americas. These were first noticed in the early 1900s. A 2010 paper by Matisoo-Smith and Ramirez further investigates them using modern osteometric techniques. I heard around that time that Matisoo-Smith, a pioneer in paleogenetics, was working on getting some genetic material out of those remains, but haven’t heard anything about it since.
In other news, a 2014 paper analyzed genetic material from skulls of Botocudo people, of Minas Gerais state in eastern Brazil. Two of them showed purely Polynesian ancestry. (The skulls were destroyed in the 2018 fire at the National Museum.)
@Y how likely is it that …
… the word for — exact meaning — thank-you in Japanese is exactly how a Japanese ear would hear thank-you from Portuguese, especially since we know the Portuguese visited Japan, and left a few words there.
… given both Polynesian and S.American languages have relatively small phoneme inventories (and neither has consonant clusters), there would be sound-alikes. I’d say highly likely there’d be plenty (see the “more thorough running of the numbers” link on LLog). Then the question is how likely one of those sound-alike pairs would also be meaning-alike?
I don’t want to be culturally imperialist, but I suspect both Japanese and Portuguese have much larger vocabularies than Proto-Polynesian or Quechua. So the likelihood of meaning-alike is higher than finding a meaning-alike pair in Japanese/Portuguese.
Then the question is how likely that (one of those) meaning-alike pairs happens to denote a foodstuff that travelled (by means so far unproven) from one language’s area to another?
And _if_ that travelling was by human agency, how likely is it that the (unknown/unrecorded in myth) travellers would take only one item (and a pretty uninteresting item at that) and only one word, having been in contact with the source language/people enough to be given ?fresh from their fields, presumably having communicated enough that they were setting out on a long/arduous return journey for which they’d need plenty of food.
Indeed why would the Quechua (supposing their generosity) give kumara? Why would the Polynesians take them? You can’t eat them raw. You can’t cook them on a canoe. They’re starch, not particularly nutritious [**]; you’d have to protect them from seawater; they’d take up space needed for fresh water. They’d just be a durned nuisance.
How likely Polynesians got there in the first place, so this fairy-tale could happen at all? I’d say hugely unlikely. Even if they got blown off course in the Roaring Forties [***], and washed up on a beach and their canoe was repairable, none of their navigational skills would help/they’d be completely disoriented.
So I’d like to balance against those unlikelinesses the likelihood of seeds/tubers travelling out by non-human agency. There’s a handy ocean current going from exactly the Quechua areas to islands we know were reached by Polynesians early in the Eastward expansion. And the Quechua were cultivating and transporting kumara at about the right time.
What is this supposed Maori etymology? I didn’t find it (but wouldn’t believe it if I did.)
It’s in Edo Nyland style, ‘ kū-umu-māra-mara ‘. No I don’t believe it either. Just an exercise to show how easy it is to find a purely Te Reo sound-alike/meaning-alike.
[**] And ref Ryan, Kumara are indeed tasty when plied with enough fat. Just no means to kill suckling-pigs and heap the lot in earth ovens, in a canoe.
[***] Note Shackleton/Worsley’s open-boat voyage through the Forties from Elephant Island to the Falklands ended up smashing the Endurance’s lifeboat. But then they knew it would be one-way; they knew there were islands with settlements out there [and British goddamit!]; they had a chart and a compass and a sextant.
Richard Scaglion (2005) “Kumara in the Ecuadorian Gulf of Guayaquil?”, presenting documentation of the word for “sweet potato” in Cañari, is available here on academia.edu. Very enjoyable!
exactly how a Japanese ear would hear thank-you from Portuguese
A Japanese would presumably borrow obrigado as /oburigadu/ (in Modern Portuguese) or such, not /arigatoː/. Two phonemic vowels don’t match, plus one syllable is missing. Most of the classic examples of false cognates are likewise only near-matches, not perfect matches—and those were cherry picked out of many meanings in many languages.
/kumara/ is exactly what you’d expect from a novel item being borrowed, along with its exact name, just like piñata or ramen.
larger vocabulary…
The Māori dictionary of Williams is about the same size as a standard dictionary of a European language, probably tens of thousands of words. I read about a project for a project of a monolingual dictionary of Tuvaluan (a language of several thousand speakers living on low atolls), which was to have some 40,000 entries. All languages have several thousand words used by fluent speakers, plus thousands more of specialized cultural and technical terms.
likelihhod of picking up food…
That has happened all over the world, especially among agricultural societies. You eat something, you like it, you figure you’d like to grow it yourself. That’s how potatoes and other American cultivars came to Europe. Sweet potatoes are nutritious and suitable for growing in tropical climates, like taro and yam which the Polynesians had already had. So they got some cuttings to take back. It’s speculative, but no more speculative than saying “aw, it couldn’t have happened.”
How likely Polynesians got there in the first place
They made it to Easter Island, after covering a long empty stretch of sea from Pitcairn and Henderson. They would be motivated to continue and seek more islands. Europeans took only 300 years since Magellan’s time to reach every island in the Pacific, and they had to come from further away, and had scurvy to deal with.
On the other hand, South American navigators, while skilled coastal sailors, had no reason to think that there’s anything to explore beyond the horizon. That explains why the Galápagos and the Juan Fernández Islands were never inhabited by humans before the Europeans.
@Y off the coast of central Chile [Mapuche tribes]
is nowhere near the Quechua/*[kumal]-speaking areas. I agree genetic analysis would provide a much firmer basis of evidence. The osteometric analysis (certainly beyond my pay-scale) seems to be all hung around with ifs and buts.
For the Botucudo skulls, the paper can’t rule out that the Polynesians arrived via “European-mediated transport”. Minas Gerais is Eastern Brazil. I’m not seeing how Polynesians would get there without European transport.
I have a big problem with both these papers:
The Mapuche paper’s cite to The possibility of Polynesian contact with North America, particularly in the area occupied by the Chumash tribe has been discredited.
It’s as if they’re saying crossing the Pacific from anywhere in Polynesia to anywhere in the Americas is like crossing the English Channel or the Mediterranean. Get a map and look at them to the same scale. The Pacific is a third of the surface area of the whole globe, more than the earth’s whole land area, wider than North America, wider than Africa, wider than Eurasia.
It is utterly misleading to talk about “long distance voyaging” as “thousands of kilometres”. Yes it’s thousands of km from Cook Islands to New Zealand. No Māori did not make that journey in one step. There’s no leg of the journey as far as 1,000 kms, let alone the 2,000 – 3,000 of open sea to get to S. America.
If you get somewhere ‘much faster’ [than what? in what timescale? how much fresh water do you need to stay alive that long?] that means you’ll go back much slower. And without weather satellites you can’t predict when the weather systems will turn round.
Or are these researchers accusing Polynesians of being as reckless as Heyerdahl and setting off on a one-way journey to possible oblivion. How would they know there’s a nice big North-South continental coastline to catch the canoe of corpses if nobody’s ever come back from it?
I don’t think I’m being culturally imperialist and underrating the navigational skills of ‘primitive’ peoples. I’m giving them huge credit for being prudent and knowledgable, and respectful of the ocean. (Like my hero James Cook. Any genetic evidence Polynesians are related to bluff Yorkshiremen?)
@AntC, Y: Cheers re the paper!!
I’ve now chased up the cites elided there. (Or at least close enough: Irwin et al 1990 is behind a paywall, Irwin 1989 is in effect a preprint )
Irwin & Flays 2015 has some sailing-nerd calculations, particularly re cross-wind navigation. Note no Polynesian exploration sets out down the prevailing wind. Hence they didn’t reach Australia.
The attribution in the Mapuche paper is downright misrepresentation. Irwin says you _do not_ set off in an El Niño event, because you don’t know you’re in an event ’til it stops blowing. (The lack of weather satellites, again.) Since you don’t know when an El Niño might arrive, he concedes you might get caught up in one/be unable to escape/end somewhere unexpected. This is an accident, not a repeatable strategy.
We of course don’t know how many Polynesian exploration voyages never returned. Irwin elaborates carefully a strategy for exploring in the most prudent directions first; learning about seasonal patterns whilst doing so; then gaining confidence in exploring more risky directions — especially by catching the tails of a passing weather system that’s blowing contra the prevailing wind. Since you’ve observed the pattern/time of year of those systems, you know they’re short-lived, you’ll be able to get home afterwards.
Both authors seem to me to be using weasel words: forced to speculate how Polynesians might have reached S.America, because kumara. This is not evidence.
So to recap:
* Yen 1974 (not a Philologist) in a botany paper makes a throwaway remark about a soundalike.
* Nobody disputes the botany: it’s the same lineage in S.America and Polynesia — before Europeans.
* A bunch of other non-Philologists take that soundalike remark as proof of human transmission of the plant.
* Nobody makes any analysis of the likelihood of chance soundalikes;
nor of possible pronunciation drift over ~1000 years;
nor of a purely Polynesian genesis of the word.
* Maritime historians are faced with a fait accompli to account for Polynesian navigation to S.America.
I think the alleged evidence does not yet allow us to pass go. Do not collect $200. Certainly do not throw the dice to see if you can sail to S.America.
For those no longer following the LLog thread (and no reason you would be), the tale has gotten more tangled.
*/kumal/ is a reconstruction in the Cañari language. That language is extinct and poorly attested. What informally gets called Cañari is sensu strictu Cañar Quechua, spoken on the coast and lower mountains pre-conquest. Quechua (various spellings, with shades of meaning) is the ur-language of the Inca empire of the highlands; original Cañari is reconstructed from a supposed substrate of the present-day coastal language.
‘Pre-conquest’? There were two conquests: C15-th16th Inca overran the Cañar civilisation — who’d been defending themselves valiantly for a few hundred years; the poor blighters got very quickly thereafter invaded by the Spanish.
So inconveniently for our purposes, the Incas/Quechua got involved too late for the kumara-to-Polynesia story. I’ve tried looking for reliable vocabulary lists of pre-both-conquests Cañari. All paywalled. This might be helpful.
So we know there’s two Quechua words for sweet-potato:
— which to my mind rather rules out that either word is originally from Cañari [***], but all the maybe-evidence is paywalled.
So presuming our hypothesised Polynesian visitors didn’t climb the mountains to get their root crops and word for them, I see no evidence that */kumal/ would be a word they’d encounter on the coast.
[**] That ‘Quichua’ spelling is maybe-significant: here means the Ecuadorean variants.
[***] or perhaps the starchy variety grows better on the coast, so the Inca didn’t adopt the thing/the word until they’d conquered the Cañari? And they regarded them as different vegetables: turnip vs swede/rutabaga, yam vs ‘sweets’.
The Cañari word is recorded directly; see the reference Xerîb linked to.
Thanks @Y (and Xerib) I see nothing there contradicting what I said.
The key evidence is a report from a priest 1582. By then the Cañari people on the coast/lowlands spoke Cañar Quechua. I’d be looking for stronger evidence the priest was distinguishing pre-Quechua Cañari vocab vs strictly-Quechua than
Furthermore this ref doesn’t seem to acknowledge the two words seem to refer to different varieties. “language seems to have no inclusive term” above. (Unless, as I hazarded, the different varieties grew in different places.)
The priest does report [translated]
Now if I’d been at sea for many weeks, I would have killed for onions — and indeed any sort of green vegetables — never mind your tubers. Furthermore, onions travel well, amaranth as a seed also travels well. Why wouldn’t you take those? AFAICT all today’s Polynesian words for Alliums derive from English.
I see that paper’s Figure 4 ‘Worldwide distribution of pre-Columbian sailing rafts’ [ref 1971]. This is complete fantasy beyond Peru-Ecuadorean waters themselves. Oh, and the wreck of Kon-Tiki. Polynesian rafts weren’t constructed of balsa (on account of the lack of balsa trees — or large trees in general), weren’t to Ecuadorian designs, weren’t seaworthy for more than paddling within atolls/small island groups, and would have had very poor upwind performance (not clear if they were wind-propelled at all). Polynesian construction for their great voyages was from two shaped/planked hulls lashed together — canoes, not rafts. The platform between the hulls is raised well out of the water, to try to keep precious stuff dry. (Kon-Tiki had the waves flowing through/between the logs. Nothing was dry.)
I see the ref to Heyerdahl, along with TBH utter bollix about similarities of ‘primitive’ sails. wp:
So it was the Romans who sailed to both S.America and Polynesia? No: if you’re going to sail upwind or even effectively cross-wind (as Heyerdahl didn’t), and you need to be able to raise/lower/shorten sail, you’d end up with something like lateen rig. It’s compelled by the ‘design requirements and constraints’.
So I contend this paper is bending the ‘evidence’ over backwards to try to support Heyerdahl’s theory of Pacific exploration from S.Am. Weird: by 2005 Heyerdahl had been rejected.
@Y Europeans took only 300 years since Magellan’s time to reach every island in the Pacific, and they had to come from further away, and had scurvy to deal with.
This is a somewhat unfair comparison:
The Europeans took Polynesian navigators with them, so they knew they were heading for an island, and how far away it was.
The Europeans travelled mostly with the prevailing winds/they generally weren’t making return journeys — or rather they were returning to Europe by continuing downwind round the globe. Not, for example, attempting to travel both ways between Easter Island and the central E.Polynesian islands.
Not that I’m belittling Cook and the other early explorers: you can count me out of rounding Cape Horn in a coal barge.
While I’m clearing the decks …
another preposterous tale of Polynesian seafaring — this one to Antarctica. Drawn from a perverse translation/European record of oral history.
(Apologies if I posted that already.)
The crucial word is huka, a general Polynesian word for foam/froth/white stuff on the sea. There not being a lot of snow in the Polynesian homelands, Māori in need of a word adapted ‘huka’ for that, and for hail/ice generally.
Then a colonial surveyor/ethnologist willfully translated ‘huka’ on the sea to ice = icebergs.
You can count me right out of any debates about pre-Columbian navigational feasibility, but if pre-Columbian contact were to be ruled out, I will say that the scenario of an early post-Columbian borrowing into Polynesian languages mediated by Spanish ships or the like strikes me as far more plausible than the idea that the Polynesians happened to come up with the same name for the same originally South American species as Quechua speakers purely by coincidence.
I’d be looking for stronger evidence the priest was distinguishing pre-Quechua Cañari vocab vs strictly-Quechua
This is a cogent criticism of Scaglion’s paper.
In the passage from the Relaciones Geográficas de Indias, the author also mentions “otra raiz que se llama racacha”. This must be arracacha (Arracacia xanthorrhiza), or in Quechua raqacha. He goes on to say, “Hay unas cebolletas que los naturales comen, que se llama zarayuyu”. This term can be understood as a Quechua “weed of maize fields” or the like : Quechua sara ‘maize’ and yuyu ‘weed, herb, green plant’.
(I wonder what these cebolletas were, exactly. I have read that the genus Allium has very low diversity in South America, or was even absent before the introduction of cultivated members of the genus. Some related plants of the genus Nothoscordum are edible and used locally like onions in South America, apparently. Perhaps it is one of these. I would be interested in learning about pre-Columbian Allium cultivation in South America.)
Lameen: There’s archeological evidence for early (pre-Columbian) sweet potato cultivation in East Polynesia. Linguistically, *kumara came in early enough to participate in regular sound changes, specifically *k>ʔ in Tahitian and Hawaiian and *r/l>ʔ in Marquesan.
AntC, Xerîb: fair point about Cañari but I think Scaglion’s essential point was that the word was used near the coast, which had not been shown before.
I think Scaglion’s essential point was that the word was used near the coast, which had not been shown before.
Agreed. I was wondering, for example, whether the coexistence of Quechua kumar, etc. “starchy and less sweet, white-fleshed sweet potato variety”, and apichu “sweeter sweet potato variety, sweet potato in general” might reflect that fact that the first word was a borrowing from a coastal language as a term for variety more recently introduced to upland areas. (For the meaning distinction, see here, p. 405.) Apparently, the words apichu and tuctuca are used in Aymara for “sweet potato”.
I just this minute came across the word doku “poison” in the Waama language of the Atakora in Benin. It is clear that this must be the source of the totally identical Japanese word. I told you that the seafaring exploits of the Oti-Volta peoples were legendary …
I will say that the scenario of an early post-Columbian borrowing into Polynesian languages mediated by Spanish ships or the like strikes me as far more plausible than the idea that the Polynesians happened to come up with the same name for the same originally South American species as Quechua speakers purely by coincidence.
I’m gonna have to sentence you to read through a list of such coincidences until you cry uncle.
@Y (and Xerib) I think Scaglion’s essential point was that the word was used near the coast, which had not been shown before.
It was used near the coast as at 1582, in an area by then heavily influenced by Quechua. So some 70 – 100 years after the Inca had defeated the Cañari.
What we need is a use near the coast as at ~1000 in ‘pure’ Cañari. A lot of language change can happen in 500 years in a war zone.
I appreciate evidence for that’s gonna be impossible, due to the absence of priests who could write anything down. I couldn’t find much of (reconstructed) word-lists for Cañari — especially enough to see if its sound-pattern differed from Quechua in ways that would tell whether */kumal/ was more likely Cañari or Quechua (or Cañari substrate under Quechua).
Or I would entertain evidence */kumal/ wasn’t used in highland/Inca Quechua. Perhaps the */kumal/ variety didn’t grow so well in the mountains.
What might tell us is the paywalled Urban (2018, Wiley online library), ref’d from wp on ‘Cañari language’, link in my post way above.
My main point remains: I just don’t believe any Polynesian craft could or would get across that much open ocean (especially at such an early date). And my secondary point remains: the Humboldt current and prevailing winds from Ecuador would bring anything floating nicely into (what is now) French Polynesia/pretty much where Kon-Tiki ended up — so within reach of Eastward-exploring Polynesians at around the right timing to pass into the daughter languages.
What might tell us is the paywalled Urban (2018, Wiley online library
Matthias Urban (2018) “The Lexical Legacy of Substrate Languages: A Test Case From The Southern Ecuadorian Highlands” is an inconclusive attempt to establish Cañari as a Barbacoan language. It does not mention sweet potatoes and—as far as I can tell from a quick read—does not otherwise touch on topics directly related to the origin of the Polynesian word for “sweet potato” or the diffusion of the crop in the Pacific. “Sweet potato” is not one of the 30 or so possible substrate words in Cañar and Azuay Quechua that he attempts to compare to words in Barbacoan languages.
Among scanty materials documenting the Barbacoan languages that I can access, Bruce R. Moore (1966) Diccionario castellano – colorado, colorado – castellano gives len as the Tsafiqui (Colorado) word for “sweet potato”. Randall Q. Huber and Robert B. Reed (1992) Vocabulario comparativo. Palabras selectas de lenguas indígenas de Colombia give ũth as the Páez word. These are not obvious comparanda to the form comal ~ cumal from Cañar, of course. (Besides these, John N. Lindskoog and Carrie A. Lindskoog (1964) Vocabulario cayapa just give camute (doubtless from general Spanish camote) for the Cha’palaa (Cayapa) language, and Huber and Reed (1992) also give pattatta (doubtless general Spanish batata) for Awa.)
Well, that explains how the return trip was possible if there was enough drinkable water on the boat. If getting caught in an El Niño event explains the trip in the other direction…
We’re not talking about coconuts. The tubers can’t just float in the sea on their own.
Meanwhile I delight in learning that Red is a Barbecue language.
I remember wondering, circa 1990, why we were reading excerpts from Kon-Tiki in middle school language arts classes. I knew at that point (although I’m pretty sure none of my classmates did) that Heyerdahl’s thesis had been totally debunked.
In terms of the spread if species, there really does seem to be a huge amount of chance involved. For example, I was actually discussing with one if my sons recently how rats spread all over the world. Two successive species of rats have become economically (and medically) important vermin only as a result of human activity. For millennia, black rats and brown rats were confined to south Asia, in spite of their being no barriers other than mountains keeping them there, until Indian Ocean trade spread them to the rest of the world.
The tubers can’t just float in the sea on their own.
Seeds can survive, as long as they are on top of something to float them, and they would end up in Central East Polynesia. That would require sweet potatoes growing on the beach in America, seed capsules landing on something to float them, sprouting on the beach on their destination island, and surviving as a wild population until people arrive.
I’m gonna have to sentence you to read through a list of such coincidences until you cry uncle.
If you have forms in two languages which match perfectly in form and meaning, where the forms are not too short or sound-symbolic, where the term is for an introduced material or cultural item, where one or both forms don’t have a native etymology, and where there’s a plausible historical explanation for a contact—then borrowing is the default hypothesis.
(And since Lameen’s bread and butter is contact linguistics, I would defer to him on that.)
I’m gonna have to sentence you to read through a list of such coincidences until you cry uncle.
Bring it on then: how many such coincidences can you come up with simultaneously involving:
– 5 or more perfectly matching successive segments (3 of them consonants, even!)
– perfect semantic match (at least at the species level)
– a referent known to be novel to one of the speech communities involved, and long-familiar to the other?
You don’t find anything near that level of specificity in Mbabaram:English dog, let alone Spanish mucho:English much or any of the other standard examples. If it were a monosyllable I’d already be a lot more open to coincidence as an explanation.
And,
– with no known etymology in the speech community where it is novel, whose historical linguistics is well understood.
OK, fair enough. But I’m still willing to assume coincidence unless I see a more convincing historical chain of borrowing.
What do you mean by “a chain of borrowing”?
I mean clear means of transmission, like Latin-speakers coming to Britain (known fact) and sharing their words.
Well, here you have an American cultivar showing up as a Polynesian cultivar. It had to come from one to the other. The only thing in the way is whether you think human transport is much less likely than accidental transport. I think the former is far more likely.
Did the native Ecuadoreans use balsa wood rafts back in the 12th century? Perhaps there really was a raft with sweet potatoes (and/or seeds thereof) on board (for whatever reason, maybe for trade up the coast) that ended up blown off coast due to a storm or something, approximately repeated Kon-Tiki’s path, and landed in what is now French Polynesia where (possibly much later, if the landing went well enough) a band of Polynesian explorers happened to be visiting. There could even have been living Ecuadoreans still there as well who could have explained what it was that they were carrying…
Certainly sounds more likely that a Polynesian canoe somehow making it all the way to Ecuador (or even Chile) against the winds, and then all the way back again. Of course either way involves lots of coincidences but I think this direction has less of them.
@Y with no known etymology in the speech community where it is novel,
Is it novel? Do we have prior etymologies for any Polynesian words as at a thousand years ago?
As I pointed out in the LLog thread (see at ‘Nyland’), ‘kū-‘ is a known prefix; ‘māra’ and ‘mara’ are known words. ‘umu’ is a known word: earth oven where you cook kūmara. Also ‘uma’ is a known word, ‘ara’ is a known word, ‘rā’ is a known word (sun AMOT) and particle (as in ‘haere rā’ = goodbye). So *[kūmara] perfectly fits expected sound patterns AFAICT (IANAP), no need to posit a borrowing.
I’m pretty sure I could find soundalikes for all those subsequences in Cañari (if we had a full set of vocab, thanks @Xerib for looking) and/or Quechua. So out of all those chance soundalikes, what’s the probability one of them is also meaning-alike?
Ok this is probably saying no more than that the Polynesian sound inventory is relatively small, open syllables, no consonant clusters, yada yada. And S.Am native languages similarly, it seems.
There is a Māori name ‘Raukūmara’ for a range of mountains in the North Island. None of my resources will give me an etymology. The word also means a specific shrub, endemic to NZ. ‘Rau’ is a word in itself or can be used in compounds/wordbuilding.
… Oh and my third point is there’s no Polynesian mythology/oral history about an epic Eastward journey to a land mass that clearly wasn’t an island. With people already on it; and who restocked their wāka and spoke a strange language. Polynesians are not reticent about vaunting their travels, nor reciting their lineages back to ancient heroes. Now kūmara aren’t so important to northern/tropical Polynesians, but Māori value them hugely because they’re one of the few starchy crops that grow successfully in temperate climes. They would have preserved the myth.
@David M The tubers can’t just float in the sea on their own.
The plants are usually propagated by stem or root cuttings, says wp. But they also produce seeds. “True seeds are used for breeding only.” — not being a horticulturalist, I’m not sure what that’s telling me.
So birds eat the seeds(?) And follow the prevailing winds and poop them out on some island. (See for example the wide distribution of Frigatebirds even unto S.Am. west coast and all across the South Pacific, several species now extinct — whose flight Polynesians followed to get to Rapa Nui. ” frigatebirds drink freshwater when they come across it, by swooping down and gulping with their bills.” — so a puddle in a kumara field.)
A bird that doesn’t poop for 2,300 miles?
As long as it doesn’t poop out on its journey, there should be some seeds left over at the terminus.
Why wouldn’t it poop on its journey? Not saying I know, but that seems extraordinary. Downwind as the crow flies, this is a 100-hour flight for a frigatebird, but there’s no reason to think they’d up and decide to fly straight there.
As for coincidence, I think the bigger coincidence is frigatebirds never managing to propagate the wild plant across the Pacific, then suddenly dropping cultivar seeds in the same millennium that the Polynesians began their voyages.
I’m also skeptical that a balsa could make its way across the Pacific on its own without submerging its cargo in saltwater by the end. Do kuumara thrive after submersion? Do they grow within reach of a wave toss?
That’s where El Niño would come in handy.
Way too small, I’d think.
I wrote “as long as it doesn’t POOP OUT”. That means “doesn’t run out of steam”, not “eschews pooping”.
How Often Do Birds Poop? (SURPRISING Answer! + FAQs)
Polynesians didn’t travel long-distance by rafts, balsa or otherwise. They traveled in wooden canoes, carrying people, chickens, pigs, and dogs. The Hōkūleʻa did many 1000-mile trips (some with chickens and pigs), as a revival of an old tradition. Back when everyone traveled in such boats, and many builders and navigatos were around, 2000-mile trips would not be such a reach. And Polynesians could tack back and forth against the wind.
@AntC: That is not an etymology. If you insisted that ramen is not a Japanese loanword because ram and men are English words, that would not be an etymology either.
All this is reinventing the wheel. People have looked at this word very hard for a century now, including Māori and Hawaiian scholars, as well as navigators and ship builders.
@Ryan Hahaha
the bigger coincidence is frigatebirds never managing to propagate the wild plant across the Pacific, then suddenly dropping cultivar seeds in the same millennium that the Polynesians began their voyages.
Under the bird-vectored hypothesis, we don’t have to posit they “never” managed to propagate before some date. They could have propagated several centuries before Polynesians got to wherever. And the kūmara self-sowed from then on. S.Am cultures were trading along the coast (and presumably growing crops for trade) from about 600 CE, so that puts an earlier limit: there weren’t such cultivars before then. (This hypothesis also explains why kūmara didn’t get further westwards to meet the humans earlier: the birds were all pooped out before they got to Fiji/Samoa/Tonga.)
@Y 2000-mile trips would not be such a reach. And Polynesians could tack back and forth against the wind.
Just no! 2000-mile trips were achieved by island-hopping at distances usually less than 1,000km. Getting so far as Rapa Nui was extraordinary (about 2,000km not miles from Pitcairn), but by then Polynesians knew what they were doing and knew how to read the natural signs. And had kūmara cultivation well understood.
The coast of S.Am is an order of magnitude further than any known hop, and no land at all, let alone somewhere to replenish fresh water. Furthermore by 1000 CE, Polynesians had not mastered the techniques for travelling (and returning reliably) over 1,000km.
Have you — or anybody else proposing this preposterously long voyage — ever tacked ‘back and forth’ against a prevailing wind? It takes 3 to 4 times longer than the same distance-made-good (as we sailors call it) downwind/crosswind. Furthermore the best those wāka could achieve was about 75° sailing angle to the wind. Modern monohull ocean-going yachts achieve about 45°; those terrifying things on stilts in the Americas Cup maybe 25°. Do the trig.
No I wasn’t positing an etymology. I was pointing out *[kumara] is easily within the sound pattern of Polynesian languages/we don’t need to look for a borrowing. Also that Polynesian languages exhibit wortbildung (and indeed abbreviating longer words to plug them into a build), so we don’t have to look for an etymology for the whole thing /that having a soundalike for all three syllables isn’t much evidence.
(Yes we are by now just rehashing prior points. So you’d think these scholars would by now have come up with something more convincing than a stray comment by a non-philologist/botanist.)
as well as navigators and ship builders.
Yeah. I note none of them has volunteered to try to recreate this hypothesised voyage — unlike Kon-Tiki. And nowadays we have forecasting that tells us when a El Niño is arriving.
My point is that typically wild breeds are more likely to self-propagate than cultivars, which often adapt to cultivation, losing traits that allow them to survive and reproduce in the wild. Presumably wild I. batatas plants and frigatebirds have existed for time measured in many hundreds of thousands of years. Yet across those ages, frigatebirds don’t seem to have brought sweet potato across the Pacific to self-propagate until the very millennium in which Polynesians made their crossing. Your accidental crossing / self-propagation theory depends on an amazing coincidence. And your independent development of the word kuumara depends on an amazing coincidence. What are the chances of both?
I take back what I said about tacking, having read Ben Finney’s classic Anomalous Westerlies, El Niño, and the Colonization of Polynesia. He does agree that sailing to South America would have been challenging (and expands further here), but as he says, “it might be wise to follow the dictum ‘never say never.’ All kinds of ocean voyages have been made over the world’s oceans with a wide variety of craft. Perhaps some particularly tenacious Polynesian explorers did stumble across the Equatorial Countercurrent, and by design or accident followed it all the way to the western coast of the Americas. If so, however, they would have had to have carried a good supply of food and water, and/or have been expert at fishing and wringing every drop of water from passing showers, in order to survive the many months such a voyage might have taken.”
Yet across those ages, frigatebirds don’t seem to have brought sweet potato across the Pacific
That we don’t know: perhaps they did, but the plants didn’t survive for long. So this particular I. batatas got lucky that Polynesians turned up in time to foster them.
Frigatebirds don’t go inland at all. Perhaps sweet-potato is usually a highland/inland crop (I don’t know). It wasn’t until humans brought them down to the coast that the interaction happened.
independent development of the word kuumara depends on an amazing coincidence.
No that one’s the least improbable amongst these coincidences. There’s plenty (well, plenty more than zero) around the world’s languages of soundalikes-meaningalikes. Ref our host. The Oti-Volta languages seem to be highly productive of examples. (More seriously: linguists don’t go looking for soundalikes-meaningalikes, because they’re tiresomely brought up by non-linguists and crackpots. So I suspect a thorough survey — which I’m not volunteering for — would produce heaps. Especially amongst languages with small phoneme inventories, open syllables, no consonant clusters, etc.)
@Y good on you for reading Finney. I thought he’d be too sailing-nerdy for the audience here.
The trouble with positing a El Niño is they’re unpredictable. Whereas Polynesian strategy was all about repeatable/returnable outings. (Not surprisingly.)
There’s a possible round trip (Finney hints at) going out in the Forties from RapaNui, north at the continent in the Humboldt, North-West from Ecuador to French Polynesia, then revert to island-hopping to the Eastern main islands. You’d need an amazingly encyclopaedic knowledge of all the constellations and island/wave patterns to even recognise you’d got back to familiar-ish seas. Yes many months, as Finney says. And little opportunity for fresh water/supplies.
But more important: how would you know in advance all those currents/tradewinds/the continent itself were there? And at which times of year they’re reliable? RapaNui was unknown at the time of discovering kūmara. If many months, you’re going to get caught in the change of seasons where all the meteorological/sea-current ‘action’ switches from N. to S. hemisphere.
The Europeans had compasses/sextants, knew the earth was a sphere and roughly how big (except Columbus), took local guides with them in unfamiliar seas, and were equipped for several _years_ at sea. And still plenty of them perished. Columbus was both spectacularly wrong, and spectacularly lucky. (And the Atlantic is tiny compared to the Pacific — especially at the squeeze point from West Africa.) So indeed ‘never say never’.
@Y The Cañari word is recorded directly; see the reference Xerîb linked to.
Is this the best we have? The priest is not a phoneticist. Today’s pronunciation in Cañar-Quechua might be over-influenced from 400+ years of Spanish [**].
Fair enough to reverse engineer the Spanish plural back to singular. Can we reverse engineer what the priest wrote back to what was spoken? How well does ‘comal(es)’ fit C16th _Spanish_ sound patterns? Does Cañar(-Quechua) have word-stress patterns/rhythms? Do they match Polynesian stress patterns? [***]
Scaglion is an Anthropologist. How sharp is he on phonology?
[**] Today’s pronunciation of Te Reo Māori is known to be over-influence by English — and that’s happened in less than 200 years. What the (mostly German-trained) phoneticists recorded as ‘wha-‘ appears to be modelled on the initial consonant in Old English ‘hwæt’. And there’s a separate phoneme recorded as plain ‘w-‘ (‘whiri’ minimal pair vs ‘wiri’). There might have been some regional variation in pronunciation: ‘hwa-‘ varying to ‘fa-‘ varying to ‘wa-‘ (aspiration lost).
Colonial administrators and the bloody priests again were not so assiduous in their recording: the River Wha-nga-rei running through the town gazetted as Wangarei — pronounced wong-a-ray by red-blooded residents (and there’s a lot of them).
Anyhoo nobody these days says ‘hwa-‘/ɸa-/ — except pedantic Anglo-Saxons like me. Some trying to be politically correct say ‘fa-‘, most pronounce same as ‘wa-‘.
[***] I hear Māori word-stress patterns as lacking lexical stress, like French. ‘māra’ vs ‘mara’ are consistently different words — the macron denotes lengthened vowel, never reduced.
pronounced wong-a-ray by red-blooded residents
I have heard old-style RP-speaking relics-of-empire Brits refer to the Burkinabé capital city of Ouagadougou as “Wogger.” This struck me as unfortunate. Happily, by far the most old-style relics of empire in those parts are actually Francophones.
Happily, by far the most old-style relics of empire in those parts are actually Francophones
If the British had got that part of North Africa that was French, we could have had “Wipers to Wogger” instead of “Paris – Dakar”.
So perhaps somebody set out on an exploration or even settlement voyage, got caught in El Niño instead, and ended up in the Blue Desert without knowing how that happened. It’s not like we have any idea how many such voyages got lost and never returned; maybe here’s one that did return.
If he could have, Columbus would have demanded the monopoly on luck before he set sail. But he didn’t.
Can I ask the assembled brains trust …
The whole brouhaha here presumes the pronunciation of this dratted word didn’t change in the 500 years from ~1000 CE (hypothesised contact) to the priest recording it 1582. This despite the Cañari getting overrun by the Quechua-speakers nearly a century before the Spanish arrived. (I’ll leave aside that we have not a skerrick of evidence it was a Cañari word ever. And we certainly have no means to reconstruct any sound changes in Cañari.)
Now it’s true the reconstructed Proto-East-Polynesian *[ku:mara] is the same pronunciation as in Te Reo Māori today. But the pronunciation in other E.Polynesian languages has drifted. Furthermore the pronunciation of other words in Māori has drifted from P-E-P. I guess the phonemes in the particular word lucked out in Māori(?)
So there’s not only the coincidence of soundalikes. There’s also the coincidence the word in both languages was phonetically stable for 500 years. Is this likely? Are its phonemes somehow ‘core’ or ‘base’ or ‘rooted’ within the sound pattern?
That wouldn’t explain it changing in some E.Polynesian daughter languages. And none of those made contact with other languages until European times.
Also: if we expect/anticipate endogenous sound changes in languages (unlike this particular word), doesn’t that increase the likelihood of historical soundalikes, even if the words today sound different?
@AntC: 500 years is not that long, and it depends on what part of the phonological system is affected by sound changes. A hypothetical Latin *cūmara would still be *cumara in Modern Italian, about two millennia later, or a Common Slavic *ku(:)mara would still be *kumara in all major standard Slavic languages, about a millennium later. While I know almost nothing about the historical phonology of Austronesian and nothing at all about the historical phonology of the South American languages involved, it doesn’t seem unlikely to me that such a word could remain mostly unchanged over 500 years (if the languages in the respective regions have a tendency to go totally batshit with sound changes, like French, Albanian, or Old Irish, then all bets are off.)
Hans is quite right; to take another example, a Proto-Semitic *kūmara would be kumər in Algerian Arabic and kūmar in most Middle Eastern Arabic dialects, 5000-odd years later. 500 years is nothing when it comes to phonetic stability. I’m no Quechua expert, but I have looked at pan-Quechua sound correspondences as part of historical linguistics homework (it’s a problem set in Lyle Campbell’s book) as well as at Paul Heggarty’s work. They’re mostly pretty trivial! You can explore a bunch of cognates at Soundcomparisons.com to see just how similar these words have stayed; try the word for “neck”, for instance.
Heh. Mair has a whole post ranting about “a knee-jerk reaction to attribute all distant cultural resemblances to chance coincidence.” Let’s face it, there’s no universally acceptable way to decide these issues; I’m always going to be suspicious of solutions that require too great a leap of faith (about, e.g., premodern trans-Pacific travel), and others like the idea of ancient cross-cultural contact and are suspicious of lexical coincidences. But we manage to coexist!
The full list of comparisons for kumara in Polynesian are here: https://pollex.eva.mpg.de/entry/kumala1/
My knowledge of historic phonology for the region is minimal, but I think there are some unexpected forms here (e.g. loss of the -m- in Hawaiian, Niue timala etc) which would not necessarily be expected from an old-established word. I’m sure I’ve seen suggestions that this was because it was a later borrowing between languages rather than part of the inherited vocabulary everywhere. (Note: they reconstruct as *kumala for Polynesian as a whole, but if that is meant to contrast with a hypothetical *kumara I think you’d need to be sure that the Tongan and Niuean forms were not borrowings from further East
Mair has a whole post ranting
I note his frankly disingenuous and needlessly offensive response to a perfectly sensible comment there.
I wouldn’t dream of commenting in that thread.
500 years is not that long, and it depends on what part of the phonological system is affected by sound changes.
Kusaal tʋm “send” is cognate with Swahili tuma “send.” The time-depth for proto-Volta-Congo can hardly be less than 4000 years … (even just proto-Bantu itself is said to be well over 2000 years old, though such numbers seem mostly to rely on voodoo lexicostatistics: still, the Bantu languages differ a lot more from each other than the Romance languages, say.)
On the other hand, Kusaal kɔlig “river” is cognate to Mbelime wuonu “river” (and Mbelime is much more closely related to Kusaal than Swahili is.)
Kusaal kɔlig “river” is cognate to Mbelime wuonu “river”
Drop the other shoe, would you?
A nice summary of Proto-Polynesian segments and their reflexes.
kūmara~kumara is also reflected as such in Rapanui and Tuamotuan. The loss of /m/ in Hawaiian and other languages is irregular, but as the POLLEX link indicates, it also occurs elsewhere (examples from Mangaia). *l is reconstructed for the protolanguage by convention: it could have been either /l/ or /r/. The Western Polynesian words are all borrowings, maybe some post-European ones. Sweet potatoes were introduced elsewhere in the Pacific by Europeans.
The plants are usually propagated by stem or root cuttings, says wp. But they also produce seeds. “True seeds are used for breeding only.”
i’m only an indifferent gardener, but i can, i think, elaborate this properly.
it’s saying that seeds are not how new kumara plants are generally grown under cultivation – that kumara-growers only grow them from seed when they’re trying a new crossbreed. that implies that kumara probably don’t breed true to strain from seed (like apples, for instance), and possibly-to-probably don’t grow very successfully from seed.
and that makes me think that any seed-based mechanism of transmission is not the best place to be looking. this doesn’t affect the human/non-human question at all: it just means that the non-human mechanism would be floating chunks of stem or tuber (perhaps as part of a larger clump of flotsam pulled off shore by a storm or washed downriver by a flood) rather than seeds.
it also might mean that a well-supplied coastal vessel would carry an uncooked tuber or two, either as trade goods (“here’s our best strain, can we have yours?”) or as emergency supplies in case of getting stuck somewhere for an extended period of time.
but given the odds of drift-carried kumara landing and taking root more than once, it seems like the timeline of its spread among the pacific islands might be revealing, if the genetics can help establish it at any usefully fine scale – especially relative to polynesian settlement wherever it seems to have first turned up.
It's factually wrong, too.
I have dared. Let’s see what happens.
I’ve tried to remind myself that being passive-aggressive seems to be a personality trait some people just have, and need not be intended as an act of card-carrying mustache-twirling cackling villainy even though that’s what it… is.
Gosh, David, that’s a daring comment there, given how high in the saddle Herr M is riding. I feel like breaking out a beer and pulling up a deck chair, but it would just make me sleepy. I’ve seen it all before anyway.
I’ve tried to remind myself that being passive-aggressive seems to be a personality trait some people just have
Trait ? It’s a fully-fledged way of life, driven by what Nietzsche called Ressentiment. So you really have to watch out for the aggressive phases. They are not necessarily just verbal. [see my forthcoming essay Dastards in the Dog Park].
@AntC, my impression is that the historical developments of the Polynesian languages is quite secure because the number of cognate sets is huge — so if they were saying that loss of -m- was regular in Hawai’ian, they would not just be guessing. But note that both of your examples are marked as “Problematic,” possibly because the changes are not regular. Looking at KUMI.1 ‘ten fathom measure’ in the same list, the correspondences in those languages are ?umi and kumi and not marked problematic.
On the other hand, Proto-Polynesian kumara has 22 “unproblematic reflexes out of 37 listed languages. Most of them are just kumala. I think that pushes any hypothesis that the form of the word on the Polynesian side has changed a lot over 1000 years out well beyond any reasonable number of standard deviations.
But on the Cañari side, I agree. One attestation 500 years after the assumed borrowing (and 100 years after a conquest by the Inkas) is compatible with all sorts of protoforms. If there was some loan from a well-reconstructed neighbouring language that was somehow unambiguously Cañari, it could be narrowed down a bit. But even if some miracle allowed us to pinpoint a similar form to Proto-Cañari of 1000AD, there is still the possibility of independent creation — how many different syllables did Proto-Polynesian even have? (And this would have to be compared with the likelihood of even a single successful return voyage, which is not known. I only see claims and counterclaims).
how many different syllables did Proto-Polynesian even have?
Proto East Polynesian, the language in question, had 11 consonants and 5 vowels (plus 5 long vowels). So at least 55³=166,375 different possible three-syllable words.
If he could have, Columbus would have demanded the monopoly on luck before he set sail. But he didn’t.
Magellan (and El Cano) surely had more; their expedition is how we have the name “Pacific”, because that particular ocean had seemed unusually quiet to them.
OTOH apparently they managed to miss basically all the inhabited islands on the way…
Kusaal kɔlig “river” is cognate to Mbelime wuonu “river”
Drop the other shoe, would you?
I second Y’s request for more info; I love that kind of unobvious relationship.
(DE, you brought it up recently, using the Mampruli cognate, but without revealing the plot then either.)
Fairly sure that I did expound this one in some detail somewhere on LH (and, after all, all issues are treated somewhere on LH) …
Still, it’s probably easier to rehash the explanation rather than search for it.
The stem of the Kusaal form kɔlig is actually not far from the proto-Oti-Volta *kpel-; Kusaal inflects this stem in the ga/sɪ class, which is where the -g comes from (the -i- is an epenthetic vowel.) More on the class membership below.
Labial-velars don’t contrast with velars before rounded root vowels in any current Oti-Volta language, but there is some reason the think that the protolanguage did have a contrast: some of these rounded vowels seem to have been the result of rounding by the preceding consonant, and in such cases eg. Kusaal /k/ may correspond to /k͡p/ elsewhere, e.g. Kusaal kɔbir “bone”, Moba kpabl.
And in fact, the Moba representative of this word is a handy half-way house to understanding the Mbelime: Moba has kpénû.
Two things are notable in this: firstly, it has /n/ for proto-Oti-Volta non-initial *l: this change is found regularly throughout all the Gurma languages (which include Moba) and all the Atakora languages except Waama (which include Mbelime.)
Secondly, the word is in a different noun class: the “long thin things” ŋʊ/ŋɪ class. It’s no mystery why this is different in Kusaal: Western Oti-Volta has lost the ŋʊ/ŋɪ class, with just a couple of stray irregularities remaining as evidence that it once had it too. So the full proto-Oti-Volta form, along with its singular class suffix, was actually *k͡pelu.
Almost there …
The *k͡p -> h change is regular in Mbelime: compare Kusaal kpi “die”, Mbelime hii “die.” The rounding of the vowel is of the same nature as in the Kusaal. The only thing remaining to be accounted for is the vowel length.
Many Oti-Volta roots of the form CVC have CVVC allophones. Kusaal is fairly typical in that it is no longer possible to reduce the allophony pattern to any simple set of rules, presumably because there has just been too much levelling, but Mbelime obligingly does have as simple rule in noun flexion: you always get CVVC when the syllable is open, CVC otherwise. As the suffix is -u, the CVVC allomorph is required, and /uo/ is the long vowel corresponding to short /o/: so, wúónù.
The stem tones also match regularly: Mbelime wúónù, Moba kpénû simply match, as high tone; Kusaal kɔ̄līg has mid tone, but belongs to a tonal subclass where the mid tone becomes low tone when the word sheds its noun class suffix and appears as a bare stem in composition (which happens all the time in Oti-Volta languages, as that is how nouns are construed with following adjectives and/or demonstratives: kɔ̀lkān, “this river.”) That tone class regularly corresponds to the high tone of Gurma and non-Waama Atakora languages, and comparisons with tones outside Oti-Volta show that the Gurma/Atakora tones are conservative, whereas Kusaal and its closer relatives have innovated.
So: all forms have arisen by known mechanisms from the proto-Oti-Volta *k͡pélù “river” (a member of the “long thin things” noun class.)
CVVC allomorphs, not allophones, sorry. And allomorphy pattern. But you knew that.
I see I’ve missed a step in the Mbelime form: *hw -> w.
I have actually handwaved a bit in this: like it’s neighbour (and relatively close relative) Byali, Mbelime normally shows proto-Oti-Volta *k *kp -> h, but there are some inconsistencies. You could arbitrarily deal with these by multiplying the number of proposed consonants in the protolanguage, but in fact I think the inconsistency reflects the fact that this is an Atakora Sprachbund thing rather than an inherited sound change. The unequivocally Western Oti-Volta language in the Atakora, Boulba, shows similar changes, again not carried through with complete regularity.
Beautiful, thanks for taking the trouble!
…I’m missing one thing here: how did h become w? Is the Mbelime form secretly huonu?
…Oh, I see it now. I guess it was missing when I saw the comment.
The “bone” word that I mentioned, corresponding to Kusaal kɔnbir /kɔ̃bɪɾ/ “bone”, Moba kpabl, in Mbelime goes: singular hɔ̰ɔde, plural wɛ̰. (In all three languages, the word has the same tones as “river”, BTW.)
The disappearing -b- in the Mbelime is a whole ‘nother problem which I haven’t got sorted out yet. There are plenty of parallels for b/w alternations after vowels in Oti-Volta, but I haven’t been able to work out regular rules so far. Judging by the presumed* Bantu cognate (e.g. Swahili mfupa, proto-Bantu *-kupa) there was a *p in there back sometime …
* The proto-Bantu *u is awkward, as the Oti-Volta forms all suggest a proto-Oti-Volta *a: *k͡pap- or *k͡pab- Still, the resemblance seems too close to be pure chance. The tones correspond properly, too.
Presto Change-o! Lovely.
*k͡p -> h is odd. Any guesses about intermediate steps? (I know you won’t just say “lenition”.)
but given the odds of drift-carried kumara landing and taking root more than once, it seems like the timeline of its spread among the pacific islands might be revealing, if the genetics can help establish it at any usefully fine scale – especially relative to polynesian settlement wherever it seems to have first turned up.
Thanks @rozele, it seems the timeline of spread in E.Polynesia was quick. This at a time when there was regular travel throughout — so I’m guessing the languages were still very close. (As others have noted, kumara didn’t get back-transported to W.Polynesia/neither the word — that didn’t happen ’til European spread.)
The trouble with getting finer detail on the botany today is that Europeans brought other cultivars from elsewhere in the Americas (Caribbean, for example) so now the strains are all hopelessly tangled up.
the non-human mechanism would be floating chunks of stem or tuber (perhaps as part of a larger clump of flotsam pulled off shore by a storm or washed downriver by a flood) rather than seeds.
I take the points everybody’s making that the distance to the Marquesas is huge for such flotsam. And how would the tubers root themselves if they just washed up on a beach? But if we’re not positing human agency, there’s a much longer timeline for this to happen: S.Am natives were cultivating Kumara and rafting along the coast from about C6th.
One of the botany papers (sorry I’ve churned through too much stuff by now) guesstimated from the samples it did test kumara’s first arrival in E.Polynesia would be somewhere around the Marquesas. But it didn’t have a sample from there. This corresponds to the Polynesian myths — if you interpret them generously. But also corresponds to the ocean drift/prevailing winds from Ecuador.
So kinda this would line up with the hypothesis David M is trying to pursue (on the Log). The trouble is it just wouldn’t work to sail _to_ Ecuador from the Marquesas — precisely because you’d be battling currents and winds and would take much longer than drifting back. So we’d have to hypothesise they set off from somewhere completely elsewhere; then the interaction on S.Am coast; then to Marquesas where no Polynesian had explored.
‘Voyages of settlement’ took heaps of stuff/whole families, and only set out _after_ ‘voyages of exploration’ had established there was a habitable island and reliably how to get there. Then if you were off course by so far as the S.Am coast and trying to get home, I don’t see why you’d pause at a so-far uninhabited island to plant these new-fangled kumara.
I’m not taking anything away from the Polynesians’ powers of navigation/seamanship to say I just don’t see how they’d know how to get back to central E.Polynesia. We’d have to posit all sorts of luck and chance — less chance than a single soundalike.
Thanks @anhweol, @LarsM. Yes I don’t get why some of those are marked ‘Problematic’. (It’s fair to mark the W.Polynesian soundalikes as ‘Borrowed’.)
Rarotongan ʔUmi vs Māori Kumi is a surprise: NZ was settled from Rarotonga (say the myths, and the genetics); their languages are still mutually comprehensible/the difference is more of a dialect than a separate language. Rarotongan has /Kuumara/, exactly the same as Māori. Other words starting /k-/ I checked also start /k-/. WP thinks Rarotongan has both /k/ and /ʔ/ (unlike NZ Māori) – allophones? ‘Problematic’ means they’re not sure their data is right? One of the Rarotongan outlying islands has /kūʔara/ OTOH in other places /ʔānau/ for Māori whānau – family. /ʔ/ is some kind of super-allophone?
I have dared. Let’s see what happens.
Apparently you’ve vanished into oblivion.
*k͡p -> h is odd. Any guesses about intermediate steps?
I presume *k͡p -> hw in the first instance.
The “bone” words make sense on the basis of the /w/ first being lost before rounded vowels, and then remaining /hw/ -> /w/. (The front vowel in the plural of vowel-stems in this noun class is a systematic thing in Mbelime, where the plural class suffix was originally *ya.)
Unfortunately, this neat explanation doesn’t account for hii “die.” The imperfective form of proto-Oti-Volta *kpi “die” was probably *kpu, but (a) in Mbelime it’s actually hiimu and (b) of all the verbs in the lexicon, “die” must be about the least likely to have remodelled its perfective on the basis of the imperfective.
Byali, the other language which usually does *k ->h, actually has yia “die”, wo “kill” (cf Kusaal kpi, kʋ respectively.)
Darn it! Both David M’s and @Hat’s comments have vanished already. I’m certainly not going to try.
That’s why the 2013 genetics paper used old herbarium specimens.
Perhaps you needed a longer break of some kind. Shipwrecked?
A single soundalike plus all sorts of luck and chance to get the sweet potatoes across the ocean without having people carry them.
FFS.
RAR ʔumi is ‘ten of cards’. It was probably brought over by Hawaiians (sailors?), Hawaiian having *k>ʔ and the general meaning ‘ten’.
AntC, there’s also the human genetic signature, discussed in Ioannidis’ et al. recent paper. They infer contact with the Marquesas at about 1150–1200 AD, from the equatorial coast of South America, either by a one-way voyage from the continent or by a round trip from Polynesia.
Technically an accidental drift of an American boat to the Marquesas is possible, but they’d be even less expected than Polynesian explorers to carry months’ worth of food and water (plus sweet potatoes), but “everything is possible”. I’m OK with that.
I still don’t know about the chickens, though. I’ve lost track of the back-and-forth arguments.
@Y I still don’t know about the chickens, though. I’ve lost track of the back-and-forth arguments.
Yes I’ve been staring at this too long now/need to get out and climb up a mountain or something/can’t be bothered to chase it all up perspicuously.
I think the chickens got rejected. Anyway they’re way down south in Chile/a long way from Ecuador. So either the chickens could fly, or we’re positing multiple Polynesian voyages.
The human genetic signatures IIRC were from samples (skulls) in Brazil. No explanation for how they’d get there without European transport. And they were dated to right on the borderline of European contact. How secure was that dating?
What this kumara drama reminds me of is Graham Hancock — a journalist, no sort of historian/anthropologist/linguist. He’s had a go at the Egyptian Pyramids, Gobekli Tepe, the Ceylon ‘Giant’s Causeway’ … He’s a real example of ‘a little knowledge is a dangerous thing’. He learns just enough to ride the tails of some unlikely hypothesis/doesn’t place what he finds in context of a whole discipline/writes a book of romantic imaginings/moves on to some other topic when (if) some academic finally gets called upon to entertain his nonsense semi-seriously.
So in the kumara case I know that I don’t know a lot. But I have an innate scepticism. An isolated word/not a slew of terms around some technology like horses & chariots to my mind needs an extraordinary level of evidence. We don’t even know whether this S.Am. word belongs to Cañari vs Quechua; if Quechua it wasn’t spoken on the coast at the needed time. And the rendering of the pronunciation was by a Spanish-speaking priest who went so far as to put a Spanish declension on it. (Quechua does put plural declensions, but they’re not `-es`; no info whether Cañari has declensions.) I just don’t trust the priest’s rendering of the sound. And if we don’t have the sound, we don’t have a soundalike.
Whatever it is the so-called Cañaris spoke, the point is that the word kumara was spoken by the coast.
That the recorder was Spanish is not a big problem. Presumably the kumara neat the coast is similar to that recorded reliably from inland Quechua, and there are no sounds in it that can’t be rendered in Spanish, except possibly an aspirated k which wouldn’t be distinguished from a regular one. The plural suffix is no stranger than that in English banana-s.
Untrained missionary recordings are quite valuable and informative. They just require more careful handling. These people weren’t making things up just for kicks. That’s why there are conferences and journals on missionary linguistics. There are entire languages only known from European missionary records.
the point is that the word kumara was spoken by the coast.
No: that’s what we don’t know — what was spoken on the coast **at the time of hypothesised contact**. It was spoken on the coast by 1582. If by “inland Quechua” you mean Inca lands — that is, Inca as at ~1000 CE — it ipso facto wasn’t spoken on the coast as at ~1000 CE. (Well I guess unless the Cañari borrowed it. But since they were rivals, that seems unlikely.)
Note Quechua as at today has two words referring to two different varieties of sweet-potato, with neither appearing to be super-ordinate. (They nowadays use a Spanish-imported word for sweet-potato-in-general.) So I think we can’t reach for an explanation that one word is Inca-Quechua whereas Cumal is a Cañari ‘regional’ word left over from before Inca conquest.
That’s why there are conferences and journals on missionary linguistics.
Yes sure, by the C19th/20th. And missionaries these days get trained in linguistics and ethnology — Everett/Pirahã for example. But (correct me if I’m wrong) in C16th the Spanish were going around destroying native American empires.
quite valuable and informative
Doesn’t strike me as reliable enough to build a whole story of contact — in the absence of any other corroborating evidence. Indeed in the absence of any other transfer of artefacts or words.
There are entire languages only known from European missionary records.
Well nobody recorded much about Cañari, so we can’t today even reconstruct its sound pattern except by presuming it’s a substrate to Cañar-Quechua creole. The next-door language group Barbacoan is better recorded, but I think was not overrun by Inca. The attempt to reconstruct more Cañari by comparing to Barbacoan didn’t get very far — not even far enough to establish there was a genealogical relationship.
accidental drift of an American boat to the Marquesas is possible, but they’d be even less expected than Polynesian explorers to carry months’ worth of food and water
I was taking it the sailors perished in the storm. Only the raft/its cargo drifted.
But (correct me if I’m wrong) in C16th the Spanish were going around destroying native American empires.
Some of the best early work on indigenous American languages was done by Catholic missionaries well before the nineteenth century. A particularly splendid example is Horacio Carochi’s work on Nahuatl
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horacio_Carochi
This is recommended even now for serious study of Classical Nahuatl (there’s a nice English translation of it with the Spanish text opposite.)
Although Carochi was particularly gifted, he was by no means an isolated case.
On the other hand, these people were hardly untrained linguistically, in the sense that they were as well up in the linguistics of their own era (such as it was) as anybody could well be.
Not all of the Spanish were destroyers. Many spent a lot of time vigorously opposing the exploitative practices of the destroyers. It’s significant that, calamitous as the European invasions were everywhere, the actual eradication of local peoples was (overall) much more thorough in the Anglophone than Hispanophone colonies.
Even more to the point, there’s Domingo de Santo Tomás, who published in 1560 a Quechua dictionary, Diego González Holguín with his 1607 grammar and 1608 dictionary, and other sources of the same era.
Anyway, AntC, I get the feeling that you are trying very hard not to look at the linguistic evidence that’s in front of you, and so insist that it doesn’t exist. It gets tiring.
I get the feeling that you are trying very hard not to look at the linguistic evidence
It’s true that I’m completely convinced by the seafaring evidence, so I’m examining the linguistic evidence (which would contradict the seafaring) particularly closely. Are you suggesting I should relax and ‘let it pass’ that we have no secure attestation of the word in the right place at the needed time?
IOW we should just let Mair run amok with his woo? (R.Fenwick I’m not so critical of: they readily states they’s not a linguist/ethnologist. They seems to take myths more-or-less verbatim.)
It’s not as if *[ku:mara] is outside of P-E-P sound patterns that we’d even be looking for a borrowing, if not for this alleged soundalike. It’s no surprise it’s a neologism: it’s a new thing in E.Polynesia.
If there was language transfer, what further level of contact would be needed to get both the word and the thing and presumably knowledge how to preserve the thing en route and cultivate it upon arrival at dry land. Seemingly not even the existence of remote peoples with a different language survived in myth. (I suppose we could experiment washing up some kumara on a beach to see if/how they survive. Anybody want to fund me to go to the Marquesas for that?)
Come to that: have we any other examples of a single contact between distant peoples transferring a single word?
(I’m not trying to browbeat everybody into conceding the point. Yes it’s tiring/I’m only putting effort into it because it’s been blowing hard all week here/I can’t get out sailing. You can just stop. I’ll just stop as soon as the weather comes right.)
. It’s no surprise it’s a neologism: it’s a new thing in E.Polynesia.
It should be a surprise, actually. When you come across something new, you almost never coin a name for it out of thin air. If you can’t or don’t want to borrow a name, you create one based on words and morphemes you already have (tele-vision, basket-ball, …), or, at a pinch, on onomatopoeia (tuk-tuk). Polynesian is reconstructible enough that the former should be analysable, and onomatopoeia seems completely unmotivated here.
you create one based on words and morphemes you already have
(Sorry I can only do NZ/Māori vocab/neologisms, but wortbildung is common across Polynesian languages.)
Ao-tea-roa, Kai-kōura — names of places, indeed not coined out of thin air.
Piwakawaka a bird endemic to NZ The fantail has 20 or 30 different Māori names.. Most Māori names for NZ endemic birds are adapted from Polynesian names. But of course perhaps the Polynesian names were coinages.
There’s also plenty of Māori names for endemic NZ plants, including those used as food, which don’t appear in the Polynesian wordlists — and again some that are adapted.
For *[ku:mara] there’s plenty of candidate words/syllables that could be assembled for coining that.
There are kumara-associated words (such as for storage pit) that aren’t soundalikes/compounds from kumara. Ok: do soundalikes for hāpoko or kōpiha appear in Cañar-Quechua?
Unetymologisable names for endemic NZ plants is a good counterpoint; that’s the sort of thing I would want to look at more closely for estimating the odds of coincidence here. Bird names tend to be onomatopoeic quite a lot, loosely imitating their cries; plant names are usually harder to associate with sounds.
Did I say (in another place) “Basque seems to be a particularly favourite source language …” (for bogus etymologies/long-distance language contact).
I bring you ‘kumara’ from Basque. Allative singular of ‘kuma’, a cradle. The picture in wikt looks exactly the sort of thing in which you’d carefully place your kumara for drying before storing in pits over winter.
Case solved.
I think that R.Fenwick actually is a linguist: indeed, I have a copy of their grammar of Ubykh, unless I’ve mistsken their identity (possible, as it”s a bit complicated.) I’m actually a bit surprised at their tolerance for Mair, but then a lot of people are more tolerant than I am.
That’ll be this R.Fenwick on Ubykh.
Also apparently this R.Fenwick on Kunwinjku dialect of Bininj Kunwok, a non-Pama-Nyungan language of Australia’s Northern Territory — although a few comments on they disclaim detailed knowledge of that topic. They do appear to be based at Uni of Queensland.
Hmm? Is that the same style of comments as on the kumara thread?
Anyhoo I’m glad I didn’t make any assumptions about their preferred pronouns — apologies for the awkward (to my ear) morphology.
@AntC: The question is not whether there are neologisms in Maori or Polynesian, but whether there is a good internal etymology for *kumara in Eastern Polynesian that is in accordance with the usual word-forming patterns of the language and makes sense.
On why only one item and one word – who knows? Maybe there were more, but they weren’t accepted into the culture and didn’t survive; maybe the sweet potato was the only thing that looked attractive and was practical enough to take on the journey back. Considering what you said about currents, the chain would look like this: Polynesians from the Not-Marquesas are thrown off-course and land in South America; they stay some time and learn about sweet potatoes, among other things; they try to get back and land at the Marquesas, where they share their findings with the locals. So there would be three stages of selection – what the seafarers decide to bring back and report, what the locals at the Marquesas would accept, and what of it they would maintain over the centuries. On each step, ideas, items, and words may get lost.
The newly discovered animals kiwi, kākāpō, moa, tuatara, all have transparent etymologies.
we’re talking about an exact phonetic match, with allowance for just one single vocalic epenthesis that Polynesian phonotactics absolutely demand. [R.Fenton, on LLog]
Can I stretch everybody’s patience a little further with some phonetics probing, because I find R.Fenton’s claim (with all respect) to be just not true. The priest wrote ‘comal(es)’. Why that ‘o’. not ‘u’? What was the sound-value of ‘o’ vs ‘u’ in C16th Spanish?
Part 1: Soundalikes. There seems to be no Spanish word ‘cumal’, but there is ‘cumel’ — some sort of alcoholic drink; there is ‘comal’ = griddle for tortillas from Nahuatl, also borrowed into English. (So I’m not saying those words were current in Spanish at the time, but the sounds were at least spellable.)
Then the soundalike pattern we’re looking for is /kOmaL(Ǝ)/, where /O/ is /o/ or /u/; /L/ is a liquid — note E.Polynesian languages have either /r/ or /l/, not both; /(Ǝ)/ is an optional epenthetic lax vowel, schwa or /a/.
I note that Quechua _doesn’t_ have /o/, does have /u/, /a/ — not that Quechua is the language we need to probe; but again why did the priest use ‘o’? I note some Greenbergian rules that all languages have a velar; if they have any nasals they have /m/; if they have a liquid it’s /r/ or /l/. So I predict before looking that we’ll have heaps of soundalikes for that pattern. For languages with a small phoneme inventory this gets more likely — all those sounds will be available.
And so it proves. Indian subcontinent name Kumar from Sanskrit; Old Irish cumal = female servant; Irish cumar = ravine; only a small deviation to get VP Kamala; and on and on. And Basque kumara is just icing on the cake — and not at all likely, because Basque has a large inventory of consonants, and consonant clusters, and not necessarily open syllables, and diphthongs (but only the standard-issue 5 vowels, same as E.Polynesian).
Part 2: possible source languages for a soundalike. Under the drift-on-the-Humboldt hypothesis, we don’t need the kumara to have come from (what is today) Southern Ecuador. The Humboldt comes northwards for the whole length of S.Am. East coast before branching NW anywhere from north Chile up to Ecuador (coincidentally the range of Balsa rafts) — indeed better our plant matter departs from south of Ecuador, else it’s liable to run aground on the Galapagos. (Counter-hypothesis: are there Kumara beached on those?)
How many native languages were spoken along that coastline circa 1000 CE? What are the chances some/several of those have a soundalike to our pattern? I can’t tell exactly when our kumara story originated. With Heyerdahl? Or at least before Heyerdahl got debunked? But let’s say you go looking with a grab-bag of E.Polynesian words for any sort of match to any W.Coast S.Am. languages: I think highly likely you’ll find a close-enough match. Kumara just was an over-achiever.
And now despite Heyerdahl being debunked we have ethnologists/philologists who soooo want to believe in long-distance communication in human history, they are deaf to the dangers of soundalikes (that actually aren’t soundalikes); they dismiss all the disciplines of the Comparative method; they diss other specialities (like nautical historians); they’re ready to believe in miracles.
It doesn’t matter that two languages have words which sound alike. If they sound alike (allowing for later known regular sound changes) and have the same meaning—that’s when it’s significant. So what is the chance that Proto East Polynesian and one of 10 or 20 coastal languages have the same trisyllabic word, ☞ both meaning ‘sweet potato’, by random coincidence? About 20 * 55⁻³, or 1 in 10,000.
You still haven’t addressed Ioannidis et al.’s paper.
The Ioannidis et al papers are mostly behind paywalls. I did skim a couple, but chiefly threw up my hands at “Heyerdahl” woo-woo. The 2020 paper (if you want me to try to take it seriously):
“Sweet potato cultivation in Polynesia as a crop began around 1000 AD in central Polynesia. …with the earliest archaeological evidence being fragments recovered from a single location on Mangaia in the southern Cook Islands, carbon dated between 988 and 1155 AD.” [wp]
So 1200 is too late. None of these dates are very secure/there might be a little wiggle room. But Ioannidis et al will need a lot of wiggle. They have a 2021 paper I can’t see, perhaps that wiggles. Polynesian expansion into E.Polynesia/Marquesas estimated 1025 – 1120 CE. (We’d need to hypothesise the Americans arrived in the middle of the expansion/100 years earlier than that 1200 date, and whatever they brought to the party got taken back to Rarotonga/Samoa/Tonga and then forward to NZ and to RapaNui — which is not impossible, there was still plenty of two-way contact at the time.)
But Colombia (or even N.Ecuador, which the paper vaguely entertains) is the wrong place: too far north for anybody to be speaking Cañari, and especially not Quechua/Inca expansion several centuries later. See their Fig. 4.
Now IANA genome-sequencer, so much of the paper’s ifs and buts went over my head. OTOH they are not Nautical scientists nor ethnologists/linguists, so when they blather on about Cañari (at least they didn’t mix them up with Inca/Quechua, but they’re still several unrelated language groups along the coast away from Zenu) and this:
I see magical thinking. Upwind exploration from the Marquesas (which is also up-current: the wind might drop or temporarily turn round; the current not so much) is what the Polynesians just would not attempt, as already made very clear by Finney 1985.
Columbia/N.Ecuador is also too far north/around the corner to the NE to catch the current to the Marquesas.
Wikipedia says nothing is known of the Zénu language/unclassified. These native Americans are in the wrong place at the wrong time speaking the wrong language. Why are Ioannidis et al even mentioning kumara and Heyerdahl?
As at 1970’s (Yen) or 1980’s (Finney), I guess Heyerdahl was still not debunked. Heyerdahl’s hypothesis of Polynesian origins is overwhelmingly rejected by scientists today. — indeed it was not well regarded even at the time. As at 2020’s, academics would add greatly to their credibility by just not mentioning it.
So, to sum it up fir myself, wr have:
– A name for the sweet potato that can be reconstructed to *kuma(r/l)a in Proto–Eastern Polynesian;
– The cultivar comes from South America
– In South America, we have similar words for the same cultivar (cumara, comal)
– As far as I can see, nobody yet has come up with a credible internal etymology for the word in Eastern Polynesian
– Linguistically, there is the problem that the main language with that word wasn’t spoken on the coast in the period when Polynesians started to grow sweet potatoes; on the other hand, Quechua and later Spanish displaced many languages originally spoken on the coast, so it’s not excluded that coastal languages had the same word, or that it even originated on the coast (names of cultivars are often widely loaned regionally).
– The bigger problem is that contact between South America doesn’t fit with the patterns of travel and navigation of either Polynesians or South Americans at that time, so the contact would be due to a highly unlikely lucky fluke successful travel to and back from South America.
I guess this cannot be solved right now without one if the following:
– Finding a good internal etymology or another source for the Eastern Polynesian word, proving that it is a chance resemblance or
– Finding other evidence for contact between Eastern Polynesia and South America in the respective period, and more evidence for the word being used in coastal languages, priving that it is a loan.
Didn’t I just see a passing mention of South American genetic traces in Polynesia? (In humans, not sweet potatoes). And at the speed new haplotype results are arriving, there might be firmer (and better datable) evidence of contact soon. Or there might not.
It doesn’t matter that two languages have words which sound alike. If they sound alike (allowing for later known regular sound changes) and have the same meaning—that’s when it’s significant.
Here, check out this list. Arabic akh ‘brother’/Mongolian akh ‘brother’, Bikol aki ‘child’/Korean aki ‘child’, Hawaiian mahina ‘month’/Urdu mahina ‘month’, etc. etc. etc. I repeat for the umpteenth time: almost no one appreciates how common coincidences are.
almost no one appreciates how common coincidences are.
Jung and his followers did. Sez the Wipe:
#
To Jung, synchronicity is a meaningful coincidence in time, a psychic factor which is independent of space and time.
#
To avoid being booked on the same boat as those folks, I suggest a more cautious claim: “how common insignificant coincidences are”.
No, that’s not at all the same. Coincidences are not “meaningful,” they’re just there. The fact that people desperately want to attribute meaning to them is a product of humanity’s need for meaning (wherever that need comes from). I have no truck with Jungians and will not word my sentences to make allowances for them.
@LH: Y’s comment was specifically directed at AntC’s list of soundalikes with different meanings. When the soundalike also has the same meaning, then certainly an investigation is in order whether this is chance, a loan, or a cognate. In some of the cases this investigation can be very short, when we know the history of the specific languages, cultures, and items well and there is no or overwhelming evidence for loaning or genetic relatedness. But the Polynesian sweet potato is not such a clear-cut case, as the entire discussion here has established.
There is no or overwhelming evidence, so coincidence is a reasonable hypothesis. I’m not denying the possibility of the kind of historical connection people are suggesting, but I am baffled by the (often angry) denial that it might be a matter of coincidence. (Cf. the contemptuous dismissal of AntC’s reasoned and moderate comments.) It seems that some people are (like Mair) very invested in the idea of cross-Pacific transmission.
Coincidence came into the language at the revival of learning, and has always had the two senses of mere agreement in time, place, nature, etc. and the stronger sense of agreement without apparent causal connection. Thus Thomas Henry Huxley wrote “The coincidence of twelve by the clock with noon by the sun-dial […] is exact only four times in the year”, but this is no coincidence at all in the second sense: it is causal if anything is.
In any case, Jung (as opposed to certain crazed Jungians) didn’t think synchronicity was anti-causal, merely acausal; he corresponded with Wolfgang Pauli about the so-called “second Pauli exclusion principle”, which tells us that working experimental equipment and Wolfgang Pauli cannot occupy the same room (and the same for certain other theoretical physicists). In one case, a chandelier had been rigged up to crash to the floor when Pauli entered the room; however, the effect failed because the rope holding the chandelier got stuck for no apparent reason.
Of course, we Peirceans know perfectly well that all this is exactly what you should expect.
Here, check out this list
It hasn’t got Waama doku “poison” = Japanese doku “poison”, though.
I’m sure there’s lots it hasn’t got. It’s proof of concept. God knows how many others could be added. It’s a big world, with lots of languages!
Quechua /u/ varies widely. As a rule of thumb, it gets the closer to [o] the nearer it lies to /q/, but there’s enough random variation in it that spellings by pentavocalistas, even today, are inconsistent. There’s a dictionary by a native speaker that orders a word with oll- (and no /q/ anywhere) between two u- words.
I really don’t think 1200 can be distinguished from 1155 by population genetics, or reliably distinguished from 1100.
The Zenu people are just the ones they happened to have DNA samples from. That’s already progress over the decades when the Karitiana of Brazil had to stand in for all of South America in dozens of papers.
Have you noticed how tight the inverse correlation between the length of matches and their frequency in this list is? There are only two matches of 5 segments or more in this list, unless we count kutya “dog”, which as 5 segments in “Hindustani” but 4 in Hungarian (…and makes me wonder about Romani…).
Also, there are mama-papa words in the list, so the numbers of 3- and 4-segment matches are artificially inflated.
I haven’t read the human-genetics papers yet.
(Cf. the contemptuous dismissal of AntC’s reasoned and moderate comments.)
I didn’t note any contempt, but I’m generally not inclined to see contempt or offense where it’s not abundantly obvious 🙂
Personally, I think AntC’s comments are reasonable where he talks about the navigation side, but that they’re bordering on unreasonable when he seems to ignore that the point is not any kind of similar words, but ones referring to the same cultivar, and when he expects an exactness of matching that we don’t have for other known cases of loans.
We confidently can diagnose chance resemblance in cases where we know the history of both languages involved well. I assume that in the case of e.g. Mbabaram:English dog, we know enough about the history and structure of Mbabaram and about cognates in related languages that we can be sure the word is not a loan from colonial times. Neither Y (as far as I understand him) nor me are saying that it’s impossible per se that kumara is a chance resemblance; we think it unlikely because the cultivar comes from South America and there doesn’t seem to be a native etymology for the word in Polynesian. Set that against the unlikeliness of contact as explained by AntC, and we get the impasse we are at now.
A fair summary.
the closer to [o] the nearer it lies to /q/
The further off from England the nearer is to France
My summary would be: It’s agreed on all sides that the sweet potato came to East Polynesia from the Americas. Two classes of scenarios have been discussed here and elsewhere:
1. The sweet potato was brought by people: either Polynesians on a round trip, or Americans on a one-way trip.
2. The sweet potato was brought without human agency, say by floating on top of something, or by birds, or something else.
Both scenarios are prima facie improbable, for reasons we rehashed. And yet, one of them must be true! Lacking further details, we have to imagine our way out of the difficulties for one or the other. Finney has made one attempt (a sensible, well-informed one) at imagining a human voyage; Heyerdahl made another (not as sensible or well-informed.) I have not seen any good imagined scenario for natural transport which gets around all the various difficulties, but let’s assume there is one.
There must be a nice way to say this in Bayesian, but I don’t speak it. I’ll try (hopefully someone will correct me): say the prior probabilities for human transport and for natural transport are, 0.0001 apiece: the posterior probabilities, given that the transport occurred, are 0.5 apiece.
Now, if people had brought it over, a borrowing of an American name into Polynesian is exactly what we would expect, just as Polynesians have been borrowing European words from the 1600s onward (usually in preference to neologizing). If the sweet potato had drifted over without the aid of people, a Polynesian neologism would be expected, and the probability for it matching kumara accidentally would be indeed non-zero, but small. Occam’s razor calls for the more probable interpretation.
Regarding the dates: a good summary exists in the paper by Anderson and Petchey (Anderson being responsible more than anyone for clearing up the chronological record of Polynesia). In brief, the Mangaia date is inferred, approximate, and probably too old (it comes from unknown wood in layers bracketing the sweet potato specimens.) A reliable date comes from Hawai‘i, dated to the 14th century, reported by Ladefoged et al. (son of that other Ladefoged).
Regarding Ioannidis: he uses samples from several South American populations for his comparisons: Mixe, Zapotec, Zenu (Colombian coast), Magdalena de Cao (northern Peru), Aymara, and several Mapuche populations. The Zenu showed the best match, as I understand it. Geographically close populations tend to be genetically close, so Ecuador fits reasonably well with the available data.
Hat: What bothers me about AntC’s arguments is that he makes absolute statements and throws them to see what sticks, and if not, he moves on to the next one. On the way, he completely dismisses the works of Yen, who spent a lifetime studying sweet potato systematics; of Irwin, who spent a lifetime on computer simulations of Oceanic voyages; of the priest who recorded the Cañari word, who lived among speakers of the language; and others. Those are not moderate comments.
@Hans The question is not whether there are neologisms in Maori or Polynesian, but whether there is a good internal etymology for *kumara in Eastern Polynesian that is in accordance with the usual word-forming patterns of the language and makes sense.
That’s a tall order to create an etymology for a word ~1000 years old, in a non-literate language. Even something as well-documented as English can’t find an etymology for ‘dog’ — nor Spanish for ‘perro’, says etymonline. (Indeed English has few words ending -og, and most of them etym dub. I’m inclined to say -og doesn’t fit the sound pattern of English.)
I’m no scholar of Polynesian languages, so I’m not going to try. What I can hear is that ‘kumara’ does fit the sound pattern of Te Reo Māori.
But that’s no surprise: those phonemes are all ‘base’ in even languages with small phoneme inventories/open syllables/etc. So if such a language didn’t already have ‘kumara’ and you were looking for a word for a new thing, that’d be a good candidate.
@Y the more probable interpretation.
I guess those who feel a spiritual/romantic need to believe in ‘long-distance communication in human history’ will find that the more probable interpretation to believe in. And those who don’t, not.
(names of cultivars are often widely loaned regionally) coming from someone who (AFAICT) has made no study of S.Am. native cultures and languages — not that we appear to have much helpful info — I’d count as a credo. Then I feel I’ve been wasting my time poring over these academic papers.
What’s the problem with ending up at ‘we shall never know’? — which is indeed where I started.
Eh, I’m not moderate either — I take a position and see what the opposing arguments are like. I understand your points and respect them, but (like AntC) I lean in the other direction. We’ll never know for sure.
Edit: Ninja’d by the Ant himself!
he [AntC] completely dismisses the works of Yen, huh?
I paid close attention to Yen: he disbelieved the word-transfer idea. I’m not at all disputing Yen’s main finding that it’s the S.Am. cultivar that got to Polynesia in time to meet the Polynesians.
Irwin’s results I also took on board (hah!) and drew on repeatedly: he’s my main evidence _against_ human transmission. Are you confusing with my view of someone else?
The priest I didn’t disbelieve: I questioned how good of a linguist he was/how reliable his data gathering. I am just not used to a ‘science’ that builds castles out of a single word in a record that was nothing to do with linguistics and was 500 years removed. I appreciate that with historical linguistics of non-literate dead languages we have to get our evidence however we can. That doesn’t make it reliable evidence.
I guess those who feel a spiritual/romantic need to believe in ‘long-distance communication in human history’ will find that the more probable interpretation to believe in. And those who don’t, not.
That’s what I was talking about earlier. I gave a reasoned probabilistic argument, and you dismiss it offhand, by calling me a silly romantic.
For the record, there have been many, many other arguments raised over the years for Polynesian–South American contacts, all of which I find unsupportable, simply because they don’t hold water (as it were). Equating the Mapuche ceremonial axe toki with the Māori word for adze, also toki, is one that comes to mind. Comparing the fitted stone architecture of Easter Island with that of the Incas is another. Those are just two examples which got written about a lot.
I guess those who feel a spiritual/romantic need to believe in ‘long-distance communication in human history’ will find that the more probable interpretation to believe in.
We have little choice in the matter here, do we? Everyone is apparently agreed on the part of this that would seem the most improbable a priori: that a human-cultivated crop spread from South America to Polynesia – a long distance indeed! – during human history, more specifically the rather short part of it between the Polynesian expansion and the voyages of Magellan. I find it hard enough to believe that would happen at all without humans being involved in its transportation – no one seems to be reporting that planting-ready South American sweet potatoes routinely wash up on Marquesan shores or whatever, and I’m not aware of any other cases of crops crossing the ocean on their own like that. And assuming that did happen, it’s a few orders of magnitude harder for me to then believe that Polynesians would invent an unetymologisable name for it that was already used in South America by pure coincidence.
First, predictions are very hard to make, especially about the future!
Second, of course I’m fine with “we shall never have metaphysical certainty”. That’s not available anyway; it’s beside the point.
Frog is an unremarkable *n-stem nickname built in an unremarkable way from OE frosc ~ frox, a word found elsewhere in Germanic (German Frosch for example), and, just eyeballing it, it looks like it should have an IE etymology from *pr- “fare, forward” and the inchoative verb suffix *-sḱ-.
The oldest usages of dog independently suggest that it, too, started out as a nickname. It’s just harder to figure out what exactly it’s a nickname of; in the footnote of this post and the comments to it are two quite plausible suggestions.
Pig is probably similar. What makes all three words so unusual in English and indeed Germanic is that Proto-Germanic *-gg- had no regular source from any sound change; it only came about by analogy, much of it in the formation of *n-stem nicknames. (A few cases – bridge, midge and the like – are caused by regular West Germanic consonant stretching, but those aren’t numerous either.)
there have been many, many other arguments raised over the years for Polynesian–South American contacts,
And of course Heyerdahl. It would be interesting to know whether those other arguments pre-date Heyerdahl/whether they’re from anti-U.S. nationalists banging a drum about their own cultures/etc.
Heyerdahl was no sort of a scientist or anthropologist. He was a deeply unpleasant Jingoist white supremacist. (His hypothesised travelers didn’t just come from S.America across the Pacific, they came from Europe across the Atlantic. They weren’t brown-skinned they were white.) You might say he started a tradition of posing preposterous long-distance cultural transmission with zero evidence. Before von Däniken.
I daresay it wasn’t the geneticists in the Ioannidis paper who inserted all that bunkum: perhaps a poor research assistant told to ‘dumb it down’ or ‘sex it up’ for greater publicity.
Thank you to David M for pointing out the limitations the geneticists are working under. I told you IANA geneticist. So we seem to have some traces of somewhere-in-S.America genes somewhen in the right Millennium. I still haven’t seen any other thing or word they brought with them.
There are other S.Am-origin plants in Polynesia, but everybody seems to be happy they floated there. Do we revise to say humans brought them? What are the Polynesian words for them? How many S.Am. languages (most now extinct/unrecorded) do we have to trawl looking for soundalikes?
OTOH if we accept some plants could float there, why not Kumara also? Kumara seeds apparently have a pod that protects them. I could posit a combined hypotheses of an outwash raft of material getting most of the way across; then a seabird landing and eating the seeds/breaking down the pod; then flying off to poop them on land.
Again, AntC: you haven’t read the Ioannidis paper, but you trivialize it: “some traces of somewhere-in-S.America genes somewhen in the right Millennium”; “bunkum”. His other paper, tracing human dispersal in East Polynesia, gets very reasonable dates; unfortunately it does not include data from Hawai‘i or New Zealand.
Heyerdahl gets dutifully mentioned whenever the subject of South American–Polynesian contacts comes up. It’s a little annoying, but he was the impetus for a lot of work, much of it intended to disprove his ideas, and he was the one who started the modern era of archaeology on Easter Island.
Heyerdahl gave a keynote address at the 1996 Easter Island Conference in Albuquerque. Someone who was there told me that he got on the stage, looked around at the packed house, and started by saying, “All of you think I’m a crackpot, but without me none of you would be here!” There was truth in both parts.
If you want a genetics paper that argues for the natural introduction of sweet potato to Polynesia, there’s a paper by Rodriguez-Muñoz et al., which argues that the sweet potato collected by Cook’s expedition to Hawai‘i is from a lineage 100,000 years distant from those on the mainland, and that other species of Ipomoea have been dispersed naturally to Polynesia. Mind, he doesn’t say that humans didn’t bring SP there, just that the specimen he looked at descended from a more ancient dispersal.
I have no reason to mistrust either Ioannidis or Muñoz-Rodriguez. I’d be happy to see what the resident geneticists think about these papers.
Added: in a news article, Lisa Matisoo-Smith (U. Otago) argues for caution with Muñoz-Rodriguez’s findings, questioning his handling of the old specimens, since they are likely to have degraded DNA. In another article (NYT), Logan Kistler (Smithsonian) cautions that that one specimen is not representative of the variety of sweet potatoes which existed in Polynesia, or even of what still exists in herbaria.
Thanks @Y, but I’m tuckered out. Clearly I’m not going to add any value to a genetics-based paper. (I think I did mention the Rodriguez-Muñoz paper in an earlier round; and dismissed it going from other commentary that the samples were denatured/sampling methods were ‘non-conventional’ and not to be taken seriously.)
As @Lameen just mentioned, what we have in Polynesia (per Yen’s paper) is a S.Am. _cultivar_. It couldn’t have arrived thousands of years ago because humans hadn’t cultivated it yet. (Also perhaps kumara naturally only occurs inland/in the mountains.) And they only had time for a few hundred years of cultivating before we need it in Polynesia. Intensive cultivation on human-made terraces would increase the likelihood of an outwash event, methinks. [**] So although spontaneous ocean-travel and successful growth at arrival is unlikely, the chances over a few centuries might just be enough. We probably shall never know.
(While I’m mentioning Lameen and evidence: there is zero evidence ‘kumara’ is an “unetymologisable name”. Merely, I am not an etymologist/scholar on Polynesian; I’m not going to just make stuff up. Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. Please just quit this insidious line of argument. Or (better) go find someone who could help.)
My “romantic” jibe was at Mair particularly (I quoted his title) — who has posted some spectacular poppycock over the years, including one from Sino-Platonic Papers that was a complete travesty of the Comparative Method. (IANA Historical Linguist either, but I know total-lack-of-method/making it up out of thin air when I see it.)
Being naturally a sceptic, I would probably have initially cast similar doubts on the idea of Indo-European language spread. It seemed wildly romantic when first proposed. But the Comparative Method, plus human technology and techniques with names that travelled with the artefacts, plus plant and horse breeding that could only have been by human agency has me convinced — even unto the Tocharians.
The kumara story has none of that — no co-ordination of multiple threads of evidence.
To be fair here, the presentation is from R.Fenton and is cogently argued. The Polynesian myths are not nothing. OTOH everything in those myths comes from Hawaiki/a remote place needing arduous travel. The Marquesas, and Hawai’i would have counted as mystical before Polynesians settled and domesticated them. (So again quoting the myths is cherry-picking (or potato-picking) out of context.)
And still the Comparative Method tells me to distrust a single word — especially when there’s no other evidence of human contact. (Even if the human genetics evidence gets stronger, that doesn’t tell us what language those people spoke. Unless ‘kumara’ was an ur-word along the coast at the time — and so far no evidence for that: Hans please note.)
So how do we strengthen the evidence from the priest? My doubts about it are as much as anything about the way it’s presented: a couple of sentences with a single word, ripped out of context. It looks ever-so like the authors are cherry-picking.
Do we have — from this priest’s reports or others along that coast:
* evidence they knew there were two languages going on (from-the-mountains Quechua vs coastal Cañari)?
* other native words that can only have been Cañari not Quechua?
* reports from elsewhere along the coast (non-Quechuan) using ‘kuma(l/r)(a)’ — so suggesting it’s an ur-word?
[**] BTW I have experienced outwash events in Polynesia — on holiday in Fiji during the monsoon season (don’t ask …). There were huge rafts of vegetation/half-mountainsides with whole trees tangled amongst them getting swept down the Sigatoka River [***], and clearly with crops trapped amongst it all/some well above water level. I have no difficulty explaining how our kumara started their journey.
[***] That’s Si-nga-to-ka.
Heyerdahl gave a keynote address …, and started by saying, “All of you think I’m a crackpot, …
I kindasorta have a personal connection. The Norwegians trained short-wave radio operators during the war, to spy on the Germans/liaise with the Brits. At the end of the war, there wasn’t much demand for them/they scattered.
My aunt was a geologist in training. She arrived at a field-hut in Iceland, where there was a tall, blond (aren’t they all?) Norwegian responsible for communications/getting the transport in and out/general factotum. Their eyes met across a pile of rocks …
My to-be uncle had trained with Raaby. He was only on Kon-tiki because the pay was good/it was a great Boy’s-Own adventure/he knew nothing about anthropology. After prolonged close exposure to Heyerdahl, he became convinced H was a stark-raving monomaniac. But by the time they got back to Norway, H was a national hero. So he kept stumm.
(I had rather a lot of Kon-tiki rammed down my throat as a youth/got the book from my aunt for Christmas/went to see the raft preserved in Oslo.)
there is zero evidence ‘kumara’ is an “unetymologisable name”. Merely, I am not an etymologist/scholar on Polynesian; I’m not going to just make stuff up. Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.
I’ve spent enough time hanging out with Polynesianists, and looking at their very impressive etymological dictionaries, to believe that if kumara had a straightforward etymology someone would most certainly have published it and publicised it all over the place, if only for the satisfaction of shutting up idiots like Heyerdahl. In particular, while I might well have missed such an etymology in my desultory explorations of the literature, I’m fairly sure PolLex – which someone kindly linked above – would not have. We’re talking about one of the most thoroughly reconstructed families in the world outside of Indo-European here.
To underscore this point: Volume 3 (!) of The lexicon of Proto Oceanic: The culture and environment of ancestral Oceanic society is devoted entirely to plant names. It’s a level of detail enough to make any Africanist weep; maybe there’s something comparable for Bantu somewhere, but certainly not for Chadic or Berber or Saharan or Oti-Volta or… You’re talking about this incredibly well-explored terrain as if it were terra incognita.
You’re talking about this incredibly well-explored terrain as if it were terra incognita.
It is largely terra incognita for me. I’m not a ‘Polynesianist’/not attached to any research institution. [**] Thank you for the PolLex list. Yes I looked through that before. (That’s where I got some of the bird/other plant names.)
None of the PolLex entries I saw showed any etymologies. That one for kumara shows only cognates in Polynesian languages — and they mostly illustrate expected sound-differences across different languages. (So I spotted the Māori neologisms because there weren’t cognates.) If there were an etymology, how would that get presented? Can you point to an etymology for some other word? (That isn’t transparently just two words run together.)
For example PolLex has ‘Omo’ = gourd reconstructed to E.Polynesian, with less than half the number of cognates of ‘kumara’. Does that mean it’s a neologism in E.P. only? Why is this ok but ‘kumara’ (reconstructs to Polynesian) not? Quechua word for gourd is ‘maté’. Gourds are thought to have floated from S.Am. (Peru, but thousands of years ago) — which would explain why there’s no more general Polynesian word.
This we’ve seen before says
And I’ve been trawling this site (no idea how reliable it is) for S.Am W. coast languages. (Looking for the word being more general than Cañari/Quechua.) So far I see plenty of other quite distinct words for sweet potato/nothing sounding like kumar(a).
[**] I’m more of a nautical historian than a student of Polynesian languages. That’s why for me the evidence is overwhelmingly against surviving such distant voyages. I am trying to be patient in dealing with linguistics-based counter-points, presuming nobody else here understands the enormity of these hypothesised voyages. You can be patient with me not understanding PolLex.
(So I spotted the Māori neologisms because there weren’t cognates.)
(That isn’t transparently just two words run together.)
So for example there’s a NZ endemic parrot (mega-cute and horny/this video went viral), Kākāpō with no PolLex entry. But it’s transparently Kākā = parrot + pō = night — nocturnal parrot.
I am not offering an etymology, but if a word were merely a run-together like that, would PolLex say so? We have
KUU.1 a fish (need not detain us)
KUU.2 damp, rotten
KUU.3 short, cut off
MARA variously (fermented) breadfruit, taro, fermented in fresh water, ripe, over-ripe, …
Why/how would a Polynesianist find grounds for accepting or rejecting an etymology in a non-literate language? Especially when pronunciations have been stable/or with predictable sound-changes between languages since well before European contact.
It’s not only sweet potatoes. Here’s a link about chickens.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1965514/
AntC: When POLLEX analyzes reconstructions as compounds, it puts a hyphen between the different parts.
omo ‘gourd’ is only attestted in Hawaiian and Māori. It’s mixed in with the meaning ‘smoke, suck’. The commoner word for ‘gourd’ is reconstructed *fue, reconstructed only to Nuclear Polynesian.
Phil Jennings: We’ve mentioned the chickens before. It’s been debated in the literature back and forth. I don’t think there’s a consensus if the results are valid or not.
Volume 3 (!) of The lexicon of Proto Oceanic: The culture and environment of ancestral Oceanic society is devoted entirely to plant names. It’s a level of detail enough to make any Africanist weep
Yes hugely impressive! It mentions sweet potato (and notes it was a substitute for yam which is not available all-year). But doesn’t even have a section for sweet potato — as it does for other roots/tubers like yams, taro.
So it’s not true to say it fails to find an etymology: it doesn’t even try. I note the volume/series is covering (Proto-)Oceania/Austronesian, not just Polynesia — indeed perhaps not (East-)Polynesian at all. It says at 2 Root Crops:
And Western Oceanic languages don’t use the kumara word, usually it’s transparently from European-introduced ‘potato’.
So I take back my “hugely” above: somewhat impressive. Why on earth omit sweet potato? Published 2008, how could they not think sweet potato was a pre-European crop? Bizarre Aussies.
And anyway, it’s not offering etymologies for any of the Oceanic words — merely listing them.
@Y Thanks When POLLEX analyzes reconstructions as compounds, it puts a hyphen between the different parts.
So all Lameen’s brouhaha is about an absent hyphen?
I just don’t get how a Polynesianist would reconstruct an etymology with any certainty. Etymologists, being cautious folk, wouldn’t hazard a guess.
Can anybody proffer evidence of a Polynesianist saying ‘kumara’ must be an introduced word? Indeed anything must be an introduced word? — that is, introduced pre-European contact.
but certainly not for Chadic or Berber or Saharan or Oti-Volta
No, alas, certainly as far as Oti-Volta goes.
Though, oddly enough, the lexicons tend to be pretty good on tree species, much more so than animals: perhaps because trees obligingly stay put while you bring your friendly neighbourhood forestry expert and your friendly neighbourhood language consultant back with you to ask them “What do you call that, then?”
Tree names seem to be surprisingly well conserved in Oti-Volta, too: but I suppose if you live in savanna you tend to pay a lot of attention to trees.
The indefatigable Roger Blench has made a start on plants, at any rate:
http://www.rogerblench.info/Ethnoscience/Plants/General/Dagbani%20plant%20names.pdf
And anyway, it’s not offering etymologies for any of the Oceanic words — merely listing them.
A list of cognates with a starred form at the top is a concise way of providing a large amount of etymological information at once: it entails the assertions that each of the forms below derives from the starred one and originally had the meaning listed for it, and that the term was already in use at least as far back as the protolanguage to which that starred form belongs. Kumara certainly doesn’t go as far back as proto-Oceanic – which is part of my point – so its absence from the book is understandable even if the assumption of post-European introduction is wrong.
Etymologists, being cautious folk, wouldn’t hazard a guess. — this is of course our consolation in this vale of confusion.
Fenwick.
You’ve made very clear that the kind of voyage required here would not have been undertaken deliberately. I keep asking if a voyage that had packed enough food & water – perhaps to settle a recently discovered island – could have been blown off course, e.g. in an El Niño event, and then landed in South America with at least one of the crew still alive.
A bit like trying to go to Greenland and landing in New Foundland. Of course it could happen, but could they get back home? Would they want to? (Somewhere upthread this was actually answered–but if you brought both your husband and your kids on such a journey, why not just settle where you landed? It only takes one person with home sickness to talk up a return journey, though).
(From the maps it looks like Easter Island is about half way from anything else to South America, so an expedition looking to settle there should have good odds of surviving until they hit Ecuador if they missed).
I learned about the kakapo from Last Chance to See. As Adams and Carwardine describe it,* the kakapo cannot fly, but it has not quite adapted to that fact. When menaced by a predator, a kakapo may climb a tree (which can be effective) and then jump out from the foliage as if to take flight (which just deposits it back on the ground next to the predator). As a result of habitat loss and the introduction of dogs and cats
the population of birds has plummeted.
What seems topical here that is Adams mentions that the local ranger who shows Adams and Carwardine around has a site where he tries to attract kakapos for observation, and to attract them, the ranger has left a small, spindly sweet potato. This piqued my interest, precisely because sweet potatoes (like those dogs and cats) are not indigenous to New Zealand. It made me wonder how the sweet potato came to be one of a kakapo’s favorite foods. (However, I now wonder whether it was actually a sweet potato or a yam. Moreover, in New Zealand, a “yam” might also be sweet oca, although that too is a crop introduced from South America.)
* It feels weird to write that both authors “describe” something, because the book is entirely written from Douglas Adams’ first-person point of view.** However, Adams himself was adamant that the book (and radio documentary) were created with equal input from both of them. Adams got his name in bigger letters solely because he was already a famous author; and for that same reason (and also because he was an outsider to the world of conservation zoology) the story of the pair’s travels is narrated by Adams.
** The book is clearly written in the grammatical first person viewpoint, Adams talking about what “I” or “we” did. However, it feels pragmatically odd to describe s non-fiction work by two equal coauthors that way; it’s not “first person” for Carwardine.
I know some other people have broader notions of what constitutes a “first person” narrative. One of the essays at the end of the critical edition of The Good Earth that I read raised the question of why an American woman like Pearl S. Buck would have chosen to write a “first person novel” from the viewpoint of a male Chinese peasant. However, The Good Earth is not written in the grammatical first person, although I certainly understand the critic’s point. The book is completely tied to Wang Lung’s limited viewpoint. As I previously noted, I found it quite jarring when suddenly, as the book is ending, the narration pulls back and describes something old Wang Lung cannot see happening. Of course, there are other, even more weirdly jarring things about the way The Good Earth is structured.
>** The book is clearly written in the grammatical first person viewpoint, Adams talking about what “I” or “we” did. However, it feels pragmatically odd to describe s non-fiction work by two equal coauthors that way; it’s not “first person” for Carwardine.
I’ve been assigned to ghostwrite or edit some jointly authored op/eds in the last several months. To establish authority and provide some drama, it was necessary to tell the backstory of both co-authors, but I haven’t found a good method in a 500-1000 word op-ed for switching from one first person narrator to another. Part of me thinks co-authorship just doesn’t work in this format. But there’s a strong and understandable interest in bipartisan authorship in what I do. (If anyone can point to an example where it’s done well, please let me know!)
>why an American woman like Pearl S. Buck would have chosen to write a “first person novel” from the viewpoint of a male Chinese peasant
I do understand the criticism, but also find it overstated. I think most fiction is by nature an effort to write from a (slightly? significantly?) different point of view than one’s own. But either it succeeds or it doesn’t, and I wouldn’t be surprised if Buck’s work is no longer seen as having portrayed that point of view accurately.
I’ve mentioned that one of my favorite books growing up was Crazy Horse, the Strange Man of the Oglalas, by Mary Sandoz. (Which is non-fiction, more or less, though with a certain amount of license). I spoke with James Welch once, a Native American author who seemed to draw a sharp line, that works about Native Americans by non-NA authors were illegitimate. I asked about a book like Sandoz’s. He held to his point. Among other things, I’m not convinced that such a figure is significantly more accessible to a modern Native American who is not Lakota / not from the cluster of cultures surrounding the Lakota.
But I still concede his point. Such considerations seem more important in a setting where the bastardizations and romanticisms of outsiders ruled the field for centuries. Perhaps I accept it as a rule, despite being willing to break it.
The Lexicon of Proto Oceanic (3:132) shows that the East Polynesian word for the bottle gourd, *fue, was a repurposed term, elsewhere used for other creeping vines.
I see that, whereas Kusaal and its neighbours (even in Togo and Burkina Faso) all borrow the English “lorry” for “motor vehicle”, Waama just uses suka “horse”; to the extent that the only meaning given in the dictionary for suka naare (literally “horse’s foot”) is “wheel.”
AFAIK, it can glide.
A tweet from Andrew Digby, a conservation biologist who seems to represent kakaporecovery.org.nz
>Yes, occasionally. I have seen them glide horizontally a few metres – but only really light females.
https://twitter.com/takapodigs/status/1523537885550374912
While perhaps somewhat more elegant, for the purpose of eluding cats and dogs that amounts to depositing itself back on the ground next to the predator.
I keep asking if a voyage that had packed enough food & water – perhaps to settle a recently discovered island – could have been blown off course, e.g. in an El Niño event, and then landed in South America with at least one of the crew still alive.
any explanation of polynesian sweet potatos has a crucial moment where it relies on an improbable chance – whether beating the odds against current and wind helping a debris-raft-carried chunk of stem or tuber find soil to root in, or beating the odds against current and wind helping a person or a few make it across the ocean’s empty quarter.
i don’t see a greater improbability in one or the other, myself. i’m not an ocean sailor (jamaica bay doesn’t count), but i’m not a total lubber, and i’ve read my share of shipwreck and mutiny accounts. from tahiti (chosen arbitrarily) to south america is something like one-and-a-half times the distance that the HMS Bounty’s launch traveled, overloaded with men far less familiar with the pacific and how to live from it than any polynesian sailor. some didn’t survive long, but all 18 who left tonga made it to timor, with only one opportunity to find sustenance not pulled from the sea or sky. i’d expect any inter-island crew to be able to do better than bligh’s blightys, given the necessary luck of current and wind (a particular mix of bad – getting caught in an el niño – and good – not capsizing – rather than one or the other unalloyed).
Thanks @rozele, yes.
I think a difference with modern tall tales of survival at sea (like Endurance’s crew from Antarctica) is the survivors had charts and compasses, and knew there was land where they were heading.
This is the point at which Finney (the maritime expert) throws up his hands with ‘never say never’. In effect: if you want to believe in miracles, why come asking for an expert opinion? Now will you go away and stop pestering me.
beating the odds against current and wind helping a debris-raft-carried chunk of stem or tuber find soil to root in,
The chances are _for_ the current/winds taking the raft to the right place. One of the papers does a drift analysis. What this hypothesis needs to ‘beat’ is the chance of the tubers/seeds being able to propagate when they arrived.
it relies on an improbable chance …
For the human involvement — that is alive humans — there seem to be a whole extra load of improbable chances to get this word across the “ocean’s empty quarter” (nice phrase!).
There’s a huge difference between travel downwind/down current from S.Am. to the Marquesas vs upwind — in which case the Marquesas (or Tahiti) would be a terrible place to start from.
The balsa rafts from Ecuador/Peru are equipped only for short voyages. I don’t see that alive people would just drift: they’d try to rig up something to get them home. If they drifted (and were alive) so far as crash-landing in the Marquesas, how would they survive there? Were Polynesians already there and took them under their wing?
For Polynesians first going Eastward from (say) Rarotonga, alive ones would turn round long before getting so far.
@DM a voyage that had packed enough food & water – perhaps to settle …
I think you’re not paying attention: a voyage of settlement would be packed with stuff that would only impede long-term survival/is useless at sea: the family, livestock, rootstock, tools for working the soil & building shelter. Too many mouths/tendrils needing fresh water.
You seem to think these voyages are like the ferry from Harwich to Hoek-van-Holland: must leave every day at 9:00 am. No: we know what season we’re going, but we don’t set off on a major voyage like that until winds are just right for quick passage, with very few provisions to keep people alive/very little spare capacity.
I keep asking …
And I’ve kept answering — or at least pointing to the experts/there’s no reason you would believe me alone. This is like one of those TV family quiz shows where the host keeps asking the same question different ways round (with pile-ups of double negatives), until the victim in a moment of inattention makes the ‘wrong’ answer.
@Lars (From the maps it looks like Easter Island is about half way from anything else to South America, so an expedition looking to settle there should have good odds of surviving until they hit Ecuador if they missed).
“good odds”? Based on what?
What you need to look at is the distance from Pitcairn (which was settled first) to Easter Island — still huge, but nothing compared to going on to S.Am. And remember in the voyages of exploration — as opposed to settlement — nobody knew there was land until they got there. Compare NZ wasn’t found direct from Rarotonga: they used the Kermadecs as a stepping-stone, at least for replenishing fresh water.
The evidence we have (although DM keeps pulling the rug from under it) is that Polynesians were cultivating kumara long before settling Easter Island.
>The chances are _for_ the current/winds taking the raft (with a sweet potato seed or tuber) to the right place.
Well, that and the chances that the seed or tuber didn’t get soaked in seawater. That’s where I think your theory falls down. I don’t see any possibility of something drifting across 2,000 miles of ocean without taking enough splash that it gets filled. Sailors keep their prows cutting through the waves. Boats adrift turn broadside.
A big question is whether a saltwater-soaked tuber or seed even remains viable. That would be a pretty easy experiment if anyone was really committed to the accidental drift theory.
A big question is whether a saltwater-soaked tuber or seed even remains viable. That would be a pretty easy experiment if anyone was really committed to the accidental drift theory.
Done, and done.
That would be a pretty easy experiment if anyone was really committed to the accidental drift theory.
I’ve volunteered to be funded to go to the Marquesas — happy to research any theory providing it doesn’t cut into my beach/snorkelling/pleasure-boating time too much.
I have made a number of suggestions how to strengthen the evidence for language transmission — even something as basic as was that word used on the S.Am. coast at the time? Anybody “really committed” to that could “easily” go hunting in the Church’s/colonial records in Ecuador/Peru.
“Really committed”? Like the human/language transmission hypothesis is well-supported by evidence and I’m somehow being a party-pooper/contrarian/just niggling. “committed” is a really strange word to use here.
How the f*** do you think Anthropology researchers get funding to test any such hypothesis — of absolutely no consequence whatever?
What in my cool judgment is the most probable hypothesis is “we shall never know”. A far less probable hypothesis is the outwash vegetation raft/possibly mediated by seabird transmission of the seeds. A long way behind that is the S.Am balsa raft adrift with all hands perished — although I don’t know whether the S.Ams would transport something as low-value as kumara. A very long way behind any of the above is a scenario involving alive humans.
And the word is just a chance soundalike. Don’t need no “really committed” to guess that/it happens all the time.
happy to research any theory providing it doesn’t cut into my beach/snorkelling/pleasure-boating time too much
I did actually once know somebody who had managed to get sent to study thalassaemia for the summer on a Greek island in the Aegean. The actual duties were to take blood samples from local people in the local clinic two days a week. The rest of the time, the unfortunate researchers just had to pass the time as best they could while waiting for the next clinic day. They coped somehow.
i realized that i didn’t say in my last that, for exactly the reasons AntC has laid out, to me the most plausible human-assisted kumara transportation is the one that requires the least elaborate motivations (and fits the very small scale of even a maximalist interpretation of the potential linguistic evidence): a long-distance polynesian vessel (either exploring or on an inter-island trip) blown by chance to south america, with at least one crew member surviving, followed by a return trip downwind/downcurrent, carrying an interesting new staple food either as supplies for the voyage* or specifically to propagate at home.
i remain firmly in the “current evidence doesn’t let us have an answer” camp, but the other human-assisted options seem far less plausible to me than this variation.
.
* i can’t take seriously the idea that people doing long-distance ocean travel, including open-ended explorations and colonization voyages, would not have ways to safely bring fire with them (or light one when needed) and to cook on board their vessels.
Thanks @Y, well Wadyaknow.
These two Theses/Masters’ projects are obviously collaborative research at Ohio S.U. 2021. And the ocean drift calculations look like refinements of the paper we’ve already seen — Montenegro et al 2008. Montenegro is Advisor to both theses.
Haha! One says ocean drift possible route of transmission; t’other probably not.
The intense speeds of the Easterlies would greatly increase a drifting object’s speed and push it towards the 15 West
Says to me our raft/mat of vegetation outwash floated high so it would both catch the wind and keep the seeds dry.
The seeds are in a pod/capsule, which helps them float/keeps out salt water somewhat. I see the seeds remain viable (30% probability) after 120 days estimated drift time, but they wouldn’t germinate whilst still inside their pod.
They need ‘scarifying’ — a service handily provided by passing seabirds. Then it’s frustrating neither thesis considered:
Floating mat/raft of vegetation. Tuckered-out passing seabird lands for a rest. Spots some yummy vegetation, ingests the seeds thereby scarifying them. Flies on, comes to land. Poops out the seeds.
The difficulty I see with the floating mat just crashing into the beach is (partly the unlikelihood of it actually hitting a beach rather than just drifting past — currents tend to ‘swerve’ around small islands) chiefly that beaches aren’t fertile. (It’s remarkable that coconuts can actually grow on a beach.)
So my pooped-out bird pooping out seeds hypotheses explains much better: the bird would go to land; and up from the beach/on somewhere with soil.
Now what I want to know is: in S.Am. do kumara naturally occur at the coast or in the highlands?/does it take humans to bring them to the coast? Or at least to cultivate them intensely enough to increase the likelihood of an outwash? Human activity is notorious for increasing erosion. That would explain why the kumara didn’t start travelling until there were active cultivators.
@rozele bring fire
They’re in hot climes/don’t need a roast and 4 veg every night. Even as far south as Christchurch, I often go for days in the Summer without a cooked meal.
some [luxurious canoes] even had moveable hearths lined with stone or coral so voyagers could cook safely at sea. says ‘Meals on keels’ 😉
On a voyage of settlement you of course don’t want to cook your livestock — except in dire emergency. So food was mostly fresh fruit/veg and fermented starches — also good for feeding said livestock.
But note the “some” above. The voyages of exploration were much more Spartan affairs. You can eat fresh fish raw, or octopus. With the pre-cooked/fermented starch the Polynesians invented sushi way ahead of the Japanese.
As I said way, way above, the big problem is carrying enough fresh water: it’s bulky, it’s heavy, it’s difficult to contain in a lurching boat. You’d catch every bit of rainfall you could/and maybe some condensation at night. And the crew are working hard keeping the boat going/they can’t just loll about trying not to perspire. So that’s what limited the duration of these voyages.
fermented starches
Seems to be some sort of paste. See on LLog the Māori myth from R.Fenwick “dried, cooked sweet potato … mashed … to a gruel”.
Note in my word-hoard from PolLex, one sense of KUU is damp, rotten; MARA in several languages is fermented starch — including sweet potato fermented in water.
Me:(names of cultivars are often widely loaned regionally)
AntC: coming from someone who (AFAICT) has made no study of S.Am. native cultures and languages — not that we appear to have much helpful info — I’d count as a credo
Not a credo, but a heuristic from other areas and language families I have had a closer look at. There are regions where it doesn’t work well – as I have read, many polysynthetic languages of North America loan almost nothing and almost exclusively rely on own coinages for new concepts. But from the discussion here I didn’t get the impression that the heuristic doesn’t apply in Western South America (someone mentioned loaning of terms for cultivars between Quechua and Aymara).
I’ll see whether I get around to read your lists of names for cumara in the local languages; it’s of course possible that loaning did not happen for this specific cultivar.
The balsa rafts from Ecuador/Peru are equipped only for short voyages. I don’t see that alive people would just drift: they’d try to rig up something to get them home. If they drifted (and were alive) so far as crash-landing in the Marquesas, how would they survive there? Were Polynesians already there and took them under their wing?
For the scenario of kumara being a loan, it’s necessary to assume that yes, they met Polynesians there, or that they settled and remained until the Polynesians arrived. The latter is even more unlikely than them being blown there and surviving to meet friendly locals – there would have to be enough males and females on the balsa vessel to form a viable population, and they must have been able to survive in an alien to them ecology.
On your etymology proposals – I don’t know enough to say how plausible they are, but the starch word is intriguing.
It’s agreed that for the sweet potatoes to make their way from South American to Polynesia required some unlikely sequence of events. Where there is still a lot of disagreement is about which unlikely sequence is the least unlikely. I don’t have any personal opinions about that answer to that. (I am fond of the romantic idea of long-distance Pre-Columbian contacts between the Old World and the New World. It would be wonderful if Saint Brendan the Navigator really had visited the Caribbean. But I know it isn’t very likely.) What I do know, from my professional work in an entirely different field, is that making useful quantitative estimates for the probabilities of highly unlikely events can be really, really hard. So judging whether the plants were most likely carried by Polynesians, South Americans, debris rafts, or frigate birds may ultimately be an intractable problem.
I previously posted a quote from Call it Courage about some fermented starch carried by a Polynesian voyager. It didn’t sound very appetizing to me, in spite of the description.
Half of each answer remained unspoken until now!
Do I? How? Seeing how deep the word reconstructs, I’ve taken for granted the presence of the word and the plant in Polynesia is much older than the settlement of Easter Island.
That’s the absence of a hypothesis. Not collecting stamps isn’t a hobby.
Complete identity of sound + meaning does not happen often with words of that length. You’re presenting your conclusion as an argument.
I’m not aware of any seabirds eating seeds; it’d have to be a landbird from an island, so the raft would have had to be pretty close already.
KUU + MARA doesn’t work. Mainly because in Polynesian languages the order in compounds is Noun-Adjective: Māori whanga ‘bay’ + nui ‘big’, or Hawaiian mauna ‘mountain’ + kea ‘white’.
*mara is recorded with only two East Polynesian reflexes, in Māori meaning ‘fermented seafood’ and in Marquesan meaning ‘rotten’. The Proto Oceanic Lexicon (1:158–159) discusses food fermentation and its terms. It says breadfruit and bananas are the foods most commonly preserved by fermentation, and that “fermented breadfruit is regarded as one of the few foods suitable for carrying on long sea voyages, and thus a prime suspect, along with its term, for borrowing.” There’s no mention of fermenting SPs. Reflexes of *mara in the specific sense ‘fermented breadfruit’ exist in Vanuatu and Micronesia, but not breadfruit in general (cf. English pickle, used generically, and also specifically for ‘pickled cucumber’, but not for the cucumber plant in general.)
Not collecting stamps isn’t a hobby.
ROFL
Here’s a description of the provisioning of the Hōkūle‘a on its historic first voyage from Hawai‘i to Tahiti. In some ways it was comparable to how an exploring canoe would travel to South America, in some ways not. Significantly, this was a first-of-its-kind trip, with a crew that had been trained but did not have the long experience of the first explorers. It seems to me that the main strategy for extending the range of an exploring canoe of this type is to make do with less crew, so that provisions and water would last longer. I don’t know how far that is feasible; for example, whether the Hōkūle‘a could have done with, say, a crew of six instead of thirteen.
I’ve taken for granted the presence of the word and the plant in Polynesia is much older than the settlement of Easter Island.
The plant was known only in East Polynesia. East Polynesia was settled maybe about 900 AD (Southern Cooks), 1000 AD (Societies, perhaps Tuamotu), 1100-ish (Marquesas), 1200-ish AD (Rapanui), 1250 AD (NZ), 1300-ish AD (Hawai‘i).
There’s no telling when any of the sound changes in the languages occur. kumara could have spread through a strict Stammbaum, from an ancestral Proto East Polynesian population and language to its descendants, and/or through borrowings.
That’s the absence of a hypothesis. Not collecting stamps isn’t a hobby.
As AntC said, ROFL. It is in fact a hypothesis, and very frequently the only tenable one; the fact that it doesn’t satisfy one’s need for answers does not make it wrong.
Complete identity of sound + meaning does not happen often with words of that length.
But it happens, as does difficult cross-Pacific transmission of plants in one form or another. The question is which improbability one prefers, and that depends entirely on one’s predilections. We are never going to come to an agreement, let alone solve the riddle, so all we can do is respect each other’s positions.
*mara is recorded with only two East Polynesian reflexes, …
Thanks @Y then please explain how I’m mis-understanding the PolLex entry. I include Fijian/Samoan/Tongan: they kept up regular contact with Rarotonga at the time of the spread to the East.
in Polynesian languages the order in compounds is Noun-Adjective
Yeah I wasn’t proposing an etymology/don’t claim to be an etymologist. The Kākāpō example seems to show you can compound two nouns. The Marquesan for ‘Mara’ looks more adjective than noun to me.
There’s no mention of fermenting SPs.
Oh yes there is. See the myth quoted by R.Fenwick on the LLog thread: fermented SP carried on long-distance voyages is exactly how it’s introduced.
Chiefly I’m trying to show Kūmara fits the sound pattern/don’t need to posit a borrowing.
(And if you’re going in for this close cross-examination: I still haven’t seen any evidence ‘comal’ was used on the _coast_ of S. Ecuador at the hypothesised time of contact. Nor good grounds for thinking the contact was specifically with that patch of coast as opposed to (say) Peru where the chickens got to — allegedly.)
It’s an old complaint: “atheism is a religion the way not collecting stamps is a hobby”…
Right – what little diversity there is in the reflexes could easily be etymological nativization.
It is not a hypothesis – not even the null hypothesis (that would be “there’s nothing to explain here, we’re looking at pure random”, not “we’ll never know whether there’s anything to explain here, we’ll never know if it’s random”).
Whether it’s wrong has nothing to do with that.
There’s no reason to respect the presenting of a conclusion as an argument for that conclusion, though.
Oh, then you’re arguing way too hard, because I don’t think anybody has claimed that it doesn’t look native and therefore has to be a loan from somewhere. The linguistic arguments I’ve seen are only 1) identity to a word used close to, and likely on, the South American coast and 2) limitation to East Polynesia.
I wanted to quote this in another thread (“Two Quotes”) for JC, but maybe it is better here:
A dray with three men in it is slowly moving through a rye field.
The three men are: Edgar and Martin – brothers, and Jaakob – their father, who is driving the dray.
-Oh… Lookk… Lookk. There is something over there… Over there… Itt mustt be a fox… – says Edgar.
10 minutes later Martin replies:
-Oh… no… no, Edgar. I think you are wrong… Itt mustt be a wolf…
10 minutes later, Edgar:
-Oh… no… no, Martin. Itt wass a fox…
10 minute later, Martin:
-Oh, no… no, Edgar… I think itt wass a wolf…
10 minutes later Jaakob turns over his shoulder:
-Cutt itt outt… you ttwo… stopp such a heatted argumentt, my fiery Esttonnian boys… You are aboutt to fightt…
David Marjanović: That’s the absence of a hypothesis.
Now people are using different definitions of hypothesis. That how the sweet potatoes spread will never be securely known is a hypothesis about the epistemology. (And by its nature, it is thus false precisely if it eventually turns out to be demonstrably/”provably” false.) Thus, it forms a hypothesis in the OED‘s sense 2.b:
(The cites for this sense include examples form the correspondence of two of the most prominent British politicians—Burke and Wellington.)
However, it is not a hypothesis in the sense used in statistical “hypothesis testing,” which is how David Marjanović (as indicated by his comparison to a “null hypothesis”) means the word. That is sense 3:
If you are curious about sense 1, it explains the presence of the hypo– morpheme:
For the benefit of all the many fans of comparative Oti-Volta:
I’ve come up with a better idea regarding the Mbelime reflexes of proto-Oti-Volta initial *k and *k͡p; both in fact became zero. All vowel-initial words in the Mbelime dictionary are either bound pronouns or particles, or foreign-origin proper names: it actually seems clear that current Mbelime initial /h/ is prosthetic, being added to any full word which would otherwise have been vowel-initial, unless it begins with a diphthong with a high-vowel first element, when the corresponding semivowel is used instead.
So proto-Oti-Volta *k͡pélʊ̀ “river” in Mbelime:
-> k͡pénʊ̀ (showing the *l -> n shift seen throughout Gurma and the non-Waama Atakora languages)
-> *k͡pónʊ̀/kónʊ̀
-> *ónʊ̀ (specific to Mbelime, and perhaps also Byali)
-> *úónù (via the active CVC/CVVC root allomorphy rule)
-> wúónù (repair of vowel-onset words);
but in Kusaal:
-> *k͡pólʊ̀/kólʊ̀
-> *kólgá (proto-Western: the ʊ/ɪ noun class is lost, so the noun becomes ga/sɪ; regular tone changes)
-> *kólg (by the apocope of final short vowels seen in the Kusaal/Nabit/Talni subgroup)
-> kɔ̄līg.
AntC: I assumed you’d meant something like ‘wet (adj.) fermented-stuff (n.)’
There’s nothing about fermented SP in the Proto-Oceanic article I cited. I can’t find Fenwick saying anything about it. In the story he quotes, Taukata takes some “dried, cooked sweet potato” which he’d brought with him, reconstitutes it with water, and feeds it to people, who like it.
The brothers who brought the sweet potato to NZ came from Hawaiki. That is most probably Ra’iātea in the Society Islands, formerly known as Havai’i.
DE: That’s very neat!
This rang a bell, and the bell was J.-C. Verstraete, Pathways of initial consonant loss: A Middle Paman case study. J. Hist. Ling 12:1(2022), 1–30. Have you seen it?
Mbelime, Arapaho, and quite possibly PIE… fascinating.
@Y:
I hadn’t (but now I have: thanks!)
I only recently became aware of this propensity in Oti-Volta languages for repairing words that have become vowel-initial through regular consonant loss by adding predictable prosthetic consonants (in response to a question from Lameen, as it happens.)
In that case, the issue was proto-Oti-Volta initial *ŋ, which is only preserved as such in a few languages. I’d been trying for a while to make sense of the various reflexes before the penny dropped that, for the most part, the initial consonants of such words (if any) aren’t actually reflexes of *ŋ at all.
I hadn’t thought of applying this to Mbelime until now. I had taken this supposed *k -> h a as a manifestation of the Atakora Sprachbund‘s hostility to voiced stops, which is certainly a thing: none of the languages preserves the contrasts of k/g or k͡p/g͡b, for example, but apart from Mbelime and Byali, they’ve just devoiced the voiced stops and lost the contrast.
In fact, because proto-Oti-Volta didn’t permit vowel onsets in full words, changing *k *k͡p to zero, like Mbelime, paradoxically preserves the underlying contrast to a great extent, though *k *k͡p still fall together, and there are other cases of initial consonant loss as well – like *ŋ, though there the nasalisation of the following vowel becomes contrastive after the loss of the consonant.
It’s interesting that these various sound changes don’t seem to work for subgrouping purposes: Mbeilme seems a good bit closer in other respects to Nateni and Ditammari (which don’t have this complete loss of initial *k *k͡p) than to Byali (which looks like it probably does.) That’s not news either: the *l ->n change that I describe in the “river” word, for example, affects all the Gurma languages and all but Waama of the Atakora languages, but those groups don’t otherwise seem any closer to each other than to (say) Western Oti-Volta.
So it’s not complete initial consonant loss as in Paman, just *k/*k͡p, right?
That’s right (though also *ŋ; *ŋ͡m has become /w/ followed by vowel nasalisation.)
Total initial-consonant loss would be very disruptive in any Oti-Volta language, where most words do not have prefixes, roots are mostly CVC, and the second consonants of roots are drawn from a fairly restricted subset in the first place, and then often subject to pretty fierce lenition processes on top of that.
The Atakora languages have done their best already to create confusion, with all of them devoicing *g *g͡b *v and merging initial *d and *l (as [l], usually.) They have also changed *z and *ɟ to y [j] (except for Waama, which contents itself with merely devoicing *ɟ.) All of them are also fond of sporadically merging *b and *m.
So did Mbelime get an significant excess of homophones from this more limited set of initial C-losses? If so, did that resut in much lexical replacement?
[AntC] don’t need to posit a borrowing.
[@DM] Oh, then you’re arguing way too hard, because I don’t think anybody has claimed that it doesn’t look native
Then what is @Y claiming? or rather disclaiming. (That’s why I’m ‘arguing hard’.) Looking for an extraordinary level of evidence for a ~800 year-old word in a non-literate language.
You (DM), too are being extraordinarily nit-picky:
I’m not aware of any seabirds eating seeds; …
I’m not suggesting it’s eating seeds qua seeds. It is ex hypothesi an exhausted bird; it’ll eat anything; it’s eating the (fermented) tubers, the seeds are by-catch. Or it’s an omnivore out (a short distance from its island) on a fish-catching trip; not finding much; stopped for a snack.
You’re usually an imaginative thinker, why are you being so closed-minded here?
And why aren’t you being equally closed-minded about the ‘comal’ evidence? So far neither you nor Y are distinguishing yourselves from the cranks and fabulists [**] (and Mair) who’ll latch on to any sound-alike to show long-distance transmission.
“whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth”
But we are nowhere near even a Holmesian level of ‘certainty’ with ‘comal’. Here are some non-stamps for you to collect:
* the priest is a drunkard sent to the back of beyond to get rid of him. Nothing he writes is reliable.
* the priest did hear ‘comal’, but mis-understood what it referred to.
* the priest was originally posted to Quechua-speaking lands, that’s where he got the word, he assumed it applied everywhere. He didn’t establish they use a different word on the coast.
* the conquistadores just took over the existing Inca (Quechua-speaking) administration. The priest interacted with the Inca authorities on the coast. The Cañari when speaking to authority figures used Quechua, not their local tongue.
To be clear: I’m not saying I have evidence for any of those. I’m saying you _don’t_ have evidence to reject them. And it’s unlikely you’ll ever find such evidence. So it’s entirely reasonable to argue “we shall never know” the answers to those conjectures. Therefore “we shall never know” whether kūmara is cognate with ‘comal’. That’s to an ordinary level of philological evidence for a cognate/not some unreasonable extra-scientific existential certainty.
“We shall never know” is not an argument I started with. I started with a flimsy claim, went looking for confirmation or disconfirmation of that and counter-claims; identified possible sources of evidence both ways; discovered that evidence is no longer securable because it happened a long time ago in non-literate and poorly-attested languages (in the case of Cãnari) or needed unlikely and un-reproducable bio-scenarios. The evidence is beyond reach. “We shall never know” is the conclusion.
[**] Although I think Polynesian seafaring achievements are near to the realm of fabulous — and their mythology certainly goes into the fabulous — I’m giving them credit for knowing what they’re doing and wishing to stay alive and understanding how to stay alive. (Unlike Heyerdahl who was just plain crazy and extraordinary lucky — and knew exactly where those islands are.) If there was contact sufficient to transfer a word and a thing and knowledge how to cultivate the thing, it is fabulist to think all other evidence of contact — including mythology — disappeared without trace.
@Y:
Paradoxically, no: because there were no zero-onset full words in proto-Oti-Volta, there was a kind of gap in the system, so that dropping the voiceless *k *k͡p completely instead of merging them with *g *g͡b resulted in less homophony than in other Atakora languages.
The *v -> f change doesn’t create many (or perhaps, any) homophones, because *f seems to have been uncommon in the protolanguage except in bound words and affixes (in which *v does not occur.) Although the distribution seems back-to-front, it looks rather as if v/f were allophones – in some way.
Lexically, Mbelime seems to be a sort of associate member of the the core Nateni-Ditammari-Byali Atakora group, which more or less matches the conclusion you would arrive at from morphological comparison too. So it’s not particularly aberrant. However, despite the received wisdom that all these languages (and Waama) form an “Eastern Oti-Volta” branch, they are actually very much more diverse than Western Oti-Volta both lexically and morphologically. And a lot of their (admittedly quite striking) similarities seem in fact to be areal rather than genetic.
I don’t think this is to do with homophony particularly: bear in mind that these are all tone languages, and all of them but Waama have three distinct tones. They can put up with quite a bit of segmental homophony.
Waama is the real odd man out in the Atakora lexically, but it’s also strikingly unusual both phonologically and morphologically. It may even be a sort of elder sister (or aunt) of the WOV-Buli/Konni-Yom/Nawdm grouping.
@Y The brothers who brought the sweet potato to NZ came from Hawaiki. …
For the umpteenth time (this is getting tedious) …
If you rip one story out of context (as exactly cranks and fabulists do) you can identify Hawaiki with some particular place for the purposes of that story — using a great deal of supposition. wp also associates it with Samoa; it might be east of RapaNui; it might be west of RapaNui; it might be Tahiti.
But there are myriads of stories of stuff/people coming from Hawaiki. Each sub-culture built its own myths around Hawaiki, after the E.Polynesians lost contact with each other. Also in Māori myth Hawaiki is more identified with the underworld. Not all of them can be talking about the same place.
So ‘Hawaiki’ acts as a story-telling device; it amounts to no more than “A long, long time ago in a faraway place …”. Lots of mythologies in lots of cultures have just the same story-telling device. Atlantis, for example; the homeland of the ‘Sea Peoples’; Homer’s Illium …
If you want me to take this myth semi-seriously … The brothers washed up near Kaputerangi, Whakatane — this is mainland (North Island) New Zealand. The brothers would have had to go to extraordinary lengths to avoid beaching on any number of island groups on the way from Ra’iātea. I think it far more likely this tale has got tangled: the _story_ has got transferred from Ra’iātea. And if you’re coming from a remote place and get washed up at Ra’iātea, where might you be coming from? where is it down-current and down-wind from? The Marquesas.
Now go look at your sea-chart: the distance from Marquesas to Ra’iātea (around 1,300km) is a fifth of the distance from Ecuador (or merely 4,800 km from Mexico — but that requires crossing the equator and all sorts of contrary currents and winds). (And about a third the distance to New Zealand.) If these brothers were knackered ‘merely’ drifting from the Marquesas, they’d be thoroughly dead coming from Ecuador.
kumara “looks native” in that it doesn’t have any foreign sounds or phonotactics, the way English loch or gnu do. It just doesn’t have a native etymology.
Hawaiki is not a generic faraway place (that would be tahiti). It was the name of the traditional homeland of the East Polynesians, and the name was attached to a large island in several island groups: Savai’i in Sāmoa (perhaps the actual homeland), Ra’iātea in the Societies, Fakarava in the Tuamotus, and the Big Island of Hawai‘i. No island in the Marquesas or the Australs picked up that name IIRC, or else it had been changed and forgotten. The Hawaiki story was not recorded from Rapanui at all.
In a daring theft, a burglar had broken into the Smithsonian and stolen the Hope Diamond, then vanished. Security cameras and a dropped receipt quickly identified the thief as Jacques Z. McGillicuddy, 201 cm tall, with a faded tattoo on his cheek of Winston Churchill in a bathing suit. An all-points bulletin was issued; roads were blocked, airports were monitored, and the Coast Guard inspected every passing vessel.
A week later, police in Germany arrested a man, 201 cm tall with a tattoo etc. His papers indicated that his name was Jacques Z. McGillicuddy. He had the Hope Diamond in his pocket.
At the preliminary hearing, his attorney argued that his client absolutely could not be the thief. First and foremost, the borders of the United States were so well-protected, that it’s unimaginable the thief could have escaped it and gone to Europe.
As to the name, the lawyer argued that names are hardly unique, and that it’s quite easy to find people with identical names. Besides, he said, we must assume that the thief intentionally dropped a receipt bearing someone else’s name. As for the description, he argued that likewise, Doppelgänger are common, and even employed as body doubles by the movie industry and by paranoid despots; the matching appearance of his client and the thief must be a coincidence, like their names. He chided the police for being intent on making an arrest, even at the cost of defying logic.
When asked how his client came to have the Hope Diamond on him, his attorney raised his hands and said, “Most likely, we’ll never know.”
@DE For the benefit of all the many fans of comparative Oti-Volta: …
I am of course a devotee of everything Oti-Volta — particularly as a prolific source of sound-alikes to the world’s languages.
Unfortunately I find myself pressed into service as a Polynesianist (or something). So I apologise I don’t have the bandwidth to appraise your doubtless incisive analysis of reflexes. If there’s a Proto-Oti-Volta *k͡póŋ͡mad(a), I’d be all ears. It’s meaning at that sort of time-depth would be: root crop, starch, fermented stuff.
A 201-cm (almost perfect!; I say, being 203cm myself) “Jacques Z. McGillicuddy” is scarcely comparable to “kumara” in terms of “analogously unlikely names for things”, and comparing a species of sweet potato to a *specific* large diamond is laughable.
Thanks @Brett, yes I too was perplexed by @DM’s use of ‘null hypothesis’. I think I’ve been using ‘hypothesis’ in the OED sense 3 that you quote.
In particular ” serves as a starting-point for further investigation by which it may be proved or disproved and the true theory arrived at”.
So I’ve been putting about testable conjectures for further investigation. It appears Ohio S. U. has been able to test one of my conjectures — with mixed results; the conjecture needs refining (usual scientific hypothesis-development).
The word-from-Cañari supporters appear not to have put up any testable conjectures — except fabulist hand-waving about implausible sea journeys. In particular I see no means for ‘further investigation’. We could set @DM and @Y adrift on a well-appointed waka with 2-months’ food supply (that would be generous), I suppose; from somewhere East of Rarotonga — projections are it’ll take around 3 months to S.Am., and then they’ll get caught in the Humboldt current going North/still rather a long way from land. If the waka is still navigable enough to cut across the current, the waka would have been still navigable enough to have returned to Raro long before. _And_ we need to conjecture that — for entirely unexplainable and atypical reasons — the winds (that already haven’t been blowing Westwards for several weeks) continue to not blow Westwards. (Usually I’d jump at the chance for a deep-sea sailing adventure, but count me out of that one.)
@DM … the null hypothesis (that would be “there’s nothing to explain here, we’re looking at pure random”, not “we’ll never know whether there’s anything to explain here, we’ll never know if it’s random”).
But with ‘kumara’ there is something to explain: the word (or cognates showing regular sound-pattern changes in E.Polynesian languages) and the thing (including genetic evidence of the thing going back pre-European contact) is present in E.Polynesia but not West P. (pre-European contact). Indeed that distribution is part of the evidence for loss of connection/divergent development between E., W.
And the explanation is both straightforward and supported by Polynesian myth: the thing was discovered hap-hazardly then fostered and transported by human agency. That the word is a neologism in E.Polynesia is explainable: a new thing needs a new name; and plenty other new things there get new names. (I can’t see a way to demonstrate the exact genesis in a non-literate language.)
With the word-from-Cañari conjecture I feel we’re still at “we’ll never know whether there’s anything to explain here”: Was that word in use at the coast at the hypothesised time of contact? All we know is: as at 500 years’ later (and up ’til today) it was used on the coast and in the highlands in a different language (Quechua), who might have borrowed it from a language in an area Quechua-speakers didn’t occupy at the time. Indeed the non-Quechua speakers were hostile to Inca at the time. Furthermore there is and more-so was a wild variety of words used for the thing along that coast.
I’ve been putting about testable conjectures to try to establish whether there’s anything to explain; but really I feel that’s beyond my remit.
@Y was the McGillicuddy-imposter in a bathing suit at the time of the theft? Or was it the tattoo in a bathing suit?
The difference is crucial in determining the guilt of the arrestee. Bathing suits are noted for not having pockets.
Winston Churchill.
The full text of the Relaciones is here, if anyone is interested.
Winston Churchill.
Well that explains escaping through the borders — he wouldn’t be challenged.
And the man had capacious pockets. And was always broke, begging stuff from the Americans, battleships, war-loans, that sort of thing. He needed the spondulux: obvious motive for stealing the diamond.
Case solved. Free McGillicuddy! Travesty of justice!
mitma
So the CCP population into Tibet and Xinjiang is merely mimicking the Inca. Note Mitma also enslaved and moved Cañari (and other rebellious) peoples into far-flung parts of the Inca empire, to weaken the chances of local rebellions. [Stalin and the Tatars?]
[AntC] * the conquistadores just took over the existing Inca (Quechua-speaking) administration. The priest interacted with the Inca authorities on the coast. The Cañari when speaking to authority figures used Quechua, not their local tongue.
So when the priest, 50 years after the Inca conquest/400~500 years after the putative Polynesian contact, heard ‘comal’, that was Quechua.
If there’s a Proto-Oti-Volta *k͡póŋ͡mad(a)
I’m afraid that the best I can do is Kusaal kawɛnna “corn”, which represents *kaŋ͡melta. I have to say that the phonetic and semantic latitude here is great enough that the comparison would only satisfy Merritt Ruhlen. Reluctantly, I have to conclude that this kumara may not even derive from KONGO at all. The natural conclusion is that the name was probably invented as a proto-Polynesian-Quechua marketing gimmick.
Wow! I have another S.America – Polynesian soundalike for you.
Solanum repandum, the ‘Polynesian tomato’ is ‘koko‘u’ in Marquesan or kokoua [**]. The related Solanum sessiliflorum is ‘Cocona’ in Peru.
A slight difficulty: it’s a fruit of the Amazon rainforest/Eastern Peru. So our Polynesian adventurers, having hiked into the mountains to get the Quechua word for sweet-potato, then hiked down the other side. Strewth! they were heroes.
A not so slight difficulty: ‘Cocona’ is Spanish.
This coincidence mentioned straight-faced in this thesis (sadly from a NZ University renowned for its crop research).
That 2009 thesis also regurgitates uncritically all the stories we’ve identified above of alleged Polynesian-S.Am. human contact.
And gets its citations just plain wrong. (But then it’s only following actual Professors who also misattribute findings. Univ of Pittsburgh seems to be a frequent culprit.)
Poor Yen 1974. He carefully lists as many South American names for Sweet Potato as he could find, including Cumar; and identified them as Quechua/inland areas and highlands. I can’t get access to the ‘definitive’ work, but I’ve read that when the soundalike was pointed out, he said those listed areas were in the mountains/he refused to be drawn on what word was used on the coast. (Being a botanist not a linguist.)
Never the less he gets cited (p.17) as the evidence for the soundalike. (I’m also dubious about that thesis’s dating of kumara the thing arriving in Polynesia/Cook Islands.)
Does this make any sense (conclusion, p.254)?:
Is there any hope of recovering those lineages? Or has all the genetic material got thoroughly mixed up by now?
I guess if this landfall was in Inca coastline areas, the word would be*kumar. OTOH most of that coastline is hostile to boats. Clearly the reason the people-who-make-up-stuff want landfall to be in Cañari lands is that there’s a nice big peaceful natural harbour — in fact the only harbour along the whole coast. Also it would be the place to set out from to get back to Polynesia. (Whereas setting out from anywhere south of there, you’d get caught in the Peru Coastal counter-current, and go round and round like in a washtub getting nowhere for weeks. Which is why Kon-tiki was towed out 80 km from the coast, to catch the Humboldt.)
[**] @DE will be delighted to hear the soundalike to the Odzala-Kokoua National park in the Congo.
WP.en mentions that 80km tow, “to avoid coastal traffic.” But I did think it looked like a bit further than necessary.
A not so slight difficulty: ‘Cocona’ is Spanish.
The Real Academia Española doesn’t seem to think so…
I mean, obviously it’s Spanish now, but equally obviously any Spanish word unknown to European Spanish referring to a species endemic to South America is most likely going to be a loan from some local language. It would be interesting to know which one. The supposed match with Polynesian is, of course, totally unconvincing even without the topographic data; the reduplication reduces the effective information content, and you can’t just randomly substitute consonants like that.
>koko‘u
Isn’t the glottal stop phonemic? If so, it doesn’t even seem like a very good match, unless there is a sound correspondence showing that non-native n often becomes a glottal stop.
North Marquesan glottal stop corresponds to /r/ in the protolanguage (South Marquesan doesn’t have /k/).
The entry for Solanum sessiliflorum in CINWA is here. The South American names resembling the Polynesian words for S. repandum are clustered in Peru, as far as I can tell, including Huallaga Huánuco Quechua.
Yanesha’ has cocohua’, given on p. 138 of Martha Duff Tripp (1998) Diccionario Yaneshaʼ (Amuesha)–Castellano. (A loanword from Quechua?)
The entry for Cocama kukuna (simply a loan from Spanish?) in the dictionary of Vallejos Yopán and Amías Murayari (2015) is on page 109 here:
For Aguaruna, Gerardo Wipio Deicat et al. (1996) Diccionario Aguaruna, p. 81–82, has
They say it is a loanword from Spanish, but what happened to the final -na?
Unfortunately I am on the road and can’t investigate the morphology of these languages further to perhaps discover what is going on there. Perhaps someone else can pick it up.
Beside forms with velars like Spanish cocona in Peruvian languages, the existence of seemingly reduplicated forms like Mastés pupu and Isconahua popó, with labial instead of velar, is also interesting. (As an aside, cocona also apparently appears as a variant of the word cacona ‘baubles, trinkets’, which gives one pause considering the attractiveness of cocona fruits.)
@Lars 80km tow, “to avoid coastal traffic.” But I did think it looked like a bit further than necessary.
Yeah, I think that’s not material to the Kon-tiki exercise. The more relevant question is why were they setting out from Lima? It was the extreme southern end of the pre-European coastal traffic. (Politics? they couldn’t get permission from Ecuador? Finance? The Peruvian gov’t provided assistance, including harbouring and that tow?)
The centre of the pre-European coastal trade was exactly the big peaceful natural harbour/gulf of which I spake. Most of the trade was going north to meso-America. The Cañari occupied the South and East/inland sides of the gulf. There was another tribe ‘Puná’ occupying a large island and the Northern side, militarily less powerful but seemed to be a shared culture (?related language)/they sometimes co-operated/traded, sometimes were at war. The Puná are the raftbuilders and seemed to manage the coastal traffic. Good sources for balsa logs just inland from there; indeed the Inca took balsa logs up to the lakes in the Andes.
This harbour/gulf is within a peninsula that juts out into the Humboldt current — that it blocks/redirects the current is what causes the Peru Coastal counter-current.
But the Polynesian explorers wouldn’t know any of that. They could probably see the Peru coast was inhospitable (also arid/no trees suitable for repairing waka/also no sweet potato). So(?) they were happy to drift northwards on the Humboldt until they saw greener lands? How much provisions did they have? Or they lucked out and got swept to Ecuador direct/never saw Peru?
Anyhoo _if_ they headed into the Gulf of Guayaquil, there’d be nobody speaking Quechua at the time. The Cañari/Puná language is now lost, due to the Inca’s mitma policy, we shall never know what words they used for sweet-potato.
(To repeat myself) this was clearly a whole ‘nother land-mass compared to the islands they were expecting. And it had people who weren’t Polynesian. Why has none of that entered myth?
I think Quechua had already been spoken in Ecuador for long before the Inca conquest.
And your evidence for that is … ? (Look at the dating for Inca expansion.)
We at least know there was a Cañari language. And we know the Cañari resisted Inca takeover valiantly — at least as at late C15th.
The Inca Empire didn’t really get going until C14th. So at the time of hypothesised Polynesian contact, even if the Cañari were at peace with whoever preceded the Incas/maybe even traded with them/had a lingua franca, why use a foreign word to talk to folk washed up in an ocean-going canoe?
I read it, e.g. here (p. 50): “From here Quechua made it far to the north, in a long-distance movement played out most likely over a period long after Quechua divergence had first begun, but still a few centuries before the Inca conquest.” I don’t quite understand the reasoning behind that history.
Say the coastal people (Cañari?) got their word for SP from Quechua. Why not.
If you want more Sweet Potato words in South America, look here (In the “Hunter-Gatherer Language Database”). There’s nothing too useful: kumara appears in Quechua varieties; coastal languages are not documented. It’s interesting to see how far some other terms have spread within the continent, among unrelated languages (e.g. Mosetén and various Panoan languages), which agrees with the idea that kumara could have been used on the coast, even in non-Quechuan languages.
“A case study in the Andes”. Thanks but hmm.
I appreciate the division Chile/Bolivia/Peru/Ecuador is useless for our purposes. Quechua as a lingua franca got to highland/inland Ecuador (Quito) says the paper. But coastal Ecuador (p. 51) is qualitatively different — lush and heavily populated vs coastal Peru barren and windswept, and with hostile currents for navigation/trade. (Indeed Lima was a totally daft place for the Spanish to put their headquarters.)
As in: not even coastal north Peru, let alone coastal Ecuador.
As in: “Unfortunately” we shall never know.
Say the coastal people (Cañari?) got their word for SP from Quechua. Why not.
Fair question.
Now wp on Naming is wrong there: Quechua has two distinct words for two distinct varieties ‘apichu’, ‘khumara’ — with neither being super-ordinate. So the Spanish brought in ‘camote’ for SP-in general. (And nobody uses related words for sweet-potato vs potato-potato.)
So the thing has been cultivated for thousands of years. And it came southwards towards (what is now) Ecuador and further southwards to the Andes. Even if it did start with the same name, it’s had plenty of time for sound changes, embedded in what are acknowledged to be different languages.
It strikes me as equally plausible the Incas (or rather some predecessor culture) got their word from Cañari; or that ‘apichu’ is a Cañari word meaning a variety that grows better on the coast. Or both. Or the other way round. Or neither. Or there’s other variet(ies) that do better on the coast, which had distinct names in Cañari until the Inca banjaxed them. “We shall never know.”
We just don’t have the quantity nor the quality nor the time-depth attestation of evidence to do any of that Comparative Method good stuff.
This is not the level of evidence that would justify judging a soundalike as cognate in any other circumstances. We don’t have a vector for human transmission as we do with the great wanderworts of Chinese to/from Indo-European (say). The maritime ‘evidence’ is against there being a human vector.
Statistically, of all the soundalikes from different languages that happen to be vaguely-similar in meaning, there’s likely to be some that are by chance very close in meaning — even some with five segments matching phonologically. (Five very common phonemes in the world’s languages BTW.) Then this happens to be one.
The maritime ‘evidence’ is against there being a human vector.
All else being the same—linguistics, history, genetics, what have you—if you thought the voyage was feasible, would you accept the existing evidence for human transmission of the plant and the word to Polynesia?
would you accept the existing evidence for human transmission
What we have doesn’t amount to the level of ‘evidence’. What we have would prod me to look for more factors. I’m a wurrit-at-it kinda thinker, in case you’d not noticed.
There’s no myths. There’s no other _things_ or words apparently. (That’s what I’d be looking for.) I guess we don’t know exactly what the coastal S.Am. cultures had at the time but: other varieties of meat; alliums (tasty and preservatives and mildly noxious to keep off pests in the garden); fruit (maybe bushes/cuttings would be difficult to keep alive); tools/techniques for decorative gemworking; …
But we have only one thing, and a not particularly valuable thing [**], despite being in the culture long enough to gain a word and understand how to foster that thing, which usually needs coaxing by humans. Like they steered their waka into a busy harbour, shouted givusyertubers and rushed away again.
if you thought the voyage was feasible, …
I don’t, but let’s counterfactually say they could manage a voyage of 4 months away from the sight of land. That’d be 2 months out then turn round. (Kon-tiki drifted for 3 months — with the current and with the wind.) Not long enough to get to the S.Am. coast unless they find an island on the way with fresh water. But there isn’t.
For exploratory voyages they looked for seabirds flying to land and followed them. Particularly Frigatebirds, which can’t land on water (their feathers get waterlogged then they can’t fly — seems poor design). Frigatebirds range as far as S.Am. west coast — just: Ecuador northwards, not Peru [***]. Our explorers might see the birds coming at them westwards. But that’s no help in pinpointing where the birds are coming _from_. Polynesians would expect it to be an island they need to head to accurately.
Frigate birds go eastwards well north of the equator to Mexico (through the doldrums, so no contrary winds) then cycle south before returning westwards on the trade winds. The birds don’t need to worry about currents, but the explorers do: there’s a weak/seasonal eastward flow, but you’ve got to go a long way north of the equator to find it. Eventually Polynesians got as far north as Hawai’i — but very late in their range of exploration/well after cultivating kumara. And still it’d be a long way to Mexico, with nowhere to hop on.
[**] It’s particularly Māori, Chathams, RapaNui that value the thing — because it grows in cooler climes and all year round. Further north on hotter islands there’s plenty to grow.
[***] which explains why not explore southwards: Scaglion+Cordero 2011 gaily show a chart with outwards journey deep to the South in the Forties. Anybody setting out that way would need to expect (with no evidence) they would make landfall and would find a north-going current/winds and would be able to come back westwards. Those things are there. There’s no seabirds to show the way. There are fierce storms. There’s no fresh water.
Uh, yes. What it’s not is a hypothesis about where East Polynesia’s sweet potatoes and the word for them came from – that’s what I meant and should probably have said.
I’m actually wondering if kūmara is specifically a Māori folk etymology of kumara (quite possibly as kū + mara as AntC suggests) – the first vowel is short on all the other islands, right?
I don’t know if this counts as “we shall know”, but the most parsimonious hypothesis is that the word was well enough recorded and really did mean “sweet potato”.
Given the phonologies involved, it really is identical to kumara: Quechua doesn’t distinguish [o~u], and the phoneme really spans the full range; Polynesian doesn’t distinguish [q~k] (or aspirates, as nowadays found in Quechua in the Andes) or [r~l] and doesn’t allow word-final consonants.
Canadian Aboriginal syllabics was derived from Pitman shorthand, plus inspiration from Devanāgarī, in the early 1840s, at least in large part by the missionary James Evans.
It spread so quickly that very few of its Cree users – apparently the entire adult population by the late 19th century – ever knew about this. Various myths sprang up, for example one where knowledge of the script had dropped from the spirit world at opposite ends of the Cree-speaking area (almost the entire width of Canada apart) simultaneously.
Even in the Greek case, where we all know the legend about a Phoenician named Cadmus bringing the letters to the Greeks, there are others that deemphasize Cadmus and/or don’t call him Phoenician.
After you just quoted “The Spanish rulers ordered the Cañaris to learn Kichwa, which contributed to the disuse of Cañari” in the same comment, I don’t understand your confidence about this.
I’m actually wondering if kūmara is specifically a Māori folk etymology of kumara (quite possibly as kū + mara as AntC suggests) – the first vowel is short on all the other islands, right?
No. The PolLex entry. Most islands have lengthened.
In particular, Marquesas variants are Kuumaʔa (MQN), ʔuumaʔa (MQS). Kumaʔa (MQN), umaʔa (MQS) (Lch). — where we hypothesise the kūmara entered the story.
Some Polynesian languages seem to have ‘shortened’ the lengthened first vowel, although AFAICT they all make a phonological distinction in lengthening.
Let me ask an oblique question. Is there any language in which *ku(:)mar(a) _isn’t_ a valid word. (It might have /l/ instead of /r/; the first vowel might be more /o/ than /u/.)
All those segments seem somehow ‘basic’: If a language has any nasals, it has /m/, etc.
Chinese/Thai languages have mostly single-syllable words — but we know that’s not really true. The tones are hypothesised to be clippings of final consonants in Old Chinese. So would that sequence be valid in Old Chinese?
I’m kinda thinking that if a language — any language — didn’t already have that as a word, it’d be a good candidate to attach to some new thing.
> the most parsimonious hypothesis is that the word was well enough recorded and really did mean “sweet potato”.
Surprised it needed to be said. But it’s looking like it may need to be repeated in reference to other lines of argument.
If a language has any nasals, it has /m/, etc
Remarkably, this is not so. Onondaga, for example, has /n/ but not /m/. In fact, all the Northern Iroquoian languages lack all labial consonants (unless you count /w/.) Arapaho also has /n/ but not /m/.
Quite a few languages lack /k/, too. Many languages lack /u/; Arapaho, not to be outdone, lacks /a/.
Oh, that’s interesting that it varies within the Marquesas. I think that strengthens the hypothesis that the long-vowel version is due to folk etymology (though obviously not specific to Māori).
Yes, but it’d be very strange with its three syllables.
You think like blurb is made up but fits the English sound system?* I really don’t think words are often made up like this, let alone catch on.
* Not a perfect example; -rb is at best rare.
…which is reportedly a purely velar [ɰ] in at least some of these languages (like a Spanish g).
/kʰumala/ and such mean ‘sweet potato’ in pretty much every Quechua variety, and if Cañari <comales> means ‘camotes’, it’s reasonably the same word.
kumara/kūmara and its cognates are attested in every Eastern Polynesian language, with that one and only meaning. Languages which have /l/ instead of /r/, like Hawaiian, use an /l/. The sound changes *r>ʔ in Marquesan and *k>ʔ in South Marquesan are completely regular.
(There are slight complications which don’t matter here, but which inspired one linguist to write an article under the name Le cas du /k/ en marquisien.)
I’m kinda thinking that if a language — any language — didn’t already have that as a word, it’d be a good candidate to attach to some new thing.
In any language, random made up words are rarely used to attach to new things, and when they do it’s typically some sound-symbolic utterance. Usually words for new things are borrowed (banana) or created from existing words (pineapple).
@DM> the most parsimonious hypothesis is that the word was well enough recorded and really did mean “sweet potato”.
Surprised it needed to be said. But it’s looking like it may need to be repeated in reference to other lines of argument.
@Ryan, I’m not getting what you’re casting aspersions on. Can I suggest you stop ripping odd phrases out of context — since the whole debate here is about context. The ‘closed-mindedness’ (my expression) that comment arose from was being closed to the idea the word does indeed mean “sweet potato” in Quechua (which is what it ‘really does’ mean today), but that wasn’t the word in use in Cañari at the hypothesised time of contact with Polynesians. For at least the reason we have nothing/zippo/de nada on the Cañari language other than a few toponyms — and they’re dubious.
[AntC]> … heard ‘comal’, that was Quechua.
@DM … I don’t understand your confidence about this.
‘comal’ or ‘cumar’ was attested in Spanish writings up and down the former Inca empire, Chile up to Ecuador. Admittedly most records are much later than 1582, but not long after then it was recorded as ‘cumar’ in Quito, north Ecuador — but _inland/upland_ Ecuador, well outside what was ever Cañari territory. Note 4 here
The Heggarty 2007 paper @Y links to above (p. 50 specifically, but all of it is fascinating/a long read) proposes that the Inca was merely the last in a long series of empires/polities that waxed and waned along the Andean chain. (Quito isn’t in the Andes, but is in uplands that continue beyond them.) These were all essentially of the same culture/spoke some form of Quechua — or at least Quechua was the lingua franca for trade along the mountain routes. (And Aymara in N.Chile/Bolivian Andes/S.Peru was part of that same culture/the language split early from proto-Quechua, or at least shares many areal features.)
I pointed to the Mitma policy and to the Spanish in effect continuing that policy of dealing only in Quechua. So ‘comal’ is the word in Quechua; the Incas imposed Quechua on everybody; the Spanish also; what the priest heard was Quechua.
The ‘hunter-gatherer’ list that @Y links to shows there are plenty other indigenous names for sweet-potato in South America. But that’s across the whole continent/sparse records in former Inca territories, and of course no Cañari. Here’s the non-Quechua/non-kumar words/languages from that list that are on or west of the Andes, and that aren’t simply batata: (this is my not-stamp collection)
Despite the close connection with Aymara, here’s the (Central) Aymara words: qhini, qama, phiñu, sicha. ‘qama’ might be the kumar word, but we need a bit of explanation to get there, and what are those other words? What’s more, the glosbe dictionary (whatever that is) tells me the Aymara is ‘Apichu’ — which is a different word recorded in Quechua-speaking areas (also on the hunter-gatherer list, but for a dialect of Quechua). ‘Apichu’ are sweeter, ‘kumar’ are more starchy. [Cook paper, linked above]
The word in Cha’palaa (Barbacoan — from which we get ‘barbecue’) — on the Ecuador/Columbia coast but a long way north of Cañari/was never Inca empire — is [‘ka’mute]. from Mexican camote, probably brought by the Spanish.
And that’s it. I’m presuming looking in the Amazon basin isn’t going to help.
That Quechua has two words neither superordinate, and Aymara 4 (?5) suggests this possibility. each word denotes a variety, not sweet-potato in general. (Furthermore S.American languages before Spanish influence seem to see no connection between sweet-potato vs potato-potato.) We could hypothesise (with zippo evidence for or against) it’s the variety that gets a name, and the name travels with the variety.
So was kumar (the variety) used in Cañari long before Inca takeover? Did the Cañari cultivate it, but under a different name? Or a different variety? “We shall never know”. What might help is knowing which variety does better in which climate. I can’t believe a variety that does well in the cool dry Andes is really happy on a luscious steamy coast, and vice-versa.
If there’s any botanists in the house (that speak Spanish): can you find a difference as to preferred growing environment/distribution between Kumar vs Apichu? Are there other ancient S.Am. varieties with different names?
@Y /kʰumala/ …, and if Cañari <comales> means ‘camotes’, it’s reasonably the same word.
?Cañari? We know no words of Cañari. ‘comales’ is what the 1582 priest wrote. We’ve all assumed he put a Spanish plural ‘-es’ ending on what he heard.
‘camotes’ is Mexican, distributed by the Spanish. (They wanted a superordinate word to mean sweet-potato-in-general.)
> So would that sequence be valid in Old Chinese?
@DM Yes, but it’d be very strange with its three syllables.
I put the trailing vowel in parens/optional — meaning it got inserted into Polynesian (to make an open syllable) from a (alleged) root word of two syllables, 2nd closed.
Arapaho, not to be outdone, lacks /a/.
Then that’s an unfortunate exonym somebody’s given them. How do they pronounce Lakota/Dakota?
Excuse me, not Cañari, Cañaribamba.
As far as I can tell, kumara and apichu are grown in the same places, like, say, sweet apples and tart apples.
Here’s a word ‘chupru’ for sweet-potato recorded on the North Peru coast, in an Inca area (late conquest) next door to our Cañari folk. (I’m not claiming it’s in any way related to Cañari language.)
I also have a couple more from a reference to a reference to field notes, so no definitive citation:
‘open’ in Yungan aka Mochican a little further South along that coast (also Inca late conquest) — thought to be a language isolate.
‘unt’ in Chibchan north Columbia (never Inca territory). Chibchan possibly related to Barbakoan family (says wp) next door on the coast; Barbakoan possibly related to Cañari (next again along the coast) — according to a researcher who couldn’t find enough traces to say either way: they were going by toponyms.
The very fact that the Spanish were still able to impose Quechua on everybody, not to mention the fact again (it’s mentioned above) that they didn’t do so immediately, shows that not everyone was speaking Quechua at the time of the conquest. I see no reason to conclude “what the priest heard was Quechua” – the probability for that is at most 50%.
In favor of that being Quechua is Xerîb’s comment above, analyzing the other two terms mentioned in the same context as Quechua.
The /l/ in comales is unusual. It does not indicate necessarily either early Quechua or Inca Quechua. The references I checked, including Cerrón-Palomino’s Lingüística Quechua, note *r>l in various contexts across Quechua but don’t have a good explanation for it.
A great deal of this is obscurum per obscurius.
A great deal of this is obscurum per obscurius.
Yeah, I’m not getting what shade of difference this now is about.
Is @DM arguing that the Cañari word for sweet-potato is the same as the Quechua, so <whatever the priest heard> could have been either language? (Hence the “50%”) See @Y’s ref to @Xerib’s analysis of what else the priest recorded.
Or that the priest heard Cañari, ‘cumar’ at the time was a purely Cañari word; and that later the word spread throughout Quechua?
The later-spread idea seems just plain wrong: why would Quechua adopt a word from a language the Incas and the Spanish were suppressing? They’d had the thing already in the mountains for centuries. Unless (Xerib speculates just after the post Y links to) ‘cumar’ is a variety that pre-Inca-conquest was available only on the coast; the _variety_ spread, with its word, as a result of the Inca getting their hands on it.
The both-languages idea we have no evidence either way. “We shall never know”. I’ve at least dug out a few languages on the coast that seem to have a non-Quechua word for sweet-potato. (I’m not claiming that as evidence Cañari did.)
I don’t even like sweet potatoes.
Snakes alive! You’ll be telling next you don’t like parsnips. (An aversion to turnips/swede I understand — unless the turnips are very baby.) I suspect I’d prefer the Apichu/sweeter variety over Cumar/starchy.
But I guess the starchy would give more energy to keep you alive on the waka back. Oh except they need pre-cooking in which case they wouldn’t grow when you got them back. It all seems too complicated to bother with on an arduous sea journey.
This thread would put anyone off the topic of sweet potatoes. I conclude they should be seen and eaten, not heard.
How do they pronounce Lakota/Dakota?
The Arapaho word for “Lakota, Dakota” (“Sioux”) is nootinei, plural nootineihino’. “Assiniboine” (endonym: Nakoda) is nihooneihteenootinei, plural nihooneihteenootineihino’ (literally, “yellowfooted Sioux”, after the color of the soles of their moccasins? cf. Blackfoot). Forms from here.
they need pre-cooking in which case they wouldn’t grow when you got them back.
Which rather counts against the drifted-on-balsa-raft possible vector [**]: there’d been sweet-potato up and down the coast for thousands of years. So not a valuable crop worth carrying as cargo. The crew might take it cooked as sustenance on the voyage, but that’s not viable for planting if they get swept to Polynesia.
So a raft travelling deliberately away from shore on a voyage of settlement? With no knowledge there was anywhere to settle, let alone how far/in what direction.
[**] Not that I was entertaining that seriously/the idea got left in our wake a long time ago.
analyzing the other two terms mentioned in the same context as Quechua.
I’ve been wondering whether zarayuyu “maize weed” (i.e. “weed of maize fields”) in that text was specifically Nothoscordum gracile, a very weedy and invasive plant that thrives in disturbed ground and is edible raw or cooked.
I’d still like to know how it got its striking name, though.
The other thread on Russian демьянки got me wondering about the etymology of the original topic of this post, lamb’s quarters, one of the first weeds/wild green plants my father taught me was edible, because it is so recognizable, and safer than nettles for a four-year-old kid to gather (and purslane usually growing intertwined with spurge). I always thought that the name must refer to the whitish tops of the plants, like a sheep’s leg after shearing, or to the inflorescences like the locks of a fleece. But looking into the matter, everyone seems to accept an etymology I can’t trace further back than Richard Chandler Alexander Prior (1863), On the Popular Names of British Plants, p. 133 here.
analyzing the other two terms mentioned in the same context as Quechua.
The original batch of Priests’ reports, held in Madrid.
The paragraph under cross-examination is on pages numbered 186-187. Comal(es) or any reasonable spelling variation doesn’t appear elsewhere nor zarayuyu, nor cazabe. (ar)racaches appears a few other times.
Apichu (or plausible variants) doesn’t appear, nor other local names for crops AFAICT. Other reports all use camotes and papa — which words we know to be brought by the Spanish from the Carribbean.
Furthermore the comal(es) priest seems to be reporting from Cañaribamba, modern-day city Cuenca at 2,500 m above sea level. There’s a separate set of reports from Guayaquil on the coast/natural harbour. seem to be much more telegraphic and brutally commercial, mention precious metals, poultry, grains, not root crops nor vegetables.
nor cazabe
Cazabe “flatbread made from manioc” in the passage from the Relaciones is just a general American Spanish word, from Taíno. It is now also often casabe, too.
Cf. English cassava.
The /l/ in comales is unusual. It does not indicate necessarily either early Quechua or Inca Quechua. …
Hmm there’s an /l/ in Camotl — the Nahuatl word from which the Spanish took Camote. Variously rendered camohtli, kamojtl. And it’s generally supposed sweet-potato spread down from meso-America.
If your language didn’t have consonant clusters (or used to, but it evolved not to), would you take -otl as -al ? If your language needed open syllables, you’d add an epenthetic lax vowel?
You’d end up with kumala(?)
So Polynesians got it from Mexico: far more sensible place to try to get to (from say Hawai’i) than to Ecuador.
The Nahuatl tl is a digraph for a single phoneme, not a cluster; it doesn’t contain /l/.
The Nahuatl tl is a digraph for a single phoneme, not a cluster; it doesn’t contain /l/.
Although I do not wish to comment on the likelihood of a Nahuatl origin for the Polynesian word for “sweet potato”, considering the general imprecision of the phonetic match and the fact that Nahuatl dialects were only spoken on small segment of the Mexican coastline, I just wish to point out that western Nahuatl dialects have l for tl. Here is an extract from Rosa H. Yáñez Rosales (2013) Ypan altepet monotza san Antonio de padua tlaxomulco ‘En el pueblo que se llama San Antonio de Padua, Tlajomulco’, Textos en lengua náhuatl, siglos XVII y XVIII, quoted and translated in Karen Dakin, “Western and Central Nahua dialects: Possible influences from contact with Cora and Huichol”, pp. 264–300 in Dakin, Parodi and Operstein (2017) Language Contact and Change in Mesoamerica and Beyond:
See also the Wikipedia here, with reference to Michoacán.
For fun, I just looked at the words in some other language groups on the western coast of Mexico…
On the Otomanguean word for “sweet potato”, note this on p. 81 of Cecil H. Brown, “Development of Agriculture in Prehistoric Mesoamerica: The Linguistic Evidence” (in John Staller and Michael Carrasco (2009) Pre-Columbian Foodways: Interdisciplinary Approaches to Food, Culture, and Markets in Ancient Mesoamerica):
Mixtecan languages have words like ña’mì, ña’mù, etc., and a word like this for “sweet potato” can be reconstructed all the way back to Proto-Mixtecan (see page 12 here), it seems.
So not resembling camohtli.
(Also, by sheer coincidence, the Mixtecan words resemble Portuguese inhame (the source of English yam), of unclear origin, but apparently first attested in the Letter of Pêro Vaz de Caminha, a description of Brazil in 1500. Modernized version of the text quickly ripped from the internet here:
The second occurrence is here, in the middle of the page.)
(EDIT: The link to the scan of the letter doesn’t go to the right image file, which is the image labelled PT-TT-GAV-8-2-8_m0022.TIF on the lefthand side of the page.)
Heh, neither do I!
I was arguing that there was no reason to infer that the word the priest heard was Quechua as opposed to Cañari. However, if he was reporting from 2500 m up instead of from the coast, that changes!
A promising idea, except for the vowels.
(Nahuatl doesn’t distinguish [o~u] either, but unlike in Quechua the phoneme seems to stick to [o] and not veer into [u], so even metathesis – say, from the vowels getting misremembered after a month or two at sea – wouldn’t turn *[kamol] into *[kumar] + obligatory copy vowel.)
Oh, on Old Chinese… it had a lot of “sesquisyllabic” words, with a first syllable that was reduced in several ways compared to the second: no coda, no consonant clusters, only a subset of the consonants allowed (AFAIK no *kʷ for example), and always the same vowel, */ə/, with a few oblique hints that */a/ may also have been allowed, but not */u e i o/.
So about the same that PIE did to reduplicated roots? (Except in Old Chinese it was two different roots, but maybe the way it happens is “natural” in some sense).
Similar. The “natural” part is probably stress.
This says,
Cuenca is just at the limit of those conditions.
Cuenca is 80 km from the coast. Whatever language was spoken on the coast in 1100 AD, the Quechua word could have been a Wanderwort which was used there too.
Mexico as the source of the Polynesian word… let’s not go there. Please?
I found a 1971 paper — so after Heyerdahl but rather before all this debate — which appears to support the camp of chance coincidence only/nothing to see here; except it’s so vehement about it, I don’t trust it at all.
It says Quechua was purely spoken in the mountains/never at the coast except for the last few decades before Spanish conquest, and it never ‘stuck’ there because Spanish replaced it very quickly as the language of the authorities.
I won’t ref the paper (partly because I’ve lost the ref, partly because it was from anthropologists/archaeologists mainly studying meso-America/not philologists). This threadlet stands or falls on its own:
Claim: The Quechua word for S-P is ‘Apichu’. ‘Cumar’ is a word from a conquered language. It appears around far-flung parts of Quechua territory because of the mitma policy (Tatars from Crimea) of moving conquered people to remote areas.
This seems to contradict the idea that the words refer to different varieties (sweet vs starchy). Also wouldn’t the people in these far-flung areas need a super-ordinate word for S-P in general? Or perhaps they took ‘camote’ because the Spanish arrived before there was time for Quechua integration with off-comers?
Also contradicts if the Aymara ‘qama’ is ‘cumar’ in disguise.
Cuenca is 80 km from the coast. … Wanderwort.
Quito (now capital of Ecuador) is further from the coast, and around the same elevation as Cuenca (so marginal for growing S-P), and a long way north/well outside formerly Cañari territory. ‘cumar’ (with ‘r’ not ‘l’) was reported from there not long after our priest in Cuenca. (But I think Quito is too close to Cuenca for mitma policy to move people there.)
The Heggarty 2008 paper that @Y linked to claims (p.51 ff) that even before the full Inca conquest, Quito was on a regular Inca trade route along the spine north from the Andes, and that Quechua would be a lingua franca for the trade. OTOH points more south along that spine (like now-called Cuenca) were hostile to Inca/the trade route swerved past it.
I tend to think S-P grows everywhere, is bulky to move, is a staple/not valuable: why would anyone be trading it — especially long distances in the mountains? Why need a lingua franca word?
… let’s not go there. Please?
Oh, sure. I was just testing if the ‘evidence’ for from-Mexico was any worse than from-Ecuador.
SP can grow by the coast (and it pretty much had to, to have gotten to Polynesia by whatever means). The word could have come with the plant and its cultivation, like tomatoes grown outside of Mexico.
I read some discussion of a scenario of Quechua spreading early along the coast northwards from Peru, quite before the Inca conquest, but I can’t find good references for this.
Quechua spreading early along the coast northwards from Peru,
cited in Heggarty 2008 p51 2nd para [Torero 1984; 2002]. The discussion immediately counters with ‘oh no it didn’t’ because Humboldt current: any sea trade would be _north from_ Ecuador, not along the Peru coast. [Hocquenghem 1993]. And if you look at Heggarty’s Fig 6 map, Quechua language spread is all inland/upland (Quito) until at the very end of the Inca expansion.
The coastal trade northwards seems to have been controlled by Puná (island and people being the shipwrights and navigators), adjacent to Cañari territory, and in a on-again-off-again alliance.
(but yeah I’ve lost the reference where I read that. I think it said the Cañari were the entrepreneurs, the Puná the transport outfit.)
Again I don’t see S-P being cargo: precious metals, cloth, spices are what’s mentioned.
“good circumstantial”? earlier they have “certainly possible”. As opposed to vanilla circumstantial? or mere possibly possible? That paper is full of trying too hard.
Well, people needed to go back, too… how close to shore does the current pass?
Anyway, the reference I saw (second-hand, no good sources) argued for early Quechua spread from Peru north to Ecuador along the coast.
Again, SP didn’t need to be cargo. It could be grown anywhere along the coast. The point was about early Quechua language spread.
how close to shore does the current pass?
Kon-tiki got towed out 80km from Lima. Heggarty points out the Spanish ships (approaching from the North) “looped out deep into the Paciific” to get clear of the current and approached the port for Lima from the south [Walker 1979].
needed to go back, too
There’s a feeble counter-current runs southwards close to the Peru coast. Combined with diurnal onshore breezes, no galleon would risk getting that close to an unforgiving shore. It would help a balsa raft going southwards (shallow draft) but they could only sail down-wind, so again they’d get driven on to shore. And going out 80km to return on the northbound current would be wildly beyond their abilities.
But if you’re trading north from Puná island (or actually coast-hugging north-east into Gulf of Panama), that’s where the Humboldt current diverges away North-Westwards, so weak currents and weak winds (doldrums).
Scaglion and Caldero claim this would be by paddling the rafts — until the Polynesians turned up and taught them how to sail. [Did I say trying too hard?]
early Quechua spread from Peru north to Ecuador along the coast. … early Quechua language spread
I’ve seen no allegation of Quechua spread _along_ the Peru coast: rather the Inca spread along the mountains; then — right at the end of C15th — downhill from the mountains. ‘north to Ecuador’ was in the mountains to Quito. And I guess they overran Cuenca (Cañari HQ in the mountains) first before spreading to the coast.
(If the Inca are mountain dwellers and not seafarers, waging war at the coast would be beastly steamy/They Don’t Like it Hot, Mum. Rather, I suggest …)
To support this Polynesian contact idea, you’re better agreeing ‘cumar’ is not a Quechua word but from some other culture on the coast — and to pick a non-Inca culture at random, because there’s no evidence which one it was — like Cañari or Puná (thought to be related — again with negligible/only areal evidence).
Then this neatly dovetails with Gulf of Guayaquil being the location of contact/right setting-off point back to Polynesia/catch the Humboldt going NW.
Amazing how the Polynesians knew so much about S.Am. currents and geography from nearly 7,000km away.
From Guayaquil northwards along the Ecuador/Columbia coast there’s heaps of good places to land and small tribes with unknown languages — you could easily make something up to fit the conclusion. Perhaps Camotli -> Cumal(a) is a Wanderwort.
Amazing — that struck me as well, if there’s only one point on the west coast of SA from which you can plausibly get back to Polynesia, somebody had to be very lucky. Or, (just-so story): like Columbus, some Cañari explorers had heard about Polynesians landing somewhere so they knew there was somewhere to go. Something about the currents naturally depositing them and their tubers on a specific island group, wasn’t it?
downhill from the mountains.
They [the Inca] continued [from Quito] by heading southwest to the coast, eventually subjugating the Ecuadorians living near the Gulf of Guayaquil and the Island of Puna to Inca rule.
“subjugating”?
A pre-Inca civilisation on the coast, including Puná island. “the Inca never conquered them “. Language unknown; alleged in other sources to be related to Barbacoan family, whose area straddles North Ecuador/South Columbia. All these families and ‘related-tos’ are based on toponyms — and typically only a handful of those — or dubious early Spanish conquest documents.
Something about the currents naturally depositing them and their tubers on a specific island group, …
Yeah it’s easy to explain how the plants/tubers/seeds got from that “only one point” — with or without accompanying humans — to somewhere in E.Polynesia.
If with humans, it’s not easy to explain how the humans got to exactly that point from Polynesia so as to take them back. (Or if humans from S.Am., how they had the faintest clue where they were going or what to expect when they got there or carried enough water/food. Heyerdahl had a chart, and a radio, and would be rescued by the Peru Navy.)
If without humans, can I ask a botanical question: are seeds from ‘primitive’ cultivars of ~1,000 years b.p. more likely to be potent than those from modern hybrids?
We know seeds (in pods/capsules) are just-about viable getting the distance/time to the Marquesas. That would explain why they weren’t viable going further into Central Polynesia, as are Coconuts/Gourds. Also the seeds likely won’t just propagate if they wash up on a beach. (Need ‘scarifying’ by passing through a bird’s digestive system, for example.)
Presumably Polynesians would know about scarifying/how to plant seeds?
Scenario: a mat/raft of outwash plant matter drifts into the Marquesas, on this benevolent current. Humans have just got there. They (either beachcombing or out-and-about on canoes around the islands) spot interesting-looking plants; grab the seeds, break open the pods/scare the seeds a bit and plant them.
Another example of a seeming perfect cross-match of sound and meaning.
Furthermore there’s a documented human vector: Serbians/Slavs were relocated by the Ottoman Empire [**].
And yet I was immediately suspicious this was too neat; and so it proved.
[**] very comparable to the Inca Mitma policy. A slight suspicion with the Slavs, though: wp puts them in Bythinia/N.Anatolia, not Syria.
Both the sound and the meaning are very imperfect matches.
Here’s another good one: How the horses were created.
(English on the slides.)
He held to his point.
The same point would tell us that men shouldn’t write fiction with female narrators, nor young people with older narrators. Ultimately we wind up with “Don’t write fiction, it’s illegitimate; stick to memoir.” Quia absurdum est.
The brothers would have had to go to extraordinary lengths to avoid beaching on any number of island groups on the way from Ra’iātea.
Magellan sailed from the Strait of Himself all the way to Guam, 14,500 km in airline distance, while sighting only three islands, probably Puka-puka in the Cook Islands, Caroline Island in the Line Islands (not to be confused with the Caroline Islands), and Rota in the Marianas, on none of which he was able to land. It’s a big ocean and islands are sparse. Even a slight deviation would, says WP, have taken Magellan to the Marshall Islands, the Society Islands, the Solomon Islands or the Marquesas Islands.
kumara “looks native” in that it doesn’t have any foreign sounds or phonotactics, the way English loch or gnu do.
Per contra, sack looks completely native: it fits in nicely with native back, pack, thwack, crack, quack, lack, wrack, hack. Rack is Dutch, tack is Germanic but took a detour through Normand, and stack is Norse (cf. native stake). But sack is an indirect borrowing from Akkadian saqqu, and the only thing that’s happened on the way here is that it lost the case ending.
Quia absurdum est.
Quod.
The same point would tell us that men shouldn’t write fiction with female narrators, nor young people with older narrators.
I agree. “Stay in your own lane” is much more understandable and more forgivable when uttered by the weak than the strong, but nonetheless still deserves the response “Would you kindly be so good as to bugger off?”
And it may have been borrowed into Germanic more than once: the Gothic version is an u-stem, the North Germanic forms are all i-stems, and while the Frisian form (going through the list in Wiktionary) is an i-stem and most of the other West Germanic ones could be, I don’t think that’s an option for the mainstream English form.
(*i would have caused umlaut. That could have been eliminated in Dutch and restricted to the plural – indeed Säcke – in German, but English, judging from guest, is expected to keep it throughout.)
Quod, of course. BTW, the term quod ‘prison’ is < quadrangle, yet it is not an originally American expression (which would account for the apparent LOT/PALM merger). The OED has American quotations, but none since 1933.
Perhaps the Gothic form was borrowed from Greek and the other forms from Latin?
Possible, of course. But I don’t think “sackcloth” had much of a plural that could have been borrowed as an *i-stem.
(Proto-)Polynesian ‘tuna’ = freshwater eel
(All Polynesian languages seem to have a word cognate with ‘tuna’. The *fresh* water is rather misleading — but that’s where the humans encounter them, see below.)
tuna (n.)
1881, from American Spanish (California) tuna, from Spanish atun, from Arabic tun, borrowed, probably in Spain, from Latin thunnus “tunny” (see tunny). [etymonline]
Note California: a sensible point of contact to Polynesia (Hawai’i), unlike Ecuador.
Polynesian-in-general has a variety of words for various species of tunny/bonito/albacore/etc.
atu/(ʔ)aku for bonito includes /tu/ again.
[wp on NZ endemic Longfish eel] I’m wondering how the larvae ‘know’ to drift back to NZ. “endemic”, note.
elvers migrate upstream? Have the people who write this stuff gone to look at the cataracts draining NZ lakes? Flumes much faster-flowing and longer than salmon leaps.
If larvae/elvers can manage that, I’m sure kumara can swim across the pacific and haul themselves on to dry land.
This one is not necessarily a coincidence anyway. The Hungarian is handwaved as “onomatopoetic” in standard sources, but looks like no such thing to me; the only data given in evidence are East European terms for calling a dog to the effect of kuč kuč, probably related but perhaps rather in the other direction (cf. here kitty kitty kitty). A possibility could be reshaping of Alanic *kuča, known to be borrowed also as Udmurt kuća ‘dog’, Komi kɨći ‘whelp’ — which is from the same Indo-Iranian root *kutta- as Hindi kutiyā ‘bitch’. Looks like they could be the same feminine derivative *kúttiyā even.
I have considered keeping a list like Johanna_Hypatia’s too (maybe as a Wiktionary sub-project to recruit others also in help), but it would have to follow some sense of strictness — not a list of similarities that merely look implausible, but rather similarities that can be actually demonstrated to evaporate once proper morphological or etymological analysis is applied. I note that a decent number of other comparisons listed by JH like Arabic arḍ ~ Dutch aard, Arabic ana ~ Brahui ana, English many, two ~ Korean mani, tu, Finnish maa ~ Tamil maN remain candidates for actual Nostratic cognates. Or, perhaps, through some ancient loanword scenario; for Italian sette ~ Yakut sette there is recent research to this effect from Rasmus Bjørn. But in any case their historical development does not show derivation from patently dissimilar sources.
I’ve seen, incidentally, an interesting recent comment of a kind of lack of real etymological labor in many of these longer “oh look at these coincidences” lists: a list of supposed false cognates between Hawai’ian and Ancient Greek (unsourced in the tumblr link here, but I know I’ve seen it previously around in a textbook somewhere) that actually contains two real cognates, meli ‘honey’ and aeto(s) ‘eagle’. Both are non-native concepts in Hawai’i, for which missionaries then opted to introduce precisely Ancient Greek loanwords when translating the Bible. Relevant to Lameen’s point, they also turn out to be the only two words on the list that show an exact match in both their semantics and in 4 consecutive segments.
meli ‘honey’ … non-native concepts in Hawai’i
So Polynesians didn’t know of honey until European times?
Māori has loans both ‘honi’ and ‘mīere’.
Now I’m wondering whether the ‘mīere’ is via Hawai’i or from French ‘miel’. There were French colonists and missionaries trying to grab Aotearoa at the same time as the British. I would expect the Bible translators would opt to follow precedent in Hawai’i.
Would’ve been hard with honeybees not being native to Oceania, and I don’t think they were any part of the agricultural tech kit spread by Austronesians either.
Supposedly no honeybees in pre-contact America either, now that I look a bit more into this; I wonder if anyone’s done an overview of native American terms for ‘honey’ as has been done for e.g. ‘horse’.
J Pystynen: a list of supposed false cognates between Hawai’ian and Ancient Greek (unsourced in the tumblr link here, but I know I’ve seen it previously around in a textbook somewhere)
It’s from Trask’s Historical Linguistics. I verified it in Trask’s Historical Linguistics revised by Robert McColl Millar (2nd and 3rd editions); I don’t immediately have access to Trask’s original edition from 1996, but this paper from 2008 quotes the list and cites that edition, p. 220. (Larry! Say it ain’t so!)
The book’s sarcastic comment (visible in the tumblr link) is unfortunate: ‘But this just can’t be coincidence. Look at the words for “honey” – they’re absolutely identical! There must be another explanation.’ So yeah.
Nick Nicholas has also called this out. There’s a 4th edition of Trask/Millar forthcoming from Routledge next month; let’s see whether Millar has fixed the problem yet.
real cognates
Caution: Language Hat objects to the use of “cognate” to include loanwords. Is there any cover term that includes both inherited words and loanwords? I can only think of, I guess, “related” or “non-coincidence”.
J. Pystynen (And other interested hatters): I have a passing acquaintance with the literature on French loanwords (and to a lesser extent early English loanwords) in indigenous languages of North America, and “honey” is definitely NOT a commonly borrowed word in this part of the world: but “sugar” and “molasses” are *very* common loanwords (in fact, my impression is that reflexes of French “(de)(la) mélasse” may rank among the most widespread gallicisms in the indigenous languages of the continent: words for “frying pan” and “priest” are two others).
In East Cree “honey” is “aamuushuukaaw”, literally “bee sugar” (“sugar” -shuukaaw-being an anglicism in East Cree, of course), in the closely related Atikamekw language it is “amo naminas”, literally “bee molasses” (“naminas” is a gallicism, but which probably entered Atikamekw through Ojibwe), and my impression (no more than that -I have not looked into the issue systematically) is that “honey” in indigenous North American languages is typically a compound involving the (typically borrowed!) word for “sugar” or “molasses”. Interestingly, the compound needn’t involve a word for “bee”, so that the East Cree + Atikamekw examples I just gave are (I repeat, if my impressions are any guide) not wholly typical: in many indigenous languages of North America “honey” seems to be “liquid” or “golden” sugar/molasses.
I wonder: does the divide between compound words for “honey” with and without “bee” as a component morpheme correspond or correlate with Indigenous North American groups in colonial times familiar with beekeeping versus those solely familiar with honey as a trade item? Hmm…
Is there any cover term that includes both inherited words and loanwords?
I’d say “historically related”.
I googled around to see how many linguists have uncritically repeated Trask’s error about the ‘honey’ word, and it’s distressingly many — especially since the correction has been in the published literature since at least 2000 (Lexical Evidence for Early Contact between Indonesian Languages and Japanese, Kumar and Rose). Trask was informed of the loanword by Ross Clark, a Polynesianist in New Zealand, in 1998 on the HISTLING mailing list, and acknowledged that “it ruins one of my favorite examples of chance resemblance”. Lyle Campbell then brought up Maori mīere, which he says is from French, as well as Niuean meli from Greek. If you don’t know what you’re doing, you could think that’s a Polynesian cognate set!
In a later book, Kumar points out that Trask also exaggerated the apparent similarity of the words in his list by ignoring the difference between long and short vowels.
It’s a pity that Robert McColl Millar didn’t find out about any of this before embarking on his revision. I wish Trask had written up the story somewhere, e.g. on his website, as a cautionary tale. Great linguist, classic book, but I think it was a serious error to use those examples without finding out enough about Hawaiian to know that ‘eagle’ and ‘honey’ can’t be inherited and must be loans.
@ktschwartz thank you for confirming the French borrowing into Māori.
If you don’t know what you’re doing, you could think that’s a Polynesian cognate set!
I freely admit to not knowing what I’m doing, but the macron in ‘mīere’ (which Lyle Campbell can’t represent in listserv) is a big hint: that must mean a dipthong with lengthened first vowel, so can’t have come from a Polynesian ‘meli’. (The /l/ to /r/ is entirely to be expected, they’re allophones. The epenthetic /e/ tacked on to the French is also to be expected.)
honeybees not being native to Oceania, and I don’t think they were any part of the agricultural tech kit spread by Austronesians either.
Yeah, if the bees hadn’t got to Polynesia under their own steam, I can’t imaging you’d try transporting them in a crowded canoe — even those magnificent ocean-going waka.
But how did the Europeans transport bees/hives? Did they have to huff smoke at them for weeks across Pacific? Cultivate flowers for them to sip from en voyage? Splicing the mainbrace would be no fun with bees hovering around you.
How prevalent were winter transatlantic trips? Bees would just stay in the hive.
Lots here on bee transport. This is from Europe to and across North America. Getting honeybees to Australia would have been more challenging, in terms of keeping them cool.
Thanks @Y.
So the bees were needed not so much for the honey as for the wax to make candles for the Church. That would explain the French borrowing into Māori ‘mīere’: the French missionaries were Catholic.
Sheesh, the things I learn at the Hattery!
(OTOH Māori ‘wax’/’wākihi’, ‘candle’/’kānara’ look to be borrowed from English, not French. Hmm.)
Supposedly no honeybees in pre-contact America either
There are some native eusocial wasps of the Americas that produce honey: Polybia occidentalis ‘avispa huevo de toro’ (a eusocial wasp producing small quantities of honey, so called after the appearance of their nests), and members of the genus Brachygastra, found from southern Texas to Peru, Paraguay, and northern Argentina. I have read accounts here and there about how indigenous people prize this honey despite the difficulties of gathering it.
I have been puzzled by the Uto-Aztecan group including Hopi momo ‘bumblebee, bee’; Eudeve (Ópata) mumúhuo, Yoeme (Yaqui) muumu ‘bee’; Wixárika (Huichol) mɯ̄mɯ́i ‘avispa huevo de toro (Polybia occidentalis)’; Guarijío momohá ‘honeycomb’. (The Uto-Aztecan group term sounds like it might originated as an onomatopoeia for the murmuring of innumerable hymenopterans, although it also looks simply like a reduplication of Uto-Aztecan *mu- ‘fly’.) I wonder if the original referent for some of the words in this group was Brachygastra mellifica, the Mexican honey wasp.
Xerîb, Stubbs (under ‘fly’) notes a number of related UA words, and shies from making any obvious statements about their derivation one from another.
Elliott’s Luiseño dictionary mentions several kinds of wild honey, from bumblebees and wasps. The word for ‘honey’ is literally ‘<species>-water’.
The precolumbian Maya, at least, were well acquainted with honey, from the stingless Melipona bees. Sophie D. Coe writes in America’s First Cuisines (1994):
Thank you for that, Tim May! Since the range of Melipona apparently extends into Sinaloa, it would allow the reflexes of Uto-Aztecan *mumu- to have a referent in a honey-producing bee species even before the arrival of the Apis mellifera.
They drift there with the current, and when they’re close enough, they follow the smell and swim. At least that’s supposed to be how salmon do it.
Oh, nice.
Oh, snap.
*low rumbling in the background that turns out to be John Bengtson practising his evil laugh*
Ok, Ok, I know we’ve done trans-Pacific Sweet Potato to death but …
“How Acacia s.l. farnesiana attained its pan-tropical distribution” alleges a species of Acacia travelled by pre-European means from Mesoamerica all the way across the Pacific, missing out any Pacific islands to … Australia.
And their evidence for plausibility is (I think, § 4.3 ‘Enigma’) that sweet potato travelled from Mesoamerica to Pacific islands — only their references/footnotes [34, 71] are at a link that needs a subscription. ” a growing body of research using linguistic and genetic analysis indicates, …” Is that ‘body’ any more than the one word that we analysed to death up-thread? Is it “growing” since the ~2004 material we’ve already considered?
BUT … no-one ever has claimed pre-European human contact Polynesia to/from Australia. Furthermore this Acacia claim needs to explain how the seeds travelled right past all the Pacific Islands without leaving a trace. (Acacia seeds seem very durable, so I’m not denying they might survive the journey and still be viable.) There’s no suitable currents/winds; if there was human agency, why don’t we find Acacia still cultivated on the Islands?
This looks a lot like a game of academic Whispers(?)
A sliver more about the Ioannidis et al claims has arrived in my feeds. A PopSci piece:
Granted, Colombia is ‘next door’ to Ecuador; but they’re both big places. The ‘Cumal’ word is attested in southern Ecuador [**]; the Zenú territories are northern Colombia: so far north, they’re on the Caribbean (Gulf of Morrosquillo). The language possibly Chocoan.
I guess getting untainted human DNA from anywhere in S.America at that time depth is difficult. Some refs I saw suggested obtained from grave sites. Ioannidis et al (from other PopSci articles) have used ‘machine learning’ techniques to sift out European contamination. We’re all doomed.
[**] As previously noted here, S.Ecuador is at least the right place to set off from to catch the ocean currents. But Ioannidis now has to explain how the DNA got so far from Colombia. If the technique worked to cross-match Zenú to Polynesian, can it work to match it en route through Ecuador? Or does DNA not work like that?
[Deep breath]
Berenguer et al. (2024). Identification of breadfruit (Artocarpus altilis) and South American crops introduced during early settlement of Rapa Nui (Easter Island), as revealed through starch analysis. PLOS ONE 19(3): e0298896. (Open Access)
I just saw this today. I have no opinion on the reliability of the research.
I’ve read it. IANAB, but it seems solid and is hedged and cautious in its conclusions. The discovery of unexpected species is especially startling. One source of error could be that their reference collection is incomplete, but that would mean that some other unexpected species was present at the island in an early phase of the settlement.
With independent evidence from genetics, linguistics and now archaeobotanics, the case for Polynesian-South American contacts starts looking solid, and as the paper says, it may not have been a singular event. We should go looking for pandemics (or at least new diseases) on both sides.
evidence from genetics, linguistics …
The (human) genetics evidence that I’ve seen so far is highly contested, and not securely placed before European contact.
The linguistics ‘evidence’ is one sound-alike.
Can this latest bio evidence reject the possibility that grains/fruit/plants floated to Rapanui, perhaps on rafts of outwash plant debris from S.Am? I agree the currents would be favourable. I note how far stuff drifted from the MH370 crash, and ended up in Madagascar.
One of the plants, Xanthosoma, grows along the coast of the Americas only from the Gulf of Guayaquil up to the Isthmus of Tehuantepec. Are currents favorable to get it from there down to Rapanui?
Nemmine. Xanthostoma can be brought from Central Eastern Polynesia to Rapanui, same as the sweet potato. It’s the same issue for both.
Yes, they must have been brought south to Rapanui together. But the chance of three cultivated species making the leap from south America to Central Eastern Polynesia unassisted and being taken up as cultivars on arrival is … not even negligible. The uncertainty I see is with the identification of the seeds.
Not seeds. Starch grains.
They address the possibility of cross-contamination in the lab. From what I can tell, they took the issue seriously, but the possibility is not 100% eliminated.
Y: Not seeds. Starch grains.
Duh. Of course.
They address the possibility of cross-contamination in the lab. From what I can tell, they took the issue seriously, but the possibility is not 100% eliminated.
That too. Not 100%, but probably very close. Though it struck me that they could have tested for more than one local Chilean species, and maybe other forms of modern airborne particles, for a better assessment of the risk of contamination.
Going back to the general theme of new world agriculture, here’s a new paper on the domestication history of cocoa:
Lanaud et al: A revisited history of cacao domestication in pre-Columbian times revealed by archaeogenomic approaches, Scientific Reports 14, (2024)
My short summary: Cocoa originated in Amazonia, in several local domestications. It made it to the Pacific Coast, and spread from there by trade all the way to Meso-America, maybe in the same period as maize spread in the other direction.
Thanks for that on the 46 starch grains, Y!
Are currents favorable to get it from there down to Rapanui?
I wonder, is there a good summary for the non-climatologist (the archaeologist, the linguist) of the probable distribution of winds and currents in the east Pacific during the first half of the second millennium (corresponding in part to Medieval Climate Anomaly in Europe)? The best I could find in a very quick search was the following from ages ago, Goodwin et al. (2014):
But the chance of three cultivated species making the leap from south America to Central Eastern Polynesia unassisted and being taken up as cultivars on arrival is … not even negligible.
So you’re instead proposing a fourth leaping species? (human)
Polynesians did settle for a while on Norfolk Island, but never ‘discovered’ Australia, a mere 1,500 km away.
Guayaquil to Hawaii nearly 9,000km; Guayaquil to French Polynesia 7,700km; Guayaquil to Rapanui 4,000+km [Google]. The Polynesian exploring technique of island-hopping to windward of the usual trade winds wouldn’t work: no intervening islands.
Are Polynesian words for these starchy species relatable to anything spoken around Guayaquil?
(And as I said last time we went round this loop: Polynesians already had plenty enough starchy vegetables. Of all the amazing stuff in S.America, why would they bring stodge?)
the probable distribution of winds and currents in the east Pacific
LLog has a piece about the Rongorongo script (or is it?)
So where was driftwood drifting from? Even if it all turns out to have been post-European voyaging, how much flotsam were European ships generating that enough happened to wash up on RapaNui? Or did the carving tradition start before the island got deforested?
Are Polynesian words for these starchy species relatable to anything spoken around Guayaquil?
Polynesian protoform ‘Pia’ (Manihot esculenta) amot seems to have impeccable reconstruction back to Malayo-Polynesian. So I’m confused: Cassava had already reached from the Americas to Malaysia before the Polynesians set sail?
‘Pia’ is derived from the middle of ‘tapioca’? But that word is via Portuguese from Tupi tapi’oka South/East Brazil.
The original and usual referent of the group of pia in Polynesian appears to be Tacca leontopetaloides. Note the comment in Wikipedia: ‘Due to the introduction of modern crops, it is rarely cultivated today’. Hence the repurposing of the word to designate the new crop cassava in various languages.
For Niuean, for instance, that page in the Polynesian Lexicon Project Online gives the meaning ‘Manihot esculenta’ only for kāpia, which looks like a compound of kā ‘stick’ with pia ‘pia, Polynesian arrowroot (Tacca leontopetaloides)’, with reference to the fact that cassava is a woody shrub. For this morphological breakdown, see page 135 in Wolfgang B. Sperlich, ed. (1997) Niue Language Dictionary, visible here on Google Books, I hope.
Note also this from the Niuean textbook Haia! An Introduction to Vagahau Niue (2010), page 266:
(Cf. Niuean ufi ‘yam’)
Ross et al. (2008) The lexicon of Proto Oceanic: The culture and environment of ancestral Oceanic society, 3: Plants, p. 273, give the following account of the group of pia:
Here is the entry for *Rambia ‘sago’ in Blust’s online comparative dictionary of Austronesian. Uppercase R stands for consonant reconstructed as uvular /ʀ/. (*R has velar reflexes in some Philippine languages and in varieties of Atayal in Taiwan. POc is Proto-Oceanic.)
@AntC: Humans are known to transplant species. The humans in question had a long-standing tradition of exploration of the open sea and bringing cultivated species with them. That’s how they’d settled there in the first place, and why would that stop when they reached the eastern islands of Polynesia? That means we need just one hypothesis.
and why would that stop when they reached the eastern islands of Polynesia?
I rather thought I’d answered that multiple times — including the message above re not reaching Australia: it’s too far, orders-of-magnitude further than they’d spanned in any known exploration; there’s nowhere with fresh water to replenish on the way. By the same magical thinking, why would “that” stop when Polynesians reached Norfolk Island, heading South-Westwards? (For all we know, some did set out on further explorations, and either came back empty handed or perished.)
If Polynesians got as far as a continent, that would surely have entered myth?! Semi-mythical Hawaiki is always described as islands. “Austronesian and Polynesian navigators may have deduced the existence of uninhabited islands by observing migratory patterns of birds.” (And apologies for the level of woo in that article.)
We know birds (Godwits) migrate North-South New Zealand to Siberia. Any known to migrate between the Americas and (say) Hawai’i? wp lists birds of Chile, Peru, Colombia, quite a few of which are migratory — but only North-South AFAICT.
Note Heyerdahl made the journey in only one direction, having got towed offshore by a powered ship; he knew where the islands were and the currents and how far he had to drift/therefore how long it would take/how much fresh water to carry.
They address the possibility of cross-contamination in the lab. From what I can tell, they took the issue seriously, but the possibility is not 100% eliminated.
Yes I see the care they’ve taken. OTOH this stuff was dug up in the mid-1980’s and stored in crates, sent to Chile, sent back to the island in the ’90’s. Can we be sure it retained integrity for all that time in all those places? It seems starch flakes are rather easily blown about. What was the museum storekeeper eating for lunch 20 years’ ago?
The site from which the flints were retrieved had “evidence of extensive use”, with the 1980’s dig revealing several layers, including evidence deeper layers had got disturbed during later remodeling (“the movement of large boulders or stones during constructing of the first ahu probably affected the bottom cultural layer.”). Presumably the later remodelers stopped for lunch during their earthworks. And mashed some starch?
P.S. ” C[arbon 14] samples using refined Bayesian estimates”
I’d be very surprised if the samples for the dating were taken off the surface. That was recognized as gross incompetence when the method was only being developed in the last few years BP.
I’m not saying it can’t possibly be contamination, but all the easy, obvious sources of contamination are excluded.
I’s been bothering me that I hadn’t read the full text of Ioannidis et al (2020). It’s still paywalled, but a final draft version is available at PubMed Central:
Ioannidis et al: Native American gene flow into Polynesia predating Easter Island settlement, PubMed Preview (2020)
The genetic evidence for Native American admixture in Eastern Polynesia long before European contacts is rock solid. The paper’s so readable I could have quoted every paragraph of it, but the figures are enough.
Thank you Trond. I’ll look in more detail as time allows, but first reactions:
* The map Figure 1a has a serious omission: there’s a Humboldt counter-current that flows North to South along the Peru-Chile coast. It is so confounding to getting into the Pacific that Heyerdahl (departing from Lima) got towed out Westwards some 80km, to pick up the ‘proper’ Humboldt going North. (“To avoid coastal traffic” is what a proper seaman would call codswallop: coastal traffic is coming round the corner from Panama, going in to Lima.)
* Then I don’t see how anything departing from Chile (the mustard-coloured dots/ ‘Southern Native Americans’) would go anywhere Northwards/Westwards. Neither would anything coming from Polynesia make landfall down there: they’d get carried Northwards by the Humboldt, and make landfall around Guyaquil/Ecuador — as we’ve discussed before. That would also be an excellent place to depart from, to catch the Humboldt going Westwards. And that’s the place ‘cumar’ is/rather proposed as was the word for kumara.
* Then please explain the smudges of mustard colour in apparently _all_ the Eastern Polynesian analyses Fig 1b. I think South-of South America DNA could have got there only via European agency. I think the paper is acknowledging this somewhat:
I disagree with that “clearly”: the samples with a larger Columbia-Ecuador component (Marquesas, Palliser) never the less have noticeable smears of mustard.
That’s amazing. So the Cañari connection is looking even better.
AntC: The map Figure 1a has a serious omission: there’s a Humboldt counter-current that flows North to South along the Peru-Chile coast.
Then I don’t see how anything departing from Chile (the mustard-coloured dots/ ‘Southern Native Americans’) would go anywhere Northwards/Westwards. Neither would anything coming from Polynesia make landfall down there: they’d get carried Northwards by the Humboldt, and make landfall around Guyaquil/Ecuador — as we’ve discussed before. That would also be an excellent place to depart from, to catch the Humboldt going Westwards. And that’s the place ‘cumar’ is/rather proposed as was the word for kumara.
We are definitely talking about a point of origin north of Chile, and also north of Lima, quite likely in Colombia. Anyway, the evidence really speaks for itself. The Native American ancestry got there somehow, and it wasn’t from the west. Before reading this paper I thought Polynesian explorations was the most likely option. Now I think perhaps a random drift event from South America would be more likely. For comparison, Ecuador to the Marquesas Island is just about exactly the same distance as from the Sunda Strait to Madagascar, and we certainly know that the latter happened.
Then please explain the smudges of mustard colour in apparently _all_ the Eastern Polynesian analyses Fig 1b. I think South-of South America DNA could have got there only via European agency.
The mustard and the green are idealized ancestries arising from the analysis. The corresponding source populations are actually genetically connected — they are, as they say, on a cline. This means that the actual source population of the 1200 CE admixture was green with some mustard in it, which is what we see.
Likewise, or conversely, the Native American element of the colonial era Chilean admixture on Rapa Nui should be yellow with some green in it. This would be hard to read out of the plots at a glance. but it would yield a too recent date for the admixture of Northern South American ancestry on Rapa Nui compared to the East Central Polynesian islands .This is exactly what they found.
If they had chosen to extract one more idealiized ancestry, I suspect it might have discerned northern and southern European, or perhaps a separate “Amazonian” element between the Native American.
@Lameen: It doesn’t have to be Cañari exactly, but yeah, the Ecuador/Colombia connection looks strong.
For comparison, Ecuador to the Marquesas Island is just about exactly the same distance as from the Sunda Strait to Madagascar, and we certainly know that the latter happened.
Section 3.2 in ref 51 shows using large amounts of Linguistic morphological evidence (not a single soundalike) AMMOT “to the satisfaction of most specialists” migration through Malaysia and India.
So no, not comparable. How easy would it have been for you to check that fact for yourself? Are you approaching this 2020 paper with equal credulity?
@Lameen So the Cañari connection is looking even better.
In the sense that if you wanted a straw to clutch at, the Cañari straw would be slightly longer than others. I wouldn’t, though, try packing such straws together to make a Ra-ft and setting out on open ocean. (What worries me in all this is that Heyerdahl started a whole industry of wishful thinkers and fabulists. Quoting Austronesians to Madagascar as if it’s somehow comparable is just another index of wishfullness.)
Am I going to find when I go through the 2020 paper that their genetic tracing used Bayesian analysis? (‘ADMIXTURE Analysis’ seems to be a brand name?) And are they going to make clear the grounds for their prior possibility guesstimates? From what I’ve skimmed so far, it seems they took DNA samples from current populations, and from archaeological source sites which were assumed to be ‘pure’. Then used some genome-mangling technique to figure out the proportions of each ‘pure’ trace in current populations.
We know there was lots of intermixing between Polynesia and the Americas, facilitated by Europeans.
Now I don’t have the geneticist chops to critique their methods, but trying to bridge over/ignore modern contact to reach back 600~800 years time depth like this seems to me indistinguishable from woo-woo.
It’s not necessarily a for-profit thing. The file format most phylogenetics programs use is, unfortunately, called NEXUS despite not being an abbreviation for anything – just a stupid word in stupid all-caps. In any case, ADMIXTURE is at least ten years old; it was already used in the classic works on the genetic history of Europe.
That’s where the “archaeological source sites which were assumed to be ‘pure’” you just mentioned come in, FFS.
Trond was talking only about the possibility of traveling long distances by sea. That has nothing to do with the linguistic or other evidence that such has happened.
That said, sailing from SEA to Madagascar is not comparable to travel from South America to the Marquesas. The settlers of Madagascar could have stopped on the way and resupplied, anywhere along the coast of S. Asia or Africa. There are no such stopping points in the Pacific trip.
AntC: just as you can distinguish between fresh tomatoes and tomato sauce on your pizza, so can geneticists distinguish recent from old admixtures coming from a similar population.
AntC: Are you approaching this 2020 paper with equal credulity?
Pretty much, yes, which is why I’ve spent the evening down a Malagasy rabbit hole. I won’t spend the night writing up an extract. Some time tomorrow, unless my wife has other plans.
That’s where the “archaeological source sites which were assumed to be ‘pure’” you just mentioned come in,
Yes I got that. If somebody living in the Marquesas today has DNA with traces of ancient Americas content (as identified by the ‘pure’ sample), how do we distinguish that Americas content arriving 4 generations ago (having mixed with who-knows-what other DNA since ancient times) vs having arrived 800 years ago (and mixed in Polynesia with who-knows-what for the past 4 generations+)?
Comparing to tomatoes-ish on pizza don’t constitute an explanation.
(And since this is a language-y site, I liked that there was plentiful linguistic evidence for Austronesians getting to Madagascar along the coast. If this alleged contact between Polynesians and meso-Americas was strong enough to bring artefacts like crops — and keep them viable/plantable on a long sea voyage — why isn’t there more linguistic/cultural evidence? And why didn’t this phenomenal voyage enter Polynesian myth?)
@Y: I was actually thinking of a random drift event, believing that that was held as the most likely scenario for a small and somewhat strangely composed founding population, but the point would have been equally valid with a planned direct journey taking advantage of the equatorial current. I do, however, concede that an indirect route using familiar Malay trading ports as stepping stones may be preferable, even if that means a carefully planned colonization.
how do we distinguish that Americas content arriving 4 generations ago (having mixed with who-knows-what other DNA since ancient times) vs having arrived 800 years ago (and mixed in Polynesia with who-knows-what for the past 4 generations+)?
See fig. 2 in the 2020 paper, especially 2d. Plus, the recent NAm genetic material comes from different populations than the old stuff (like Mapuche vs. Colombian).
I being who I am, I remember wondering from a relatively early age why there seemed to be two significant reasons for interest in Rapanui. (It was clearly not for the reason stated in the original Rifts rulebook, that there was a major convergence of ley lines there.) The most famous thing about the island is the moai, but it has also been a locus for discussion of pre-Magellanic trans-Pacific travel. I eventually realized that the two topics are probably not closely related, but their common appearance is not strictly coincidental either. At the eastern-most extent of Polynesian island settlement, Easter was quite isolated, which contributed to the development of a rather unusual culture. Even the religion that developed after the toppling of the moai, the Birdman Cult, was unique enough to be a fascinating topic of anthropological interest. (The nature of the transition period, and even its duration, are obviously almost completely unknown, but I suspect it would it be fascinating.) The islands’ geographical position also makes them a natural possibility for where South American travelers could have first reached Polynesia. The location is the factor common to both topics. However, this seems to be seldom discussed. Heyerdahl, in particular, wanted to believe that the unique moai culture was derived from that of the megalithic builders of South America; and I suspect something of that attitude has contaminated discussions of the topic ever since.
A random drift across the Pacific doesn’t lend itself to the idea they’d started with a large enough stock of fruit or seeds aboard which they hadn’t figured out how to consume in their starvation. It seems like they’d have to have been attempting to sail west, by whatever circuitous route currents and winds make semi-possible, to move fast enough not to consume their supplies. But the why on that is tough to figure.
Was there significant agricultural trade along the Pacific coast of South America at that date?
Was there significant agricultural trade along the Pacific coast of South America at that date?
Good question. I have no idea, but it seems that by that date maize cultivation had long since spread from Mexico to Peru, and cassava cultivation from Amazonia to Mexico and even Puerto Rico. The latter at least suggests the plausibility of coast-hugging journeys carrying food plants, even if it’s the wrong side of the continent.
Was there significant agricultural trade along the Pacific coast of South America at that date?
Yes trade, not specifically agricultural: you can grow stuff where you are. We covered that in the earlier discussion. (It might be above somewhere, or on the LLog thread.) The following is from memory.
We have to be careful where: because of that counter-Humboldt current, and the relative barrenness of the coast, there was little coastal trade south of Guayaquil/Ecuador. The Inca preferred to take goods inland from Guayaquil, then on pack routes South along the Andes. The (Gulf of) Guayaquil coastal traffic northwards was controlled by a clan neighbours of the Cañari (speaking a lost but thought to be unrelated language) — who monopolised the balsa log extraction from inland. Whereas since the Cañari lands stretched from the coast up to the mountains, they got the pack traffic.
The coastal water traffic was ‘hopping’ from beach to beach, relying on diurnal wind patterns (since they needed to travel both North and South). No ocean-going. On dugouts/rafts looking something like Kon-Tiki. No evidence of any seacraft remotely comparable with the Polynesians. Since the Humboldt current branches out Westwards from Guayaquil, the coastline through to Central America is relatively current-free/easy to navigate.
Furthermore I don’t think that coastal traffic would include large stocks of vegetables (too perishable) nor food more than to sustain the crew for a few days; not rootstock suitable for transplanting. It was mostly durables. (see “metallurgy” at that link.)
So if we continue straw-clutching, the only seafaring culture capable of a journey to Polynesia would be the Polynesians. How would they have gotten to Guayaquil? Not deliberately: they ceased [**] Eastwards exploration once they got to Rapanui — and they reached Rapanui much later than kumara is posited to have arrived in Central East Polynesia.
[**] which is to say, there’s no myths to that effect. They quite possibly tried but couldn’t see signs of any island next in the chain to hop to.
So an exploration expedition setting out from French Polynesia, blown Eastwards by a humungous weather system lasting weeks? Even if the boat(s) survived, how did the crew not die of thirst? And I have so many more questions:
Why/how would they have brought native S.Am. human genestock back? Why would they bring only starchy vegetables, given the high nutrition content foods around G of G. (They’d already brought pigs and chickens from Asia, so they knew the importance of varied protein despite plentiful seafood.) Why bring only one word? And that for a foodstuff relatively unimportant in East Central Polynesia? (The value of Kumara is for colder climes where it thrives but most tropical starchies don’t.) … … ? Why didn’t they get killed by the natives as soon as they arrived at Guayaquil?
@Brett: Yes, I was surprised to see the megalithic argument reiterated in this paper. I hardly think it’s an argument at all. There’s nothing that connects the moai to South America.
@Ryan, Lameen: I haven’t found a comprehensive history of seafaring in South America, but the early transplants of maize, beans, cassava, cocoa etc. between the Andes and Meso-America is evidence that it goes far back, and the complex genetic histories of the species is evidence that continued exchange of cultivars was an important element of it.
I agree that a freak drift event is a slight chance, but so is a planned expedition. We seem to be left with only impossible explanations, and still one of them will have to be right, One idea that struck me is that it was an expedition planned as an exploratory settlement of the Galapagos, equipped with unusual amounts of water after initial exploration had revealed the notorious scarcity of surface water near the coasts, but alas, there’s no accepted evidence of Pre-Colombian visits.
@AntC: These questions are very relevant, and for a long time — since my adolescent fascination with Thor Heyerdahl met critical thought* — they made me dismiss (successful) travel between Polynesia and South America as, well, not impossible but highly unlikely. But old beliefs must be reevaluated with new evidence. As I see it now, with strong evidence of genetic admixture from the northern South American coast in Eastern Polynesia dating back to about 1200 CE, the questions are about the how and why. I’m far less sure about that.
* and later the realisation that the ageing Heyerdahl was a real crackpot.
^ One idea that struck me as having at least some explanatory power is ..
The idea itself is obviously not original with me.
Oh, that. Sorry. That can be dated pretty precisely in numbers of generations because the chromosomes exchange material in every meiosis, so the chunks from each of the two people involved in the “admixture event” (as the kids are calling it now) become steadily smaller.
Also, what Y said: not the same SAm populations.
I like that.
what’s been kicking around in my head this time round is the voyage of the HMS Bounty’s open boat after the mutiny. a very different part of the ocean, obviously, but a long unintended trip that should probably not have been survivable.
if a coastal vessel (or convoy) got blown off-course far enough to not be able to make it back to the mainland, taking inventory for rationing (as, if i remember nordhoff and hall’s Men Against the Sea right, it was one of bligh’s first acts after being set adrift) would’ve turned up any potential rootstock or seeds aboard (as cargo, as food supply, or otherwise). saving it, in case of landing in a place with no plants you know to be edible (and in absence of a vaguely convenient colonial outpost to head for), would’ve been a high priority. a just-so story, i know, but the fact that there doesn’t seem to have been a large number of different plants brought west seems like a solid indication of an accidental departure, and of a one-way westward trip.
Good point. Bligh’s journey to Timor was about the same distance as from Ecuador to the Marquesas Islands, but obviously very different technologically. They also made landfall on a few uninhabited islands off Australia, but I don’t know if they managed to resupply with water and foodstuff.
I agree about the scarcity of transplants as an argument for accidental drift. OTOH, we don’t know if they were that scarce at the outset. We only know those plants that survived the journey, got successfully replanted, and thrived until the modern era (or at least long enough to be recovered by archaeology).
AntC: they reached Rapanui much later than kumara is posited to have arrived in Central East Polynesia
As Berenguer et al. say, the Rapanui starch granules are the earliest known evidence of kumara in the Pacific.
Why they brought kumara: it’s tasty, sweeter than yam, and indeed became a hit everywhere.
The scenario I imagine is this.
— At the earliest settlement and expolration of East Polynesia, the Tuamotus and the Marquesas were discovered, along with the South Equatorial Current (if they hadn’t know it earlier).
— Following the consistent ESE trend of Pacific island chains (ultimately due to the motion of the Pacific Plate), explorers head in that direction from Mangareva, and reach the relatively remote Pitcairn and Henderson.
— Encouraged, they continue exploring in that direction (utilizing anomalous westerlies), and reach Rapanui (which lays in that direction by pure coincidence, having been formed by a separate hotspot).
— Rapanui is rich in water and food (lots of unfortunate endemic birds, some flightless), and suitable for restocking. Either on that exploring expedition or on a subsequent one, they start off again from Rapanui in the same direction, accustomed to the idea that new lands will be far and few between.
— They reach the coast of South America, 3600 km away (cf. 2000 km from Pitcairn to Rapanui).
— At this point there is no more going east. They resupply and head north, aided by the Humboldt Current, aiming to catch the trade winds and the South Equatorial Current back to the Marquesas.
— Before relaunching on the return voyage from the Gulf of Guayaquil, they resupply. The sweet potatoes could be a gift from the locals, who saw that their visitors liked them.
Trying to take inventory of the most important findings from yesterdays dive down the Malagasy rabbithole, here’s in chronological order of publication:
0.
Adelaar, Alexander: The Indonesian migrations to Madagascar: making sense of the multidisciplinary evidence (pdf, undated, but the most recent reference is to an article from 2004)
[This can be dropped, but it can also serve as a summary of the state of the field before the following papers:]
1.
Blench, Roger: New palaeozoogeographical evidence for the settlement of Madagascar, Azania XLII (2007) (pdf)
2.
Blench, Roger: The Austronesians in Madagascar and Their Interaction with the Bantu of the East African Coast: surveying the Linguistic Evidence for Domestic and Translocated Animals, Studies in Philippine Languages and Cultures 18 (2008) (pdf)
3.
Philippe Beaujard; The first migrants to Madagascar and their introduction of plants: Linguistic and ethnological evidence, Azania Archaeological Research in Africa 46(2) (2011)
4.
Serva et al: The Settlement of Madagascar: What Dialects and Languages Can Tell Us, PLOS ONE (2012)
5.
Kusuma et al: Mitochondrial DNA and the Y chromosome suggest the settlement of Madagascar by Indonesian sea nomad populations, BMC Genomics 16 (2015)
6.
Kusuma et al: Contrasting Linguistic and Genetic Origins of the Asian Source Populations of Malagasy, Scientific Reports 6 (2016)
7.
Crowther et al: Ancient crops provide first archaeological signature of the westward Austronesian expansion, PNAS 113(24) (2016)
8.
Brucato et al: Malagasy Genetic Ancestry Comes from an Historical Malay Trading Post in Southeast Borneo, Molecular Biology and Evolution 33 (2016)
9.
Hansford et al: Early Holocene human presence in Madagascar evidenced by exploitation of avian megafauna, SCIENCE ADVANCES, 4 (2018)
[Not to the point at all, but if you are in a rabbithole, you are in a rabbithole.]
10.
Atholl Anderson: The Peopling of Madagascar, Oxford Asian History
[Unfortunately not open access, so I’ve only read the summary.]
It seems that the first of three comments went into moderation. It will eventually appear.
[Edit: Duh. I miscounted the links. There’s a number 0.]
[Edit 2: I also got so busy posting that I forgot to add my own summary. I’ll do it short, while the edit window is open…
The genetic and linguistic evidence seem to be honing in on a mixed population of marine nomads. The how and why and when of the first settlement is still open, but the consensus seems to be that a coastal route is the most likely.]
@Y: Before relaunching on the return voyage from the Gulf of Guayaquil, they resupply. The sweet potatoes could be a gift from the locals, who saw that their visitors liked them
Or the plants could have been especially important to the adventurous locals who went with them.
The comment appeared. That was quick! (I see that I missed a closing blockquote after the first Blench quote.)
An ignorant question to DM or someone: Does the whole genome analysis of Ioannidis et al. allow for a separate analysis of Y chromosome genes, to determine the sex of the carriers of the SAm genes?
(I see that I missed a closing blockquote after the first Blench quote.)
Fixed. (My secretary will send you the bill.)
I’d check up on that secretary. There may be a considerable backlog of unsent invoices
@Y: It’s actually quite unusual not to say anything about sex I’ll venture the guess that there’s no South American uniparental markers (Y-DNA and mt-DNA) to see, meaning that that ancestry didn’t survive in unbroken male or female lines*. But they should have said so. I don’t now enough about the craft to suggest other, more technical reasons.
* Not as much of a coincidence as it may sound. That’s what genetic drift in small populations does. Although generally more often with the male line, since there are bigger differences in male than female reproductive success.
>the “admixture event” (as the kids are calling it now)
Even some failed admixture events can be memorable!
>— Before relaunching on the return voyage from the Gulf of Guayaquil, they resupply. The sweet potatoes could be a gift from the locals, who saw that their visitors liked them.
Perhaps, but for your suppositions to be correct, at least as an explanation for the new paper, they also had to resupply themselves with genetic material.
Another gift from the locals, who saw that their visitors, liked, well, admixture events.
Ryan: Even some failed admixture events can be memorable
An unadmixed pleasure.
I probably owe you some more digestion of the Malagasy papers. Going back to the most recent genetic papers:
[Also, doing this I realize that I misidentified a group in one a paper with a different group in another and ended up with the wrong conclusion in my short summary. Not very wrong, but wrong enough to warrant a correction.]
5.
Kusuma et al: Mitochondrial DNA and the Y chromosome suggest the settlement of Madagascar by Indonesian sea nomad populations, BMC Genomics 16 (2015)
This paper shows that uniparental markers push the Malagasy homeland to the east of the Sunda Sea and points out the Bajo sea nomads as a group uniting a language orginating in Southern Borneo with a more eastern genetic composition.
6.
Kusuma et al: Contrasting Linguistic and Genetic Origins of the Asian Source Populations of Malagasy, Scientific Reports 6 (2016)
This paper identifies a deep Eastern(?) Borneo genetic component that runs almost unadmixed in some Ma’anyan but has made no significant contribution to Malagasy, in shameless spite of the linguistic evidence.
What I think happened: The Malagasy source population in Southeast Borneo has since shifted language, but not before their language had spread to their inland neighbours.
8.
Brucato et al: Malagasy Genetic Ancestry Comes from an Historical Malay Trading Post in Southeast Borneo, Molecular Biology and Evolution 33 (2016)
Here I misidentified the Banjar with the Bajo.
This paper (with Kusuma as second author) identifies the source population more clearly as Banjar and says the Banjar can best be modeled as a 3:1 mix between Malays and Ma’anyan, the admixture process going on until the Europeans upset the established systems. This contradicts the conclusion of the 2015 paper without explicitly discussing it.
I don’t quite understand this, though. For one, Fig. 2 in Kusuma et al 2016 shows a clear cyan South Asian element in Malay that is all but absent in both Banjar and Malagasy (and I think it would have arrived in Indonesia before the supposed date of the settlement of Madagascar), and also too little of the grey “Western Borneo” ancestry. From that figure I’d say that Java looks like a more likely non-Ma’anyan source. Maybe it’s something I don’t get about the use of “Malay”.
And I don’t know what to think about the uniparental markers from 2015.
To the wise, links suffise.
@rozele the voyage of the HMS Bounty’s open boat after the mutiny. a very different part of the ocean, obviously, but a long unintended trip that should probably not have been survivable.
Unintended but not unplanned. Bligh had a chart, a compass, a sextant, knowledge of currents and Trade winds; he’d sailed many times through those waters on various expeditions.
And do we know how many mutinies there were in which similarly with some charity the gold braid were set adrift to look out for themselves, but who perished (probably without trace)? Maybe Bligh merely was lucky against long odds? (On the million monkeys principle.)
@Trond Bligh’s journey to Timor was about the same distance as from Ecuador to the Marquesas Islands, but obviously very different technologically. They also made landfall on a few uninhabited islands off Australia, but I don’t know if they managed to resupply with water and foodstuff.
Another comparable feat (1,320 km) was Shackleton’s 1914 open boat journey from Elephant Island to South Georgia, following the loss of Endurance:
Note South Georgia is by no means the nearest land (which would be Tierra del Fuego). But trying to head North-West would be fighting both winds and current. OTOH South Georgia is a tiny target; they could easily have overshot.
It’s crucial in these examples to know in advance exactly where the land is and to be able to navigate accurately to it. Polynesian navigators know the signs of land nearby but over the horizon: cloud formations, bird flights, wave patterns providing reasonably calm seas. But from East Polynesia to S.America there’s none of that. No birds because no land; no clouds.
And note there was a sharp difference between exploration voyages (and craft) vs settlement voyages to known/established hospitable targets. The need to be able to come back meant that the exploration voyages were at times of year when a counter-trade winds weather system would come through for a few days (@Y anomalous Westerlies). If no land found, the trade wind pattern would return and they’d get home again. Exploration craft were light, steerable, had reasonable cross-wind performance, and could be paddled if all else failed. Settlement craft were essentially barges: all they could do was wallow down-wind/down-current.
As to @Y’s hypothesising (fabulising), I see not a skerrick of evidence anybody set out Eastwards from Rapanui:
@Y As Berenguer et al. say, the Rapanui starch granules are the earliest known evidence of kumara in the Pacific.
Earliest known physical evidence if you ignore Polynesians’ own mythologising: all the stories are very clear that Māori brought kumara from the Cook Islands, and that it had been brought from East Polynesia before that. Of course myth can be invented; but nothing so fantastical as what you’re proposing. Is there fossilized kumara remains in cooking pits in E.Polynesia? Are there preserved cooking pits even? Absence of physical evidence is not evidence of absence.
Even if Polynesians did reach S.Am. and came away with Kumara, their return journey would not take them anywhere near Rapanui — exactly as @Y fabulises. So the Rapanui starch granules have what bearing on this story?
For me, the strongest evidence is the Polynesian oral histories/myths. All of the E.Pol. cultures have foundation myths. There’s strong alignment between them/there were frequent inter-chain journeys even after settlement up to around C14th (when climate change seems to have rendered the weather patterns less reliable). And that frequent contact to some extent explains why their languages are so closely aligned.
If Polynesians reached a whole continent/conspicuously not an island, and conspicuously already inhabited by people conspicuously not Polynesian, they’d have memorialised it in myth. If that’s where they found Kumara (and other foodstuffs), the story would travel with the thing. Rapanui kumara arrival myth — note the total absence of continents.
As to the language ‘evidence’: ‘kumara’ fits very comfortably into Polynesian sound patterns/there’s no need to posit it’s a loan. Each syllable is a word or particle in its own right; ‘mara’ is amot a modifier, reconstructs to Oceanic “fermented, prepared for eating by steeping in freshwater” — originally of seafood, but which is what you do to prepare kumara. (Not, of course that I’m hazarding an etymology.)
It seems that the first of three comments went into moderation. It will eventually appear.
To the wise, links suffise.
I suspect it’s the links causing the spam-checker to choke.
Could I beg the forbearance of @Hat’s overworked and underbilled secretary, to rescue my latest (tales of adventure on the high seas).
Rescued!
To the wise, links suffise.
Well then, I’m not wise, because I’m much more likely to read a helpful snippet/summary than to follow a link.
I agree this is a good argument the genetic evidence has been interpreted correctly and the admixture event occurred in eastern Polynesia, not in South America, after somebody somehow made it from South America into Polynesia rather than the other way around. Trying to settle the Galápagos and missing – due to navigation skills below the Polynesian level – would even make sense of that.
On surviving on an uppowered seacraft, without food, charts (or oars!), and only a vague sense that islands were out there somewhere, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jos%C3%A9_Salvador_Alvarenga and sources cited. from Chiapas, Mexico to Marshall Islands, and lived to tell the tale. Diet of fish, turtles and birds, He captured birds that landed on his boat, broke their wings so they couldn’t leave, fed them when fish were available and ate them them when fish weren’t.
If he’d had sweet potatoes on board, he might have hoarded those, as he did with the birds, not knowing when he might be closest to starving, and he could have reached the Marshall Islands with some remaining.
Could a Pre-Columbian trading vessel randomly carrying seeds or cultivars have met the same fate? Unlikely, but.
AntC: first of all, enough with the snideness (“fabulising” etc.) I’m polite. You be too. It’s an interesting discussion, and I learned a lot from your comments, but I quit once your aggressiveness got to be too much and made it less fun. Don’t start it again.
To clarify, in my scenario sweet potatoes and S. Am. genes (in whatever bodies) came to Central East Polynesia first (most likely to the Marquesas), where the winds and the currents would make the voyage the quickest. From there they would spread to the rest of East Polynesia — the Cooks, and also back to Easter Island, on a settlement voyage, after which the ahu of ’Anakena would be built, and at which the starchy knife would be dropped. I can’t think of a more compact plausible story consistent with the physical evidence. This latest ’Anakena evidence is not essential — we know kumara had existed in pre-European Rapanui — but it’s nice to confirm its early date, which fits with the tradition of it having been brought with the earliest settlers.
The absence of evidence for American contact in the traditional stories is not evidence of its absence. Some things are remembered more, some less, depending on what was considered important, and on what survived through the generations and through the epidemics. New Zealand Māori traditions recall the Kermadecs. Surviving Rapanui traditions don’t mention Pitcairn. Both don’t mention their older history beyond Hawaiki (the Societies) and Hiva (the Marquesas), respectively, except in mythical terms. If a canoe had arrived in the Marquesas from a trip to the Americas, that is where such a story would be likely to be remembered. As far as I know, there are few records of the oral history of Marquesan settlement in general.
AntC: first of all, enough with the snideness
Seconded. AntC, your points would be more effective if you’d quit treating everyone else as a bunch of morons.
arthur: Could a Pre-Columbian trading vessel randomly carrying seeds or cultivars have met the same fate? Unlikely, but.
Maybe not unlikely at all. Two things I learn from that story, and the others listed in the article, is (1) that being set adrift by accident and being caught in the Equatorial Current actually does happen time and again along the Pacific coast, and (2) that catching food while drifting with the Equatorial Current is actually not that difficult and might help you survive for a long time. You still need a lot of luck, but we don’t know how many vessels that were lost through the ages for the one that that got to the Marquesas.
I think I got the Galápagos idea from Heyerdahl, actually. He and his collaborating archaeologist, the later professor Arne Skjølsvold, traveled there and dug out a couple of sites. Heyerdahl of course hoped to find evidence of a culture of ocean travels and a settlement that could have served as a springboard for further explorations and colonization from the east, but the evidence is inconclusive at best. What we now see emerging is a much more limited American influence, but his proof of concept with Kon-Tiki may still turn out to be very close to what happened.
Speaking of Heyerdahl, I think the very beginning of his obsession with prehistoric transoceanic travel was a legend of ancestors from the east that he heard when living a year in Fatu Hiva in the Marquesas as a young man. Whatever you say about Heyerdahl*, he took indigenous myths seriously**, and he was very thorough and serious with archaeological work.
* E.g. that he had absolutely no clue of linguistics and would make crackpot hypotheses based on word similarity.
** Well, he listened carefully and used what fit him.
Larranaga et al., Holocene land and sea-trade routes explain complex patterns of pre-Columbian crop dispersion. New Phytologist 229(3), 1768–1781, here:
Hat: I’m much more likely to read a helpful snippet/summary than to follow a link.
Me too. Also, it’s much easier to come back to a discussion if you don’t have to click all the links to get the idea.
in my scenario sweet potatoes and S. Am. genes (in whatever bodies) came to Central East Polynesia first (most likely to the Marquesas), where the winds and the currents would make the voyage the quickest.
Yes I think all accounts regard Marquesas as most likely first landfall (or perhaps I should say least unlikely). Note those same winds and currents would make a raft of outwash material from around Guayaquil also arrive in the Marquesas, without human intervention. (There’s a research paper somewhere has oceanic drift modelling to that effect. The plant material might be just-about still viable — seeds encased in husks — if a human found them on the beach and took kindly.)
Then if kumara got first to Central East Polynesia, what bearing does finding the flakes in Rapanui have? It’s evidence for no more than that kumara spread with humans to Southern/South Eastern Polynesia — which is also what the mythology tells us. There’s no merit in supposing and no evidence that Polynesians got to Rapanui first without kumara [**] and from there went off on this merry-go-round. If you want to posit Polynesians went on exploring Eastwards without finding more islands (I agree that’s likely), it makes as much sense that that would be Eastwards from Marquesas. IOW further Eastwards from wherever they’ve reached already by going Eastwards. (I think it’s anachronous knowledge to be talking about following island chains/edges of tectonic plates: the exploration would be onwards from the incoming route; finding land would be entirely serendipitous. And exploring contra the prevailing winds that would get them home if they found nothing. This explains why they never discovered Australia, despite Brisbane (say) being much closer to Norfolk Island than the distances we’re positing here.)
[**] There is (weak) evidence Māori got to New Zealand/outlying islands before Polynesians had discovered Kumara — or at least that the exploratory voyages that left fire sites and spoil pits didn’t carry kumara, as opposed to the settlement voyages. (And apologies I can’t provide a cite for that quickly.)
The part of your scenario which seems particularly implausible:
They resupply and head north, aided by the Humboldt Current, aiming to catch the trade winds and the South Equatorial Current back to the Marquesas.
Implausible because it doesn’t fit with known Polynesian exploration techniques. You talk as if (like Bligh or Shackleton) they were carrying a chart showing currents. But they don’t know there’s a South Equatorial Current flowing reliably from almost meso-America let alone a Humboldt Current branching North-West from Guayaquil — unless that route is what they’ve come by.
Am I “treating everyone as a bunch of morons” by pointing that out? I think what I’m doing is looking for antidotes to my own scepticism by producing evidence[***], not supposition. I appreciate lots of people might know of Bligh’s or Shackleton’s amazing escapes and of course they can find them in wikip as easily as me. I quote enough of the accounts to provide supporting evidence, and the links not because I expect people to follow them but in case anybody has doubts — they would certainly count as tall tales.
I note the lack of supporting material cited in @Y’s sketch. And the trailing of the kumara flakes as some sort of sufficient substantiation. I appreciate sometimes a brave imagining beyond the evidence could be a stimulus to further research. I don’t see such merit here when we have plenty more evidence.
there are few records of the oral history of Marquesan settlement in general.
Yes that’s sad. At best we can only extrapolate from the history that is preserved by other Polynesian seafarers.
Trying to settle the Galápagos and missing – due to navigation skills below the Polynesian level – would even make sense of that.
How would anyone know there is a Galápagos (something over 1,000 km distant, with no intermediate stepping stones), let alone what direction it is? No amount of navigational skills would justify setting out with materials for settlement (plant cuttings/seeds) if you don’t know there’s somewhere hospitable to make landfall.
[***] It remains the case I just see no evidence justifying there was human contact between Polynesia and S.America before the Columbus era.
the Galápagos idea from Heyerdahl, actually. He and his collaborating archaeologist, the later professor Arne Skjølsvold, traveled there and dug out a couple of sites.
And apparently applied no more archaeological disciplines than wishful thinking.
Whatever you say about about Heyerdahl*, he took indigenous myths seriously**, and he was very thorough and serious with archaeological work.
I have some small personal knowledge. On Kon-Tiki he took a radio operator Raaby. Raaby got his radio skills from working for the Norwegian resistance; after the war there was an over-supply of operators, jobs were short. So it wasn’t as if he was enthusiastic for all this exploration stuff. A radio-operator buddy of his married my aunt. Raaby’s private opinion of Heyerdahl was … well shall I say, at variance with that claim.
@Y [citing] evidence of pre-Columbian crop movement between Mesoamerica and the Andes across the Pacific Ocean
Thanks @Y. Yes previous discussions have recognised the coastal sea-trade through to meso-America and potentially northwards. This paper drawing a straight line between two coastal points — which I wouldn’t conceivably describe as “across the Pacific Ocean” doesn’t show any boats travelled such a straight line.
catching food while drifting with the Equatorial Current is actually not that difficult and might help you survive for a long time.
Yes to the catching food. It’s not the food that’s problematic but — paradoxically — the water: the fresh stuff. (“all around but not a drop to drink”) And the more seafood you eat, the more fresh water you need to purge your system of salt. For food you wouldn’t carry starchy vegetables, or they’d be pre-cooked. (That is, on the exploration voyages. The settlement voyages by comparison even carried ovens on board.)
Water is heavy and slops about unless well-contained, tending to make a boat unstable. Anything the Polynesians could contain it in would be fragile — well, not the coconuts. You can collect rainwater, dew en route. (I suspect that page is mixing up exploration voyages with settlement.)
So that’s ~140 kilos of water, or the weight of two extra humans, for six crew for at most one month. Well less than a litre per day per person. Contrast recommended daily intake is ~3 litres per day for men. (The weather on that voyage was mostly dreadful; probably there was plenty of rain to collect.)
Contrast Polynesian voyagers under a tropical sun; and probably needing to paddle for significant periods. As opposed to drifting along with the wind/current as did Alvarenga in that amazing story. (Never the less he was suffering from dehydration and anaemia.)
surprised to see the megalithic argument reiterated in this paper.
I’m now going through the Ioannidis et al paper in more detail. I think some of these peripheral points we might have discussed first time round.
I’m failing to see “linguistic … observations” plural. “stronger”? Historical what? — other than the megaliths.
I’m afraid quoting Heyerdahl as an authority for me lends negative credibility. Do we have independent accounts of this from-the-east mythology? I couldn’t find anything on a quick search.
The approach for the genetic identification makes no sense to me. So by all means be as snide and patronizing as you deem fit in explaining it …
How do you verify a Native American from Peru is unadmixed? There’s no such thing as an unadmixed Austronesian in Taiwan, so I’m relieved they didn’t make that claim. Never the less there’d be so much Sinitic admixture as to make the exercise pointless(?)
Amongst Taiwan Austronesians today there’s about a dozen tribes/clans. Their languages are at least as diverse and remote from the Austronesian diaspora languages as within that diaspora. It’s suspected there were more Taiwanese clans historically. It’s also suspected the ones who spread out West, South and ultimately East might have been further clans not genetically closely related to those that remain today.
Then I’m not seeing “indigenous Austronesians from Taiwan” is any sort of applicable genetic reference — that is, to examine widely where those genes might have come from. Why not sample Melanesians or Central Polynesians? Or indeed indigenous Austronesian Filipinos or Malagasy Oceanic indigenes?
IOW can we exclude that the genetic traces/similarities found between S.Am. samples and today’s Polynesian samples are merely a coincidence with the actual Austronesian Polynesian ancestry?
But chiefly: is it not possible to obtain historical genetic material from Polynesia itself?, dating later than the paper’s posited contact 1150~1230 CE but before European interference.
Do we have independent accounts of this from-the-east mythology? wrt Fatu Hiva
It seems the Marquesas were settled in two waves. This p.23
wikip suggests
So the second/longer-lasting wave concocted a myth about the previous inhabitants? (Rings bells wrt the Māori myths about the Moriori being a distinct/earlier race.)
Oh and I bumped into this tidbit (same page) about amazing voyages
There’s a movie, directed by Ron Howard. From the trailer, I don’t think it’ll offer any historical insights.
@AntC: Credit where it’s due, and I realized I owe the Galápagos idea to Heyerdahl. I’m not trying to deny that he was an egomaniac and a crackpot.
Arne Skjølsvold is another matter. One can ask how Skjølsvold squared his professional integrity with Heyerdahl’s fantasizing, but he evidently did, and I haven’t read that there’s anything wrong with his archaeology in the Galápagos. The finds of indigenous artifacts were real enough, and the reports are there, describing exactly what was found. One may criticize that it was interpreted as evidence of Pre-Columbian activity rather than souvenirs or trophies brought and discarded by Spanish soldiers and sailors, but I’m not sure that option was as obvious as it now seems. Anyway, the evidence laid out in his reports turns out to accord well with an interpretation as early European activity.
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Water is obviously the limiting factor, but not having to bring (or use) large amounts of foodstuff also makes the odds a little better if the fleet was stacked with water* for some other reason. Hence the idea of an exploratory or preparatory mission to the Galápagos, but I’m wide open to other hypotheses that would improve the odds. We are (I am, anyway) discussing on the premise that a successful (defined as leaving progeny as shown by Ioannidis et al) crossing from South America to Eastern Polynesia actually did happen against all odds.
* “stacked with water”. Having traveled long distances up and down the unwelcoming Pacific Coast for thousands of years already, they surely must have developed methods for this. So how? Did they tow waterproof sacks after the fleet?
Regarding Ioannidis’ later paper (“Paths and timings of the peopling of Polynesia inferred from genomic networks”), an important correction by Huang et al., “Genetic estimates of the initial peopling of Polynesian islands actually reflect later inter-island contacts”:
[…]
It’s funny, because Ioannidis’ dates matched remarkably well the best archaeological dates from the various island groups. No study is ever the last word on anything.
I am no geneticist, and can’t tell whether this applies in any way to the 2020 SAm contact paper.
if kumara got first to Central East Polynesia, what bearing does finding the flakes in Rapanui have?
None, as far as how it got to Polynesia. It’s an interesting aside, that’s all.
There’s no merit in supposing and no evidence that Polynesians got to Rapanui first without kumara and from there went off on this merry-go-round. If you want to posit Polynesians went on exploring Eastwards without finding more islands (I agree that’s likely), it makes as much sense that that would be Eastwards from Marquesas.
No direct evidence, indeed, or we wouldn’t be pitching our speculative scenarios against each other.
The merit of exploring toward Rapanui is that this strategy would have recommended itself by having found Pitcairn, as I said.
And exploring contra the prevailing winds that would get them home if they found nothing.
That’s just trading (heh) one difficult journey for another. Planning on the merry-go-round, as you call it, allows for favorable winds in both directions: east with the anomalous westerlies, then N+W or NW with the trades.
There is (weak) evidence Māori got to New Zealand/outlying islands before Polynesians had discovered Kumara
You might be thinking of Anderson and Petchey’s paper (here). They review the data and conclude that they are equally consistent with early (±settlement time) introduction of kumara but slow spread down to the South Island, or a later introduction and a fast spread.
they don’t know there’s a South Equatorial Current flowing reliably from almost meso-America
That’s at least arguable. It’s a strong current going clear across the western half of the Pacific, and it’s thinkable that they’d expect it not to disappear in the east
let alone a Humboldt Current branching North-West from Guayaquil — unless that route is what they’ve come by.
What I meant was that as they got further east, they would encounter the Peru/Humboldt current and winds coming from the south.
Looking at a current and wind map and plugging in different dates, it’s remarakble how much variability there is, far beyond “anomalous westerlies”. Right now, heading SE from the Marquesas and going across northerly winds will get you to Rapanui. Going south from Rapanui, you’ll catch nice strong wind at your back all the way to the Tuamotus. A year ago at this time both trips would be a lot harder. I don’t think you can say for sure what was possible and what was not at an unknown time about a thousand year ago. The South Equatorial Current and the trade winds are relatively reliable and constant though.
I note the lack of supporting material cited in @Y’s sketch.
None of us have any direct evidence for how kumara got to Polynesia. There is no supporting material either for Ecuadorean ships going exploring (as some have proposed, and which we both find unlikely for the same reasons), nor for kumara seeds/rhizomes floating to a Polynesian beach (as you advocate). These and mine are all scenarios made up to fit the available scanty data.
@Y: I’m no geneticist either, but I’ll try.
Length of shared IBDs is a measure of time of independent development. If the assumption is a clean (momentary) split, it’s true that later contacts will skew the dates. Longer segments will be added to the genomes, and the dates will be too recent. Similarly an admixture event can be dated by the length of segments derived from the source of admixture. That’s how Post-Columbian contacts between Rapa Nui and Chile explain a more recent estimated admixture date for Rapa Nui than for the rest of East Polynesia. I guess one can say that the estimate gives an average date of events, and if there’s more than one event, it’s really the assumption of a single event that fails, not the method. It should follow that for presumed single events the estimated age is a terminus ante quem.
As for the admixture itself, this should mean nothing, since the evidence for that is the content of the segments, not their length.
Oh, and it’s Easter Sunday on Easter Island right now. I don’t know if it’s a day of celebration.
Y: None, as far as how it got to Polynesia. It’s an interesting aside, that’s all.
Yeah, well. The dates are certainly important, but not for how it came to Polynesia. However, the fact that there’s evidence of several transplanted species makes unaided drift much less likely. We could imagine Polynesians finding an empty raft stocked with edible plants on the reef, and bringing them home and successfully replanting them, but the human genetic evidence leaves that moot. Unless we want to suggest more than one event, but I fail to imagine how that could be less unlikely than one.
@Trond “stacked with water”. [the S.Am.] Having traveled long distances up and down the unwelcoming Pacific Coast for thousands of years already, they surely must have developed methods for this. So how?
Presumably the sealed bamboo was traditional. Heyerdahl also carried water in cans; total of 1,000 litres — equiv weight of ~8 people.
Galápagos: my read of wikip’s description is that there’s no evidence of pre-Colombian human presence. Heyerdahl and Skjølsvold just did bad archaeology. Of course we can’t reject that humans stopped by and left again pretty quick. It’s entirely unsuitable for human habitation (no fresh water).
the idea of an exploratory or preparatory mission to the Galápagos
But how would you know it’s there? (If you get close enough, there’s presumably bird traffic. But how would you know to get close enough?) The Polynesians by the time they expanded into Eastern Polynesia were comfortable with long explorations over the horizon, and reasonable confidence they could get back if they found nothing. The S.Am. coastal trade (on vessels like Kon-Tiki) never went out of sight of the coast, and for good reason: there’s nothing to go to; and the rafts had no ability to sail against the wind. (Heyerdahl experimented, and could sail at maybe 45° across/down wind.)
And if you’ve already visited the Galápagos by some inscrutable means, why would you go back thinking to settle? How would you get any idea that a chain of islands is a thing? Indeed Galápagos is not the start of a chain.
So … (thinking outside the box) a small number of natives staged a rebellion/invasion and lost. Their punishment was to be sent away to the wild blue yonder. But and still but … why take vegetables/cuttings as opposed to ready-to-eat?
What is the percentage of plants, tubers or even fruits that are edible for humans? I can see a rafted bit of timber and muck floating across, maybe even with a sweet potato plant growing on it. But did the islanders have a designated strange plant taster to test and see if it killed him? And did this raft have multiple sweet potato plants? If not, digging up the root to taste it leaves you without a live specimen.
That’s where the idea of a random, not human-transported journey fails for me.
Y: That’s at least arguable. It’s a strong current going clear across the western half of the Pacific, and it’s thinkable that they’d expect it not to disappear in the east
Also, they weren’t stupid. They knew that the water in the currents came from somewhere. In a worldview of endless ocean with a steady westward current right underneath the path of the sun, the natural assumption would be that the current and the sun followed the same path. The water disappeared with the sun in the west and reappeared in the east. If they unexpectedly met a north-south coastline to their east, their worldview would be shaken, but with a strong northward current along the coast, they could at least assume that the northward current would feed the westward current they knew.
@AntC: I don’t much like any of the scenarios, mine or others, and still Ecuadorian/Colombian genes reproduced in Eastern Polynesia from around 1200 CE.
@Ryan: Yeah, me too. I think we need people familiar with the plants to bring them ashore, plant them, grow them, and cook them.
Some plants certainly did get west by themselves from SAm, most notably the extinct Easter Island palm.
If sweet potatoes could get to the Marquesas by themselves, so should have other plants (useful to people or not) over the millennia. Were any plants of American origin established on the Marquesas before settlement?
As I quoted here, sealed bamboo tubes for carrying water were mentioned in Call it Courage and presumably represented real Polynesian practice.
Thank you @Y for that ‘important correction’ paper. Re substantial gene flow between islands after their initial settlements.
Yes there’s plenty of evidence of continuing inter-island contact (at least in the central groups) in both directions up until C14th. (So the Māori mythology of a single settlement canoe fleet, peopled by demi-gods is wishful. There’s archaeological evidence of at least exploratory contact before the first wave of settlement.)
OTOH I thought Rapanui was so far away, there was only a single phase of settlement. (Can’t find where I read that.) Again there must have been exploratory voyages before settlement.
It’s funny, because Ioannidis’ dates matched remarkably well
I don’t find that “funny” at all. The talk of “bias-corrected divergence dates” (or whatever woo terminology they used) made me immediately suspicious the original Ionnidis paper was “correcting” the data so it came out with the answer they’d predetermined they wanted. There’ll be Bayesian black magic at the back of it somewhere.
no supporting material … for kumara seeds/rhizomes floating to a Polynesian beach
There have been some experiments (I think covered in the previous round of discussion maybe this one) and modelling for how long seeds might be viable/compared to times for ocean drift. The being immersed in sea water is problematic, but some of these species have seed husks that might preserve them. IIRC Heyerdahl came across floating vegetation.
@Trond the fact that there’s evidence of several transplanted species makes unaided drift much less likely.
To the contrary: we don’t know the age of any of these species in Polynesia. There’s no reason to suppose they all arrived at the same time/in the same weather event. The South Equatorial Current and Trade winds run every year. What makes it more likely is more intense cultivation in S.Am., making for more frequent outwash events and/or the outwash events more frequently including crops.
bamboo tubes … presumably represented real Polynesian practice.
Wait … There’s bamboo in Polynesia? And in Central America; and of course in Asia. It grows in clumps/by spreading rhizomes. Notably not a successful tactic to spread across oceans.
Then how did it get all those places? where — coincidence? — humans live.
Proto-Polynesian name is KOFE. What’s the Cañari word?
@AntC: The “bias-corrected estimates” is Huang et al describing their own results, not those of Ioannides et al. Ioannides et al used “a genetic estimator biased to be 300 years too old”.
I’ve already described the general effects of later back-and-forth contacts. I’m not enough of a geneticist to dive into the details of Huang et al and find out exactly how they determined the correction factor and how it went wrong in Ioannides et al (2021), and if that also applies to Ioannides et al (2020).
More seriously to our argument, though: If that bias holds not only for the dating of splits between populations, but is the same even for the dating of the Northern South American admixture in Eastern Polynesia, the correct estimate would be ~1500 CE rather than ~1200 CE, which just about could be explained by the first Spanish voyages across the Pacific. Except it couldn’t, since the European admixture is clearly younger, and probably also because the American ancestry is so evenly distributed and so consistent between islands.
That may mean that we haven’t heard the final word on the correction yet. But it’s good to see that these people actually control the application of methods and the results by other groups and issue counter-analyses when due.
NB, Huang et al. acknowledge Ioannidis first among the commenters on their paper.
the extinct Easter Island palm.
Excellent question @Y. Not known to grow anywhere further north in Polynesia, because too hot.
related to the Chilean wine palm (Jubaea chilensis) [wp]
[which] is endemic to a small area of central Chile between 32°S and 35°S
A very long way south of Lima, let alone Ecuador. Obviously the first thing you’d take on a voyage setting out from Viña del Mar, needing to roll your Moai into position. The Humboldt counter-current would drag you a long way South as you paddled away from the coast/fighting the onshore breeze. But no matter, the proper Humboldt would drag you back North — in fact you’d need to paddle like crazy to avoid getting dragged way North of Rapanui. And then you could settle in for a steady 4,000 km of Westward paddling against the Roaring Forties.
Yep, nothing further to explain here. Move along.
By the time of European contact, the inhabitants of Rapanui had no idea how the moai had been moved into place, from the known quarries to their platforms. Heyerdahl heard took locals’ folktale statements that the figures must have walked as genuine historical memories and idiotically suggested that the moai had been levered vertical as soon they were carved and transported that way, by wiggling them back and forth with ropes, giving them a “walking” pace. (And, despite the lunacy, some later investigators wasted money testing whether this was actually a viable method for moving the statues.)
Maybe Bligh merely was lucky against long odds? (On the million monkeys principle.)
yes, absolutely. that was what i said, and what i meant: there’s no reason to have expected anyone in that boat to have survived – which i think is quite clear from the facts that nobody at the time did*, and that it was such a matter of wonderment that they had.
but more to the point: all of this is Million Monkey Hamlet! the Surprisingly Good Quarto is the genetic and starch-flake data (for as long as it stands); we’re dickering over whether the typewriter operators were macaques, howlers, or marmosets (or a multispecies haplorhine federation**), whether they produced the pages in the same order as billy shakes (or pierre menard) did or needed subsequent collation, and whether they composed using hunt-and-peck or touch-typing.
my occamite bias points towards one westward trip. but that razor’s edge gets more than a bit fuzzy when we’re already in the realm of the deeply improbable, so i don’t necessarily consider it a reliable gauge of probability.
why take vegetables/cuttings as opposed to ready-to-eat
travel is risky, especially in the periods we’re talking about – and especially by sea. winding up somewhere unexpected, in an unfamiliar ecosystem, without a clear way to get to anywhere you know, is a real possibility. easily propagable plants are travelers’ insurance.
it’s not an either/or: you can eat a tuber or a vine cutting if you need to (especially if you’re homeward bound and in familiar waters when you run short on supplies). but you don’t need to use up much of your weight allowance to set yourself up to establish some plants that would make a huge difference to your long-term survival if you (for example) get blown aground somewhere isolated while on a long coastal trading trip.
we’re not talking about unsophisticated people here. longdistance ocean travel – whether coastal or blue-water – means knowing things about weather, about currents, about rainfall and watersources, about what drifts where and what that implies about what’s out there in various directions, and about how to survive when things go badly.
and that applies across the board. bligh had his navigational tools; they’re fairly familiar to the likes of us – less so to non-archive-rats of the GPS generation. we know a bit about what the polynesian navigational suite was when it was in constant use – but only as much as a GPS kid who’s been told “the red end points north” knows about bligh’s methods. nobody here has (unless i missed it) claimed any knowledge of pre-colonization eastern pacific coast seafaring techniques – i don’t count heyerdahl’s speculative endeavors as more than hypothetical. but if we know they traded by sea, we know they had some – and the longer the distances and period of seaborne trade, the more sophisticated we can expect them to be***.
.
* except maybe bligh, but that’s megalomania, not assessment.
** not to be confused with napoleon’s recreation of middle francia.
*** “but it’s just following the coast” – try that sometime.
I don’t think anyone claims that plants can’t travel across long stretches of open sea. They do. If they didn’t, all distant islands would be barren.
But some plants travel easier than others. They have developed methods for just that. Hardy, floating capsules, grains that pass through digestive systems, spores or winged fruits that fly with the wind.
And some have, quite recently, developed a symbiotic relationship with humans, being brought along and made to thrive wherever humans settle.
If I remember correctly, the suggestion that the statues were wiggled along using ropes was made to Heyerdahl by an engineering student, and it was Heyerdahl who organized the expedition to test it. It’s one of the stories I had in mind when I wrote that Heyerdahl listened to the myths and took dem seriously (when it suited him).
The idea itself isn’t that outrageous. I have actually done this myself with stone slabs that are too heavy or unhandy to carry alone. Rise the slab on its short edge, wiggle it back and forth, and turn it sideways for every wiggle. This takes very little effort once you get the rhythm in.
Doing it as a team, with ropes, over long distances would be an entirely different matter. I don’t remember (and can’t be bothered to check) how far Heyerdahl’s tug* party managed to move the statue.
* I first wrote “hemp party”, but that would be unfair.
“Tug party” sounds pretty dirty.
I thought I was safe. I did an image search for “tug party” to get an immediate sense of the compound, and all I got had to do with tug-of-war at parties. People seem to have neglected to share photos illustrating that other meaning,
Cows get their dugs tugged every day. It can’t be much of a party.
Just as any noun X can be verbed as “X-ed” to mean “totally inebriated”, so for any noun X, “X party” is a euphemism for “orgy.”
(This proves that Construction Grammar is the One True Path.)
I don’t think anyone claims that plants can’t travel across long stretches of open sea. They do. If they didn’t, all distant islands would be barren.
I think @Y’s example is a reasonable ‘please explain’. most notably the extinct Easter Island palm.
The humans made it extinct, so it was presumably established and thriving by its own means. It’s closely related to the Chilean wine palm native to southwestern South America and is endemic to a small area of central Chile between 32°S and 35°S . IOW the same latitude as Rapanui. And it is a tiny area given it has a whole continent to go at. Which suggests it’s not very good at the proliferating game.
I think continental drift isn’t an explanation: Rapanui arose long after that. Presuming the Roaring Forties have always roared, and the Humboldt has always currented, how would capsules/grains/spores travel 4,000km in the ‘wrong’ direction?. (I’m presuming from Chile to Rapanui, but if the other way round, how did they get to Rapanui?)
That Wikipedia article is out of date in many ways. An older but better review of the the Easter Island palm are here (with a map of the suggested dispersal route).
People have tried for a long time to figure out why the palm went extinct. The current preferred explanation, IIRC, is that the introduced Polynesian rats chomped on the fruit before they had a chance to sprout. You can find remains of endocarps (“nuts”) with such holes chewed in them.
A survey of Hawaiian native flora finds that about a third of its species and a quarter of its lineages are of American origin (tropical and North American). Almost all of North American lineages and about two-thirds of the neotropical ones were brought to Hawai‘i by birds, the rest by flotation.
I haven’t found a similar study for the Marquesas or the Societies.
P.S. I don’t think the rongorongo sign has anything to do with the palm trees. If it did, it would mean that rongorongo is quite older than European contact, but no such luck.
A new paper, which I haven’t seen yet. Davletshin, A. 2023. Possible Clues to the East Polynesian Homeland: Paper Mulberry, Sweet Potato and Red-flowered Hibiscus. Waka Kuaka | The Journal of the Polynesian Society 132(4).
@Y: Tanks yet again!
Interesting, and very much to the point, but either the conclusion doesn’t follow from the premises, or I don’t understand what he’s trying to say. It’s probably clearer in the full version.
(with a map of the suggested dispersal route)
Thank you again, @Y. I’m a little perplexed by their map Fig. 4:
* No acknowledgment (again) of the Humboldt counter-current. But I think that might actually help their hypothesis — although that’s rather overstating their suggestion:
* Endocarps apparently ‘tacking’ cross-current and upwind in the S.E. Tradewinds?
* Better: the seeds initially went South on the counter-current; that put them much further Westwards as they came back North in the Humboldt. (Same as Kon-Tiki getting towed out to sea 80 km.)
* Except: what’s propelling them Westwards at all? Wouldn’t they just get blown against the beach?
* And then germination (as with the Kumara): they get washed up on the beach at Rapanui. Whereas in S.Am.:
No rats (or any other mammals) on Rapanui until humans arrive. Birds? There were plenty of ground-dwelling species until the humans arrived. But eating seeds that have been in salt water for 40 days? If they did, I suppose they might walk inland and poop them on fertile soil?
Does the finding pollen in the crater sediment [in their Intro] mean it’s ancient? Could have arrived when the climate (and wind patterns) were much different?
As with your comment about the rongorongo sign, this seems an odd thing to point out: aren’t there about a bazillion species of palm worldwide, including in S. America? And plenty of places in the Hispanosphere with names “Palma or Las Palmas”.
I haven’t found a similar study for the Marquesas or the Societies.
No neither could I. All the original lowland flora seem to have been wiped out by the humans, planting food species they brought with them from further West.
Southern Cook Islands were a locus of interaction between speakers of West and East Polynesian languages before the settlement of Remote East Polynesia, that is to say, a place where East Polynesians maintained their ancestral connections.. [from the ‘Possible clues’ paper]
This on the face of it (but yes perhaps the full paper is more nuanced) is conventional wisdom, nothing to see here move along. Māori mythical homeland is the Cooks — where their settlement fleet departed from. (Depending who you ask, the Cook Island Māori language is mutually intelligible with Aotearoa (NZ).)
You can’t get to Hawai’i direct from nuclear Polynesia (Fiji/Samoa/Tonga) because of those Trade winds and Equatorial current. So you have to first go East to (approx) Cook Islands, then North via the Marquesas. So although F/S/T are at the Western corner of the ‘Polynesian Triangle’ (or indeed Fiji is often just outside), that doesn’t count as ‘Western Polynesia’.
So I’m perplexed by the term “West Polynesian languages”. This [in as much as it’s used at all] usually refers to Polynesian languages spoken West of Fiji. (Hence I used ‘nuclear’ above.) The ‘nuclear’ dates from a ‘Empire’ based in Tonga but allied with Fiji and Samoa C10th~12th. It was the collapse of that Empire ” numerous wars and internal pressure”[wp] that spurred outwards exploration, but with continued frequent contact up until C14th, when the reliability of the weather patterns seemed to make travel less frequent.
So … I was going to ask about the Ionnidis et al paper: can they exclude that the smudges/traces of non-Polynesian DNA they’re reporting are from occasional contact events with (what is now) Melanesia — Solomons/Vanuatu/New Caledonia, during the timeframe of those throes? How would they know if they didn’t include sampling from there? (They did include a Formosan reference sample, for exclusion purposes — which I’d describe as next to useless unless it was very carefully curated to be indigenous stock.)
> the smudges/traces of non-Polynesian DNA
There comes a point when you’ve tested so much spaghetti by throwing it at the wall that you have none to eat.
AntC: can they exclude that the smudges/traces of non-Polynesian DNA they’re reporting are from occasional contact events with (what is now) Melanesia — Solomons/Vanuatu/New Caledonia, during the timeframe of those throes?
This is where my “solid” applies. If it were of some other origin, it would have to be another group with identical genetic characteristics as the indigenous South Americans. There’s no way that the Papuan (i.e. Non-Austronesian) element in Melanesia could come off as that. The reason why Papua doesn’t show up as a distinct ancestry in the analysis is presumably that Austronesian and Papuan genes got so thoroughly mixed through the multiple bottlenecks across the Pacific that the independent signals can’t be discerned. It might possivly have turned up as no. 7 or 8 or 9.
I wrote that in a hurry. I’ll hurry (again) to add that I may have misrepresented the actual method for defining idealized ancestries, but that doesn’t matter for the general point: That the mustard&green addition in Eastern Polynesia is either South American or indistinguishable from South American.
@Trond [refing Huang] Ioannides et al used “a genetic estimator biased to be 300 years too old”.
This doesn’t give me a sense of confidence I’d call “solid”. Aren’t Ioannides and Huang also subject to the vagaries of this assumption:
30 years might be conventional, but we’re starting from “ca. 1200 CE”. So only a small variation in that assumption might vary the result by another 100 years or so.
The “biased” word comes to mind again. Sorry, but that sounds sooo much like it’s the answer they wanted to arrive at from before they started. I think it’s too early for Polynesian exploration to have got as far as the Eastern extremes of Polynesia, let alone S.America. Were there occasional episodes of S.Americans drifting away from the coast, with rafts that just happened to have viable root crops. And all failed until one just happened to arrive at a time and place Polynesians had established and could look after them?
Here’s another ‘just so’ story relying on such coincidences. We don’t have samples of Kumara (seeds) of a vintage ca. 1200. The samples we do have are already subject to human-facilitated interbreeding which perhaps downgraded the viability of seeds because they were spreading through cuttings/rhizomes.
Human cultivation in S.Am. increased the number and volume of outwash events. Humans arriving at where this outwash came to land in the Marquesas (with seeds more viable than today), picked them up off the beach and planted them. This worked for coconuts; why not for other stuff? Or perhaps birds ate them, fertilised them and pooped them out; but it took human presence to cultivate them. (We do know Polynesians were great beachcombers: the Rongorongo script was written mostly on driftwood, on account of the lack of trees. Driftwood from where is a good question. Since I’m highly dubious that’s an explanation for the Easter Island palm.)
@AntC & all: I haven’t had time to look at the full text of Huang et al’s correction of Ioannidis et al until now. It’s very informative. It finds nothing wrong with the basic method of calculating age based on segment lengths (which would have been odd anyway, because the method is well established and tested), but essentially with the definition of a population split, or maybe with the assumptions of how a Polynesian population split did occur. The short story is that at the time of a split event, the genetic characteristics of the two new populations will already be different for purely statistical reasons*. It’s this effect that Huang et al estimates to 10 generations or about 300 years*. In other words, for the genes to appear 900*** years different (which all agree on), the actual population split would have to be 300 years later, i.e. 600 years ago. That doesn’t accord with archaeology, which instead would date the colonizations to more than 900 years ago, so Huang et al suggest that the genetic dating reflects not a clean break but later contacts between the populations (as earlier studies have shown)
What has this to do with the dating of the South-American admixture? Nothing at all, I think. For one, on appeal to independent authority, we can assume that Huang et al would have said so. But also, it’s a case where the issue shouldn’t apply. The admixture event isn’t dated as divergence time from South America, but solely by the length of the segments that are of South American origin.
* I think we can assume that when the draw is completely random, the effect is smaller than if it’s self-selected, as in a colonization. If it’s correlating with pre-existing differences, like with the building of a great wall, the selection may be skewed even more.
** This ought to mean that the apparent genetic divergence between a random draw from a population and the remnant population is 10 generations. I’d think that this divergence must depend on many variables, notably the size of each set. There’s a list of literature for those who want to delve into the theory of the estimate and the simulations done to test it. I might, but not now.
*** Or whatever age is inferred for any colonization.
Another issue, a standard one I should think, but unaddressed by either Ioannidis or Huang, is the length of a generation. It’s presumed to be 30+-0 years. The average seems arbitrary, and the standard deviation is certainly wrong.
Yes, I thought about mentioning that. I’m used to seeing 28 years in genetic studies, without much more justification. And that assumption is also part of the admixture time estimate.
(Not 28 years specifically, but an average generational time.)
Me: I may have misrepresented the actual method for defining idealized ancestries
I shouldn’t leave this hanging. ADMIXTURE can be run in different ways. Sometimes they use it to extract any number (“K”) of ancestries (or ancestry signals) from the ancient genomes themselves. That is e.g. the case in the linked Kusuma et al (2016) paper that detects separate “Ancient Philippines”, “Ancient East Borneo”, “Ancient West Borneo”, etc. ancestries with K=14. (I think 14 is the largest number I’ve ever seen for such an analysis, and I’m surprised the signals didn’t drown in noise.)
Some of my comments upthread were made on the assumption that this was the case also for this study, but Ioannidis et al started instead with six predefined ancestries: “Melanesian”, “Polynesian”, “Northern -” and “Southern South American”, “European”, and “African”. What this means is that the Native American ancestry is determined from comparison with two pre-defined sets of Native South American genes, rather than by comparing a detected signal with Native American sets afterwards. I think the main effect of this approach is to reduce the graphical noise by having a number of other detectable ancestries, maybe especially different European origins, merged into one for this specific analysis. That doesn’t matter for the matter at hand. South American is South American, and any stream of admixture from the west (Melanesia, Papua) would have shown up as a darker blue rim.
The choice of predefined sets would also fail to detect further nuances in the South American ancestry, so they did that with a specific IBD analysis of Native American ancestry, which is what allowed them to hone in on a point origin in Colombia or Ecuador.
Thanks Trond for turning my attention to this runaway thread (I actually meant to take a peek because of my recent discussion of edible amaranths, which makes me roll the words “Lambs quarters” on my tongue 🙂 )
I saw the paper on Rapa Nui starch grains but wasn’t impressed, because there were so few grains on so few tools and I worried about possible misidentification).
There were many exciting discoveries about possible ancient American – Pacific Islands contacts but they uniformly fizzle out.
My most recent adventures into this field included the putative Mesoamerican origin of custard apples
https://www.facebook.com/dmitry.pruss/posts/pfbid0x8nh11aPoFU5oVoiDg7buNjyh4AMkR7FXV4V1ZVeQdph9tthw4JAVp2M1NbRSTkAl
(too cool a story to not tell, but ultimately not convincing me an iota).
About Madagascar, the details about the Bajar (and Ma’anyan’s continuing mixing with the Malay at their trading posts and with inland tribes further inland) were all new to me, thanks!
I recently wrote about another species transplanted by the humans to Madagascar – the lamba wild pig, which turned out to have been brought on the island in small numbers from today’s Zimbabwe or adjacent South African lands
https://www.facebook.com/dmitry.pruss/posts/pfbid0Pp63n1o9QdDdQ7gjKqfcAWsbFSYvQVfd5r4aE3JumeK1YwPCvXPSk2gXBuThDf96l
Dmitry: There were many exciting discoveries about possible ancient American – Pacific Islands contacts but they uniformly fizzle out.
Time to recalibrate the coprometer, apparently. I came out hard in defense of Ioannidis et al after reading it. Could you tell how you think the genetic evidence fizzles out? How can the moderate and evenly distributed South American ancestry detected in Eastern Polynesia be illusory?
I need to be more specific. Evidence of additional population streams *into* the Americas, once widely proposed, doesn’t become more convincing, although people still like to speculate that the pre-Columbian Native American ancestry in Eastern Polynesia came with the return trips of the Polynesians rather than with the Westward travel of the ancient Native Americans from the Ecuador / Colombia area (whether intentional or not)…
But the early conclusions of Moreno-Mayar 2014 about the genetic footprints of such westward travel still look real
I mean, without admixture, the only things happening with the colonization of Eastern Polynesia would be the founder effect and drift in a small population. Since both lead to a reduction in genetic variation, I can’t see how the results would be mistaken for a new ancestry.
Even if it could, I can’t see how a spurious admixture could be misidentified as South American. I’d rather think it would look like a change of balance between old ancestries — like an admixture from an unknown but related population. Is the problem that the six predefined sets work as a straightjacket, and without Asian origin available, a drift that accidentally shifted the balance towards Asian genes (rather than Melanesian) would have nowhere else to go?
But then again, if this is an issue, isn’t it moot with the IBD analysis?
[Edit: Thanks! Coprometer reset to factory defaults. I’ll leave my soul searching up. There might still be interesting questions in there.]
the only things happening with the colonization of Eastern Polynesia would be the founder effect and drift in a small population.
If I could lift your sights out of the test tube for a minute …
(And without mistaking the Polynesian mythology for a detailed history …) we know there was back-and-forth contact throughout Eastern Polynesia during the exploration phase; and to-and-fro with nuclear Tonga/Samoa and even Fiji. There’s multiple stories of an earlier phase of settlement getting overrun by a second or third phase. (As we’ve noted above, sadly the oral history from Marquesas is mostly lost.)
So “drift in a small population” is nothing like accurate. (Of course depending what you mean by “small” and how wide geographically you’re counting “population”.)
I expect a diffuse “founder effect”, because there were several phases of founders. The mythology is varied and unclear as to whether a later phase interbred with the earlier (certainly there was enslavement) and/or whether it shoved the earlier further afield. (On-shunting is what appears to be happening with migration to Rapanui.) The warrior myth is strong throughout Polynesia. And for good historical reason. In NZ to this day there is resentment amongst ‘proper’ South Island clans that Ngai Tahu (a North Island clan, with a North Island accent), who saw the writing on the wall early and got guns from the Brits then invaded the South Island and took all the spoils.
Then I’m surprised Ionnidis et al’s method didn’t already identify this effect (until Huang pointed it out); and I’m wondering what else they failed to model. Oh, besides also the variability of generational time.
Back and forth movements would (as you say) result in a “diffuse founder effect” and a less pronounced drift. Those would actually decrease the divergence between Eastern Polynesia and wherever its founding population came from, giving less room for a false signal. Such movements might also reverse older founder effects and drift by reintroducing genes that were lost somewhere upstream (i.e. back west). In my last comment I tried to get my head out of that test tube and imagine how a signal from the west might be misidentified as South American.
I found a sliver of a chance in the lack of a specifically “Asian” predefined ancestry, but the Asian and Papuan ancestries of the Polynesians were so thoroughly mixed through the millennia and across the Pacific that it would take really strong founder effect and drift for the balance to change visibly by accident. If it came all the way from the source it’s really hard to imagine it turning up with such power in Eastern Polynesia without leaving any traces along the way.
It’s also a question how strong an Asian signal would have to be to turn up in Eastern Polynesia and produce something that would be misidentified as South American, and how far north in Asia it would have to originate to even contain a fraction of the ancient Siberian genes found in Native Americans. Maybe a direct colonization of Eastern Polynesia from Japan? If only someone could think of another way that descendants of ancient Siberians could have come in direct contact with Eastern Polynesia.
The uncertainty and variation in generational time is real, but it’s also handled by the error bars of the estimate. It’s not something either Ioannidis or Huang, or their respective als, forgot.
Another comment finished hastily. My wife was calling from the hallway, ready to go out.
Please add a full stop between “accident” and “If”. The paragraph could also benefit from another break. Maybe before “It’s also”.
Edit: And an ugly typo, while you’re at it. “It’s also a question how strong an
dAsian signal […]”.Fixed!
Thanks. Just add it to my tab.
a question how strong an Asian signal would have to be to turn up in Eastern Polynesia and produce something that would be misidentified as South American, and how far north in Asia it would have to originate to even contain a fraction of the ancient Siberian genes found in Native Americans
Another thing which makes it so much harder to confuse the South American vs. NE Asian ancestry is the fact that there were sequential episodes of severe founder effects on the humanity’s way to Beringia -> N America -> S America, which still allow one to discern the past Siberian ancestry in today’s Native South Americans, but make it much harder to confuse the contributions of their DNA…
Dmitry: But the early conclusions of Moreno-Mayar 2014 about the genetic footprints of such westward travel still look real
I’ve reread Moreno-Mayar (2014). I hadn’t completely forgotten it, but I think I confused it with articles I read around the time of the first discussion of Ioannides et al. It does indeed look real, but I remember finding it suggestive but not sufficient. There are results in the paper that didn’t mean that much to me at the time and which I understand much better now. There also seemed to be a chance that the Native South American genes could have come to Rapa Nui with the first European voyages, and a return trip to Rapa Nui would have been mindblowingly difficult.
It wasn’t until the announcement of Ioannidis et al (2020) and their evidence for contact in the archipelagos north of Rapa Nui that I started to really ponder the possibility. Now that I’ve read the full paper I’m as convinced as I can be, and I’m leaning towards a one-way accidental drift from Ecuador/Colombia. But science is always preliminary, and I’m eagerly waiting for new results,
That’s one cringe of a final paragraph. Why doesn’t Akismet eat my comments when I need it?
What I mean to say is: I’m well convinced now, but I will change my views without notice.
Back in 2014, I sounded excited by the findings ( see https://www.facebook.com/dmitry.pruss/posts/10203649242934958 ) but didn’t write about it on LH as far as I can tell. At the time, I was a little skeptical about date range of the admixture (as in, no doubts that it was much older than the 2nd half of XIX c., but how much older? What if the sizes of the genetic fragments were explained by, say, XVI c. admixture in the ancestral stock of the future “white” Chileans?…)
I agree that the characterization of a similar Amerindian genetic flow in the Polynesian islands to the North-West of Rapa Nui makes the whole “out of Ecuador” hypothesis more plausible …
My distaste for a one-way voyage from Ecuador to Polynesia comes from having to depend on an accidental drift voyage, which would happen to carry sweet potatoes and bottle gourds. Possible, but a bit of a deus ex machina. A round trip from Polynesia is harder to do, but is easier to imagine as being done by an exploring people.
Can the available data be used to estimate the size of the founding American population?
Then there’s the chicken. That is still undecided?
My distaste for a one-way voyage from Ecuador to Polynesia comes from having to depend on an accidental drift voyage, which would happen to carry sweet potatoes and bottle gourds.
In these evidence-lite scenarios I think we can be more imaginative. The kumara arrived under separate cover, by similar means to the Easter Island palm. It would have made landfall about the same place as our Cañari Kon-Tiki, because Humboldt. The Polynesians took pity on the Cañari because their diet had been nothing but raw fish for several weeks: look! a nice plate of roast tubers!. Oh (underwhelmed) we call those cumar …
the chicken. That is still undecided?
We eliminated that some time ago. (Maybe up-thread here or on the LLog thread.) Under grilling, the chicken fell off the bone. It confessed to being post-Colombian. Though was delicious with a plate of roast kumara. wikip has a reasonable write-up. It all comes down to arguments over DNA sequences — which is why I’m treating the human DNA ‘evidence’ with large pinches of salt — also needed to make kumara palatable.
we call those cumar
Dragging out memories of the previous discussions. The great seafarers and maritime traders on that coast (the dudes with the balsa rafts on which Kon-Tiki was modeled) were not Cañari but Manteño-Huancavilca. What language did they speak? What were its words for sweet potato, gourds? They were based around the Gulf of Guayaquil and Northwards; the Cañari territories extended from the Southern edge of the Gulf up to the Andes.
This might tell us more about languages. ‘Guayaquil’ gets plenty of mentions; ‘cumar’, ‘potato’ not. (It’s beyond my tourist Spanish.)
This tells more than anybody needs to know about their seafaring; including claiming the rafts could sail to windward. I am very sceptical, but if true someone should have told Heyerdahl. Plus a just-so story that they must have spoken lots of languages/pidgins to trade so extensively up the coast. (Spam warning: Academia dot edu )
@AntC: Thanks!
The onomastic paper says that there’s little onomastic evidence left, since the Ecuadorian lowlands were castillianized very early. What little there is seems to point to different linguistic layers. It concludes suggesting that a ~7th c. wave of immigration of Barbacoan peoples from Colombia (which is an older hypothesis based on archaeological and ethnographic evidence) formed a superstrate over a substrate of local languages, including one related to Cañari.
The trade paper is a good summary, but certainly not more than anybody needs to know. I for one could take much more. Those first Spanish descriptions of balsa rafts are interesting. In another summary I’ve read that the rafts were described as equipped with two sails, bow and stern, both lateen style with very bendy masts (bamboo?). I’m no sailor, but I believe this too would have facilitated windward sailing. I briefly wondered if it was worth mentioning as possible evidence of technology transfer from Polynesia, but decided against it. There aren’t that many ways to make a sail.
I distinctly remember that Heyerdahl equipped the Kon-Tiki with steering planks, but I don’t think he got them to work properly, or maybe he decided they weren’t much use when the wind and currents took the raft in the right direction anyway. He did definitely not use two sails or a lateen rig. I suspect it didn’t fit his story.
@AntC: The WP section on the chicken evidence says that the jury is still out, which was my impression too. The historical population genomics of chicken isn’t well enough understood to reach clear conclusions. The common origin of domesticated chicken is fairly recent — it just about caught the boat to Polynesia at the final call. This may mean (as the critics say) that old European landraces (like those the first Europeans brought to America) would have carried many genetic sequences shared by old landraces elsewhere, very much inclluding the Pacific, and the lack of a comprehensive set of ancient European samples makes it impossible to tell which ones were unique to Polynesia.
I’ve read that the rafts were described as equipped with two sails, bow and stern, both lateen style with very bendy masts (bamboo?). I’m no sailor, but I believe this too would have facilitated windward sailing.
Yes, known as Fore and aft rig — or if not sailing to windward, at least cross-wind. Guayaquil 1748. Heyerdahl ignored that style of sail and used square-rigged. Heyerdahl was an idiot.
Heyerdahl’s steering planks were loosely based on the original (but I suspect not as large as described in that treatise). And he did experiments showing he could get the raft going something like 45° off the wind. (But I’m repeating myself.) ‘Guara’ technology described here [**]. Note that just because your raft’s nose is pointing into the wind does not mean it’s gaining any distance in that direction. Even with monstrous guaras, heading made good will be crab-wise across the wind. (And that description of ‘tacking’ will lose all momentum, bring the raft to a halt then have it pushed downwind before picking up speed again. The bendy masts/lateen sail could be twisted/angled to both push the raft through the turn, and get some way on much quicker — as with a windsurfer.)
“Proper use of guaras” 2006. (But still with that stupid sail — allegedly a “relatively sophisticated” improvement.) See also Tahiti-Nui on that page, crossing the ‘wrong’ way.
If the coastal traders relied chiefly on sea breezes, they’d want about 90° across the wind. But making progress _against_ the wind — especially if you’re fighting the Humboldt — and especially in deep ocean with large swells and breakers driven by the wind — is a whole other game. You need sleek (and high) bows to cut through the surf. You need a long and deep waterline to avoid getting pushed sideways. (Also if you’re carrying dry goods you need a platform well above water level. Heyerdahl described the waves washing through the raft/between the timbers as if that was some sort of feature. No: it shows the swell has lots of logs to get a purchase on and push you down-wind. Did I mention Heyerdahl was an idiot? And his brainless seamanship/ignoring traditional technology was also on display with Ra I.)
possible evidence of technology transfer from Polynesia,
No need, there’s plenty of evidence of S.Am. coastal trading long before Polynesians got beyond nuclear Polynesia. As you say, Fore-and-aft rig is something that could get invented many times independently. In fact by any seafarer who wants to get back home.
(Sailor speaking, BTW.)
[**] That claims to be a “Manual for raft skippers”. Then why persist in showing a Heyerdahl-style square rig? Also interesting to see the comparison to bamboo rafts in Taiwan, Vietnam with the familiar ‘junk’ fore-and-aft sail.
AntC already said most of what I was going to type. You really do not want to try sailing a vessel with a shallow draft and low aspect ratio into the wind. This did get me thinking, however, about another of the practicalities of a long accidental voyage. If your raft is blown off course, how long do you keep trying to get back to South America before giving up and running before the trade winds, hoping you will find land before you die if thirst?
I think a relevant question is: Did anyone ever make it back, to implant the idea of land to the west? Columbus thought he was aiming for Japan which was a known thing, except he didn’t know how big the earth was. The first Vinlanders found it by accident , but they could get back to Greenland and tell the tale: just ride before a western wind and you’ll hit Greenland, or Norway if you miss. (And they had blue water-capable vessels already; I don’t know if they could tack against a prevailing wind, but at those latitudes you can probably just wait for a tailwind. Iceland is not that big of a target, much less the Faroes, but they seem to have hit those pretty reliably).
What I mean is, just giving up on getting back and trusting your luck is easier if you know there’s something out there. Maybe the South American “Columbus” who first got to Polynesia, was just as mad as the Spanish one.
More grist: Dewan and Hosler, Ancient Maritime Trade Between Ecuador and Western Mexico on Balsa Rafts: An Engineering Analysis of Balsa Raft Functionality and Design.
Ed.: Published here, in 2008.
Ed. See also here: Emanuel, J. 2012. “Crown Jewel of the Fleet: Design, Construction, and Use of the Seagoing Balsa of the Pre-Columbian Andean Coast.”
AntC: if not sailing to windward, at least cross-wind. […] The bendy masts/lateen sail could be twisted/angled to both push the raft through the turn, and get some way on much quicker — as with a windsurfer.
Yes, that’s what I imagined. “Against the wind” is apparently not what I meant to say.
there’s plenty of evidence of S.Am. coastal trading long before Polynesians got beyond nuclear Polynesia.
Oh yes, a millennium, maybe two. I didn’t mean to imply that sailing came from Polynesia, only the fore-and-aft lateen rig — except that I didn’t mean to imply that either. There was more than enough time to develop efficient sails at the Pacific Coast.
But even if there was a long history of seafaring and trade, it must have been quite different from what we see in the Indian Ocean, the South China Sea, and the Mediterranean. There’s little evidence of buzzing trading ports and expatriate merchant communities. That must mean that trade by sea never generated enough surplus to be worth expanding, and I find that extraordinary. It’s even more striking in the Caribbean, which really ought to have developed into a major venue for intercontinental trade and travel, with competing seafaring empires fighting for dominance.
Maybe the lack of widespread bronzesmithing inhibited the development of sturdy masts and hulls?
A supply side problem? We demand siders prefer to think that if there’s a strong enough demand for sturdy vessels, the market will come up with a solution.
Oh, maybe I should listen to myself and rephrase the problem as one of demand! Why wasn’t the demand for traded goods strong enough to nourish a seafaring economy in the Caribbean?
If your raft is blown off course, how long do you keep trying to get back to South America
Éric de Bisschop/the two Tahiti-Nui attempts answer you that (link in my long post above): if you’re a total nutcase[**], you keep trying despite the pleading of your crew and eventually first have to be rescued by the Chilean navy then second get yourself killed, never having made landfall to the East.
But note the first voyage was from Tahiti, and got rescued off Chile, so not so much West-to-East as North-to-South. Critically they were still 800 _miles_ off Chile so outside the Humboldt flowing strongly North when the raft started to disintegrate. If they could have kept going, they’d still be another several weeks crossing the Humboldt, and make landfall somewhere around … Guayaquil. The passage here tells the tale:
I’m concluding there was no two-way voyaging back to S.Am.
trusting your luck is easier if you know there’s something out there. Maybe the South American “Columbus” who first got to Polynesia, was just as mad as the Spanish one.
Quite. What makes all these C20th ‘recreation’ attempts just meaningless, is they knew there was land to aim at, they knew where the currents flowed. Columbus was not so much mad as seriously bad at surveying: he thought the globe was much smaller than it is (and than everybody else told him it was); and then he was incredibly lucky to bump into land before running out of fresh water.
So I don’t think any raft set off Westwards from S.Am. expecting to find land. Rather, it was a coastal trading raft that got blown off course and miraculously drifted on to somewhere about the Marquesas. Under that scenario I still don’t believe they were carrying enough fresh water. And neither were they carrying kumara or gourds in a state they could be planted out. (They’d eat them first.)
lack of widespread bronzesmithing …
Have you seen a Polynesian ocean-going vessel? “Sturdy” is the only word to describe it.
To make the European wooden ships that ruled the world, you need metal woodworking tools: adzes, planes, machined planking, copper nails, … So I think steel to give a sharp enough edge for fine working.
[**] de Bisschop seems to have been a serial boat-wrecker. His biog is a catalogue of getting washed up on random islands or rescues from sinking vessels. Many of the sources I found describe him as ‘unlucky’. I’d say reckless and irresponsible. Lucky in the sense only that he’d failed to kill any of his crew before killing himself.
We’ve discussed current hen history knowledge here
https://languagehat.com/insufferable/#comment-4444736
Including first semi-domestication in Thailand in mid-2nd millennium BC, and much later origin of the mutant hens which laid eggs year round
Oh, that’s where! I couldn’t find it.
(Spam warning: Academia dot edu )
Acadamia is clearly losing patience that I avoid them as far as possible; they’re sending round the boys/wouldn’t like there to be any accident, would we matey?:
To be fair, and must unusually, one of the cites is to someone with very nearly my name. (No relation AFAIK.)
“Skeletal effects of castration on two eunuchs of Ming China”?
So that’s what you were doing during the Ming period, eh?