姚淑超-东方语言学.doc

International Conference on “Chinese Form and Function” in Honor of Prof. Xu Liejiong for his 70th Birthday Zhengzhou (Henan), 21-23 April 2006 Some Remarks on Languages and Genes in China Alain Peyraube CNRS EHESS (Paris, France) Shang China was inhabited by Chinese populations speaking Sinitic languages. It was also inhabited by non Chinese populations. We do not know however who precisely these non Chinese populations were, while the evidence for the origins of the Chinese language is still also scanty and controversial. Can the history of genes help us in understanding better what the Chinese linguistic situation was some 5,000 years B.P., not to mention the population distribution? Languages and genes do not have the same history, but as Darwin already noticed in the second half of the 19th century, there is an ??interesting parallelism between the development of species and the development of languages??. If we have two different types of history, two different types of evolution – one being natural, the other one largelly cultural – with different mechanisms of origin and reproduction, there are indeed many clear analogies in the mechanisms of transmission: mutation, natural selection, migration, and chance (called “drift” in genetics). It is not surprising then that the similarities of these mechanisms of transmission have lead scholars to look for the congruence of genetic and linguistic evolution. For almost two decades, population geneticists – whose main aim is to put forward a reconstruction of the history of modern humans since their origins, through a systematic study of the genetic variability of our species – have been very active in correlating genetic distance, a central notion in genetic population, and linguistic distance. In most of these studies, if not all, the linguistic hypotheses adopted by the geneticists have been the ones for the macro-families advocated by Greenberg and Ruhlen and/or by the Russian ??unificationists??. Many othe