FRUITFUL FORMOSANS: THE HOKKAIDO HYPOTHESIS
The
Polynesian Triangle is formed by three points located in New Zealand
(Maoris), Easter Island (Pascuans) and the archipelago of Hawaii (native
Hawaiians). The related peoples living in Micronesia are to the north-west of
it, while, to the west, lies Melanesia, whose older, black-skinned populations,
as said above, is akin to Australia's Aboriginals and a series of smaller
tribes and nations still living in Malaysia, Sri Lanka, Yemen and the
Philippines (forming a kind of living bridge between Africa and Australia). The
Malay Universe covers the present countries of Malaysia, Indonesia, the
Philippines, Brunei and Timor Leste, plus the coasts of Papua New Guinea, a
country that could be nicknamed Little Africa for different reasons that would
be part of a planned new article, later on.
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Update:
December 1, 2024
So much for my Hokkaido
Hypothesis, about a settlement of the Ryukyu islands, the Japanese archipelago
and the Korean peninsula by Austronesian populations originating from Taiwan...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=71YARAwejVk&feature=youtu.be
December 2, 2024
It must be said that since
the proto-Malays went south from Formosa Island to the Philippines islands, and
then to present-day Malaysia, Brunei and Indonesia, some of them may also have gone
north-east, up the Ryukyus chain of island. There may still be a genetic trace
of their presence in the blood of the present inhabitants of that archipelago.
It may be a research worth pursuing...
* * *
Original
article:
The
Ryukyus was a Chinese protectorate (a nominally independent kingdom under the
protection of Beijing), for centuries, before being annexed by Japan in the
XIXth century. The People's Republic of China presently seems to be using the
precedent of that ancient protectorate to pressure Japan with the threat of a
potential claim to those islands, whose population speaks languages that are
part of the Japonic linguistic family, along with Japanese, by far the
best-known of them all.
There
is a possibility that the population of the Ryukyus archipelago and of the
Japanese archipelago are related to the indigenous population of Taiwan, a
group of small nations collectively known as Formosans (from Formosa, the name
given by explorers from Portugal to designate that island off the coast of
China).
The
Hokkaido Hypothesis, in a few words, is that the roots of the Japonic languages
(and hence of the population as such) of both archipelagos are in Taiwan. In
other words, it is conceivable that the Formosans indigenous populations living
on Taiwan are the very distant ancestors of the people presently living in
Japan and the Ryukyus, from Formosa to the very tip of the area of distribution
of the Japonic languages, i.e. the island of Hokkaido, the northernmost island
of the Japanese archipelago, just south of the island of Sakhalin and southwest
of the Kurils archipelago.
A
sub-hypothesis, the Yanbian Variation, postulate that the Koreanic languages
could also be an emanation of the Formosans, with a diffusion along the
following axis: Formosa Island / Ryukyus archipelago / Kyushu Island/ Jeju
Island and-or South Korea / North Korea / Yanbian Korean Autonomous Prefecture
(China), the last one mentioned being at the extreme northern part of the
continuous range covered by that small linguistic family. Korean is also spoken
in Central Asia (forced migrations at the time of the Soviet Union), and in
diverse cities, mainly in the West and Japan, through free emigration.
If
attested and confirmed by linguistics experts, the Hokkaido Hypothesis and the
Korean Sub-Hypothesis would mean that the early Formosans, eons ago, already
recognized as the ancestors of the Malay languages, the Micronesian languages,
the Polynesian languages and the languages of most of the population living on
the island of Madagascar (the exceptions being the Bantu-speaking populations
living on the western and northern coasts of La Grande Île, just off the
coast of mainland Africa, opposite Mozambique), might also be the ancestors of
the Japanese and the Koreans, whose tongues were long thought to be mere
isolates by linguists, that is to say, languages apparently unrelated to any
other, much like Basque, spoken in Northeast Spain and in three cantons of
Southwest France, i.e. on both sides of the Pyrenees mountains. The difficult
terrain and the isolation from th centers of trade and knowledge may have saved
the Basque language from complete extinction.
The
Basques are widely considered to bee remnant of the population living in
long-ago Europe, before the great Indo-European migrations that transformed the
linguistic and ethnic landscape of that peninsula of Eurasia, along with the
Etruscans (whose language is now extinct) and the Iberians (whose language is
also extinct). Languages, usually, are closely or loosely related, and form
linguistic families, like the Romance languages of Southern Europe (deriving
from the Latin spoken in the western part of the Roman Empire), the Slavic
languages of Eastern Europe, or the Germanic languages of Northern Europe.
AUTRONESIAN LANGUAGES
Austronesian
languages are spoken by about 390 million persons, mainly in Indonesia and the
Philippines. It is the fifth linguistic family in terms of number of speakers,
the second in terms of number of different languages. Since the pioneering work
of the great Robert Blust (1999), it is now known that the source of all those
languages is to be found in the indigenous inhabitants of the island of Formosa
(Taiwan), sometime called Formosans to distinguished them from the great
majority of the population of this disputed country/province, which is from Chinese
stock and origin. On the mainland, the Formosans are called Gaoshans.
According
to modern linguistics, Austronesian languages is divided in ten main branches,
nine on the island (collectively known as Formosan languages) and one outside
of the island (known as Malayo-Polynesian languages, or Extra-Formosan
languages), which is to say in the rest of the vast linguistic area now
occupied by the family, across the Pacific and Indian oceans.
THE HOKKAIDO HYPOTHESIS
The
Hokkaido Hypothesis postulate that a part of the Malayo-Polynesian branch (or
possibly a part of the nine Formosan branches, or maybe an hypothetic eleventh
branch) went North-East, instead of down South, like the ancestors of the
Malayo-Polynesians, who first went to Luzon (the big northern island of the
Philippines), which became in effect the stepping stone toward the rest of what
is now the Malay cultural universe, the Micronesian cultural universe, the
Polynesian cultural universe and the Malgache cultural universe.
The
North-East branch went up the Ryukyus archipelago, island by island, and then
spread along the Japanese archipelago, again island by island, starting by the southernmost,
Kyushu, up to the very tip of the very last Japanese island, Hokkaido, pushing along
the way the indigenous Ainus ever northward, till those Ainus found themselves
restricted in their present territory, where they lived as minorities (Hokkaido
Island -along with mainly Japanese people-, Sakhalin Island -among with mainly
Russian people-, and the Kurils archipelago -among with mainly Russian people).
Behind
that Hypothesis, and to the source of it, lies what may be called the principle
of diffusion. It proposes that diffusion, in the many forms it can take in
human metrics (linguistic, cultural, genetic, etc.) implies a movement from a
concentrated source to a diluted destination, through time. Let's see some
applications of it.
The
Out of Africa theory is well known and stipulate the now-well establish fact
that humans spread from the continent of Africa to the rest of the world. That
has genetics consequences. For demonstration, let's suppose that there was only
a total of 100,000 humans on Earth, all in Africa, at moment A, arbitrarily set
a long, long, long time ago. Those 100,000 persons holds, of course, 100 % of
the genetic variety presently found in our flesh.
Let's
say that, starting at moment A, a part of that population start leaving Africa,
in tribes, clans, families or simply as individuals, gradually, decades after
decades, on the model of the English colonization of the thirteen colonies, the
French colonization of New-France or the Dutch colonization of South Africa,
that is to say that it was of not the whole population of the country of origin
that left Europe to the new lands, but only a part of it, in a gradual manner.
Let's
suppose that, in the process of that migration, 20 % of the original
inhabitants (or their descendants) had left to settle in the new continents
existing beyond Africa. That would mean that 20 % of the human genes have moved
to the new continents and that the remainder, 80 %, is still carried out in the
80 % of the population that stayed Africa.
At
moment B, arbitrarily set several thousands of years after the beginning of
extra-Africa colonization, the population living outside of Africa, amid vast
amounts of territory full of food in the form of animals, berries, fishes,
etc., has grown explosively, and from the mark of 20,000 persons, have now
reach the mark of a million persons. At the same time, the population who has
never left Africa (80,000 persons), has grown much more slowly, since they live
in the exact same habitat, with the same resources. Let's say, arbitrarily,
that they have reach again the 100,000 marks.
What
it means, is that 20 % of the total human population who has left Africa now
represent 80 % of the total human population. But their share of the genetic
pool is still now much the same, since they left with 20 % of the genetic pool,
and retain only that proportion of 20 %. By contrast, those who never left
Africa still have 80 % of the gene pool, even though they now represent now
only a tenth of the human total population. That is why, in other words, small
African villages, located sometimes a few kilometres apart are more genetically
diverse that, say, the population of Germany is from the population of China.
It explains why Africa, mainly Black Africa, is the place where can be found
the greater diversity in matters of genes, cultures, tongues, societies, etc.
Each tribe, no matter how small, is a society in and by itself.
All
that is why Africa is the most diverse part of the planet. It is where the gene
pool is the most concentrated, while the rest of the world is where the same gene
pool is the least diluted.
Another
example of the principle of diffusion is simply the way the Austronesians
themselves spread in the last five millennium. Most of the gene pool of that
cultural group remains in the veins of the half-million Formosans, descendants
of the 'nine tribes' in a manner of speaking. The remainder flows in the veins
of all the descendants of those who migrated out of Taiwan, toward the far
reaches of the vast Indo-Pacific region, where lives the hundred of millions of
persons who are issued from the wayward 'tenth tribe', so to speak.
Following
that same principle of diffusion, it is not farfetched to imagine a scenario
where some Formosans, again in tribes, clans, families, or simply as
individuals, leaves what is now Taiwan to spread to the nearby islands of the
Ryukyus chain, island by island. The isolation provides by the distance between
very small islands could easily explain why their common language progressively
became different dialects, then different languages, all along the archipelago
that went from Taiwan to Kyushu.
When
the migration reached the last-mentioned island, much larger, the first of the
four large Japanese islands constituting the Japanese archipelago, the number
of settlers grew significatively and the abondance of resources permitted much
larger groupings. The early Japanese then expanded northward, slowly, decade
after decade, century after century, till they reached Hokkaido, settled
remarkedly late, in modern time, because of the resistance of the earlier
inhabitants, the Ainu and/or the Ennishi. Had the modern State of Japan been
powerful enough to retain South Sakhalin (Karafuto Prefecture) and the Kurils, against
the stronger Russians (living in Tsarist Russia, then in the later-on USSR),
those regions would probably be inhabited today by a large majority of Japanese
people.
That
Hokkaido Hypothesis would both explain the large number of Ryukyan languages,
that are still spoken (or used to be spoken) on the small islands of the Ryukyu
archipelago, and the unicity of the largest Japonic language, Japanese.
Presently, the scenario that prevails among linguists, despite the scarcity of
sources, is that the early Japonic languages emerge on the Asiatic mainland,
went south to the tip of the Korean peninsula, jumped to Kyushu, and then
forked in two, A) with one branch going South-West, along the islands of the
Ryukyu chain, where they divided in the many small Ryukyuan languages, B) and
one branch going North-East, becoming Japanese along the way, and following the
Japanese archipelago to its tip on Hokkaido.
The
problem, with that scenario, is that there is scant evidence of it, found in
areas of the Korean peninsula. That lack of evidence makes it difficult to
prove it in a definitive way, hence the eventual or potential appeal of a
possible alternative: the Hokkaido Hypothesis.
THE YANBIAN VARIATION
The
Yanbian Variation of the Hokkaido Hypothesis postulate that the spread of a
hypothetic Japonic branch of Austronesian up the Ryukyu and the Japanese
archipelagos was accompanied by a spread of early Koreanic languages up the
Korean peninsula and into the reaches of Inner Manchuria, where is located the
Yanbian Korean autonomous region.
To
link the Hokkaido Hypothesis with the Korean Sub-Hypothesis, on must imagine
that the early Ryukyuans, when reaching the island of Kyushu, divided in two
branches, A) one going straight north, across the not-very-large Tsushima
Strait, B) one continuing along the chain formed by other three islands of the
Japanese archipelago. The waves of migrants might have reached the island of
Jeju first and the Asiatic mainland second, or the reverse. It probably does
not matter a lot to know which was first, in the long run, given the proximity
of the two. What is sure is that the language of the first settlers of Jeju
start to diverge at ont point from the early Korean, becoming the Jeju
language, a Koreanic language that is, so far, the only known relative of
Korean.
From
the southernmost tip of the peninsula, the proto-Korean language (and the
population speaking it) spread north, again slowly and progressively, while
absorbing or pushing back earlier inhabitants, till they reach of fastness of
Manchuria, homeland of the Manchus and many other tribes and nations beside.
The Manchus, of course, are those who, after conquering Imperial China, created
the last Chinese Imperial dynasty. The Chinese people -that is to say the Hans-
started settling Manchuria in their millions quite late in their history, not
before the end of the XIXth century and the beginning of the XXth, till they
became, by far, the majority of the population in that North-Eastern part of
today's China).
LAST WORDS
A
lot of time may passe before the Hokkaido Hypothesis and the Yanbian Variation
are proved or disproved. If enough evidence, material, linguistic or otherwise,
are found to establish it, it would mean that the Formosans, who likely came
from Mainland China in ancient times, have engendered a part of the human
population that was quite larger than previously thought. Not only, would they
have been the progenitors of the languages of the Malay world, the Micronesian
world, the Polynesian world and the Malgache world, but they would also be
responsible for all the languages (and the present inhabitants) of North-East
Asia. Japanese and Korean were long seen as isolates languages, then as part of
very small linguistic families of their own, the Japonic one and the Koreanic
one. In the end, they may simply prove to be subfamilies of the quite large
Austranesian linguistic family, one of the most important subdivisions of the
Terran population...
Fruitful Formosans, indeed.
General map of Northeast Asia (source: World Atlas). The Yanbian Korean
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https://twitter.com/RnaudBertrand/status/1652215856905191424
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MORE: @charles.millar3 (Twitter)
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