Проблемы китайского и общего языкознания. К 90-летию С. Е. Яхонтова

 470  George van Driem   population geneticists find molecular corroboration of what linguists and eth- nographers have been claiming for centuries. Yet correlations should not be confused with identity. The correlation of a particular genetic marker with the distribution of a certain language family should not be simplistically equated with populations speaking languages of a particular linguistic phylum. Historical linguistics and human population genetics present two distinct windows on the past. The time depth accessible to historical linguistics is an order of magnitude shallower than the time depth accessible to genetics. Language families represent the maximal time depth accessible to histori- cal linguists because the relatedness of languages belonging to a recognised linguistic phylum represents the limit of what can be demonstrated by the comparative method. This epistemological barrier represents the linguistic event horizon. Languages and genes are independent. Yet the probabilistic basis for possible correlations between the genetic markers and the language of a speech community lies in the fact that genes are invariably inherited by offspring from their parents, whereas languages are in most cases, but not invariably, inherited by offspring from either or both of their parents. The potential skewing effects of natural selection, gene surfing, recurrent bottlenecks during range expansion and the sexually asymmetrical introgres- sion of resident genes into incursive populations have been discussed else- where [van Driem 2012b]. Factors such as ancient population structure and possible ancient Y chromosomal introgression could also affect inferences and interpretations based on any single Y chromosomal locus when attempt- ing to reconstruct migrations and elucidate the geographical origins of popu- lations [Mendez et al . 2013]. Even with all these caveats in place, we must be especially aware of all provisos and qualifications included in our inferences and working hypotheses when attempting to understand East Asian ethnolin- guistic phylogeography. Although paternal ancestry only represents a very small segment of our ancestry, emerging autosomal findings appear, at least in part, to corroborate the reconstruction presented here for meridional East Asia [Chaubey et al . 2010; Jinam et al . 2013]. Whilst father tongues may predominate globally, mother tongues certainly do exist in the sense that there are areas on the planet where the linguistic af- finity of a community appears to correspond to the maternally transmitted mi- tochondrial lineage which the speakers share with other linguistically related communities. In this sense, in the north of today’s Pakistan, the Balti speak a Tibetic mother tongue but profess a paternal religion that was first propagated in this area as early as the 8th century by men who came from the Near East, al- though the wholesale conversion of Baltistan to Islam is held to have begun only in the 14th century. The most prevalent mitochondrial DNA lineages amongst