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

 471  The Eastern Himalayan Corridor in Prehistory   the Baltis are shared with other Tibetan communities, whereas the prevalent Y chromosomal haplogroups probably entered Baltistan during the introduction of Islam [Zerjal et al . 1997; Quintana-Murci et al . 2001; Qamar et al . 2002] 1 . At the same time, a disconnect is sometimes observed between a highly salient genetic marker and the linguistic affinity of a community’s language. Hungarians lack the TatC deletion defining the Y chromosomal haplogroup N3 (Tat) notwithstanding the prevalence of this marker amongst Uralic lan- guage communities [Lì et al . 1999], suggesting that those who introduced the Hungarian language to Pannonia left no prominent genetic signature. This lineage died out, or a resident population adopted the language of newcomers without undergoing a replacement of their paternal lineages. In fact, the an- cestrally preponderant Hungarian paternal lineage might already have been lost or greatly diluted by the time that the Hungarians reached Pannonia, for the case of the Hungarian language is geographically analogous to that of Ossetian. Hungarian forms the easternmost Uralic clade together with the closely related languages Khanti and Mansi, formerly known as Ostyak and Vogul. Yet in terms of its geographical position Hungarian is the most south- western Uralic language, just as Ossetian, the westernmost Iranian language, is phylogenetically a member of the Eastern Iranian subgroup. Such cases underscore the fact that the linguistic ancestors of a lan- guage community are not precisely the same set of people as the biological 1 Has female irony on the part of successive generations of Balti mothers been preserved in the Balti practice of calling their language ཕ་སྐད་ phaskat ‘father tongue’, their homeland ཕ་ཡུལ་ phayul ‘father-realm’ and their birthplace ཕ་ས་ phasa ‘fatherland’? [Sprigg 2002, Biel- meier, forthcoming]. Bettina Zeisler takes objection to the historically attested and recur- rent phenomenon of an incursive population of male migrants availing themselves of the ‘womenfolk in place’. Her fully understandable aversion leads her to construct a contrary narrative, whereby the Tibetic languages of Baltistan are viewed as being not as phono- logically conservative as they, in point of fact, very much are. She furthermore suggests that instead the language spoken in Baltistan ‘might have’ been a ‘Dardic’ language, ‘an Iranian language, Burushaski or perhaps even a Turkic language’, but asserts that ‘they certainly did not speak Tibetan’. One of the problems with Zeisler’s ‘alternative explana- tion’ hinges upon the set of referents denoted by her use of the pronoun ‘they’ in the latter assertion and to the particular slice of time during which these referents are supposed to have lived, and where. The population genetic data show that, whether or not ‘Balti is the original language of Baltistan’, the current population of Baltistan share their mito- chondrial ancestry with other Tibetic speaking populations on the Tibetan plateau, whilst the predominant Y chromosomal lineages in Baltistan are likely to be correlated with the historical introduction of Islam from the Near East and that these paternal lineages were not, contrary to the scenario proposed by Zeisler, introduced by ‘Amdo speaking soldiers’ [ pac e Zeisler 2005: 53–57, 2009: 88, 2016: 235–236].