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

 479  The Eastern Himalayan Corridor in Prehistory   encompassing Kradai, Austronesian, Tibeto-Burman, Hmong-Mien and Aus- troasiatic. Starosta was not the first to conceive of an East Asian superfamily. Once a polyphyletic view of numerous distinct Asian language families had been propounded by [Julius von Klaproth 1823], scholars began to advance proposals that might link some of these linguistic phyla together in the form of larger genetic constructs. Gustave Schlegel in[Schlegel 1901, 1902] agreed with Klaproth in assess- ing Kradai to be unrelated to Sinitic, merely replete with Sinitic loans, and argued instead that Kradai was related to Austronesian. Schlegel’s old theory was taken up by [Benedict 1942, 1976, 1990] under the guise of ‘Austro- Thai’, though this putative genetic link always constituted an ingredient in grander proposals such as Austric or ‘Japanese/Austro-Tai’. Weera Ostapirat in [Ostapirat 2005, 2013] was the first to present methodologically sound and cogent historical comparative evidence that Kradai and Austronesian repre- sent coordinate branches of an Austro-Tai family. The coordinate branches of Ostapirat’s Austro-Tai represent an ancient migration from what today is southern China across the Taiwan Strait to Formosa, where the Austrone- sian linguistic phylum established itself, whilst the proto-language ancestral to today’s Kradai language communities remained behind on the mainland. Much later, the Formosan exodus led to the spread of the Malayo-Polynesian branch throughout the Philippines, the Malay peninsula, the Indonesian Ar- chipelago, Madagascar and Oceania. Transgressing the linguistic event horizon, [Conrady 1916, 1922] and [Wulff 1934, 1942] each proposed a superfamily consisting of Austroasiatic, Austronesian, Kradai and Tibeto-Burman. Other than the neglect of Hmong- Mien, the mega-Austric superfamily envisaged by Conrady and Wulff al- ready comprised all the constituents of Starosta’s East Asian. [Benedict 1942], [Blust 1996] and [Peiros 1998] proposed an Austric superfamily com- prising Austroasiatic, Austronesian, Kradai and possibly Hmong-Mien 1 . 1 Sino-Austronesian, staunchly and solely defended by [Sagart 1993, 2005], stands in stark contrast to these superfamilies. This highly restricted superfamily unites Sinitic and Austronesian and, more recently, ‘Sino-Tibetan’ and Austronesian into a single phylum. [Blust 2009: 707] writes: ‘The Sino-Austronesian hypothesis is the product of an id e fixe ’. Sagart’s phylogeny of Formosan languages is rejected by [Blust 2009], [Winter 2010] and [Teng and Ross 2010]. Sagart misanalysed the Puyuma data in an attempt to assail the Nuclear Austronesian hypothesis proposed by [Ross 2009]. Nuclear Austro- nesian comprises all Austronesian languages other than Puyuma, Rukai and Tsou, the latter each representing primary branches of Austronesian. [Winter 2010] argues that the empirical basis for Sagart’s hierarchical grouping of Formosan languages is flimsy and leads to an overly simplistic model of prehistoric migrations on Formosa. As an idea,