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

 481  The Eastern Himalayan Corridor in Prehistory   In modern East Asia, many languages, such as Vietnamese, Thai, Canto- nese, Mandarin, show little to no morphology and so do not occupy any place in this two-dimensional spectrum, but lie instead on a third typological axis, discerned by [Schlegel 1808], ranging from synthetic, i. e. agglutinative or flexional, to purely analytical and devoid of morphology. This widespread attrition of older morphology limits the scope for reconstructing the histori- cal morphology of languages and linguistic subgroups which have come to be caught up in the maelstrom of what historically became the East Asian linguistic area. [Fortescue 1998, 2011] advanced the theory of an ancient circumpolar Uralo-Siberian linguistic phylum comprising Uralic, Yukagir, Eskimo-Aleut, Nivkh and Chukotko-Kamchatkan, which he associates with Neolithic as- semblages appearing across Siberia and circumpolar North America between 5000 and 3000 bc during the thermal maximum following the last Ice Age, several millennia after the land bridge across the Bering Strait had disap- peared. Fortescue first pushes the comparative method as far as he can take it before introducing the notion of a ‘mesh’. Fortescue’s mesh not only denotes language families which derive from a single putative linguistic phylum at a time depth which lies beyond what is, strictly speaking, historically recon- structible, Fortescue’s mesh also represents a complex picture of language shift. Beyond the many known cases of language shift in the circumpolar region, Fortescue has sought typological traits which can be identified as the residue of language shifts in more distant prehistory. The mesh notion is invoked because the time depth of the relationship and the complexity of Figure 7. Some historical antecedents leading up to the East Asian hypothesis