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

 487  The Eastern Himalayan Corridor in Prehistory   represent the first sub-branches of the Sinitic subgroup to have split off from Proto-Sinitic, even before the splitting off of the Mĭn dialects [de Sousa 2012]. The idea of an Altaic substrate influence on Sinitic, and on Mandarin in particular, has been in the air for quite some time, e. g. [Poppe 1965; Ch’en 1976]. In terms of its salient typological features, [Hashimoto 1976a, 1976b, 1980, 1986] argued that Sinitic could be thought of as an ancient Tibeto- Burman language which underwent pidginisation in the mouths of an Altaic population in the northeast. Hashimoto adopted [Ballard 1979] metaphor, which depicts Sinitic as a mosaic of structural features representing a typo- logical halfway house between Southeast and Northeast Asia. Some have responded critically, e. g. [Li 1995], whereas others have received the idea favourably, e. g. [Norman 1982; Wadley 1996] 1 . In terms of gross syntactic element order, Sinitic is not unique. Mru in the Chittagong and Karen in the Tenasserim are likewise not verb-final. Did Sinitic undergo an actual process of creolisation, or was the language just subject to successive phases of ex- treme contact influence over the millennia as a lingua franca shifting its cen- tre periodically from one capital to another? [Starostin 2008], posthumous argued that the lexical items shared between Proto-Altaic and Proto-Sinitic, but not with other Tibeto-Burman languages, indicated a not always friendly ancient contact situation which arose only after Sinitic had split off and mig- rated northeast to the lower Yellow River basin. Hashimoto’s and Ballard’s theory of Sinitic having arisen from a Tibeto-Burman creole has recently also been taken up by [Comrie 2008] and [DeLancey 2011]. The ancient eastward expansion of Tibeto-Burman to the North China Plain is likely also to have brought the Trans-Himalayan group ancestral to Si- nitic into contact with ancient Proto-Austronesians on the eastern seaboard 2 . If ancient Hmong-Mien were once a predominant group in what today is southern China, then future linguistic research could evaluate the hypothesis of ancient language contact between Hmong-Mien and Kradai in the vast hybrid zone south of the Yangtze, where these two linguistically distinct sets of populations interacted. In a later epoch, a new episode of language con- tact arose between Tibeto-Burman and the ancient Hmong-Mien and Kradai when Sinitic expanded southward. [Ballard 1979, 1984] argued that the Wú 1 Wadley disbelieves the existence of a Manchu-Mandarin pidgin during the Qīng dy- nasty (1644–1911), but he is receptive to Hashimoto’s and Ballard’s central thesis regar- ding profound substrate influence on the formation of Sinitic at a greater time depth. 2 I have suggested that Sagart’s purported ‘Sino-Austronesian’ correspondences, if not just representing chance resemblances, could be a residue of such an early contact be- tween Austronesian and Sinitic in the Lóngshān interaction sphere in the fourth and third millennia bc [van Driem 1998, 2005].