Asia Is Not an Island

Well, I must correct something I said. Remember how I was saying the significance of food in anime might be related to the suspected Austronesian substrate in Japanese, given the significance of food in Polynesian cultures? Well, along the way, I had a discussion of the Yue peoples and their food concepts. Only, I mistakenly identified the Yue (specifically Vietnamese) as Austronesian. Only, Vietnamese is Austroasiatic, not Austronesian. I think I just misread the stuff I was basing that on. Everything else I said does stand—the Japanese are very similar to other Pacific islanders, and food really is important in Yue culture—but those two facts are not (demonstrably) related.

In my defense, who names two language groups whose speakers sometimes share borders such similar things? We don't call Tibeto-Burman "Indo-Burman", even though a lot of them are spoken in India—because that would just cause needless confusion, given that one of the other major language groups of their region is Indo-European (and specifically Indo-Iranian, or Indo-Aryan). But we have Austronesian and Austroasiatic, which not only both start with "Austro" they both have "sia" in them. Since we're on the subject, why do we even call that language group Austronesian? Their Urheimat is, to a reasonable degree of probability, Taiwan, and Taiwan is not that far south. How about just "Nesian"? Nearly everybody who speaks those languages lives on an island or a peninsula.

I think another factor in my confusion is there is a theory, admittedly from Russian linguists (who also gave the world Japhetic theory and are the only guys still taking Nostratic seriously), that Austronesian and Austroasiatic might be unified in a larger "Austric" language family. The trouble is, of course, that a lot of their common features might be areal rather than genetic, since both are spoken in Southeast Asia; there's the same trouble in determining whether Uralic, Altaic, Mongolic, and Tungusic—all spoken in the Eurasian steppes—are related to each other (or even, some of them, exist—the relatedness of Altaic languages, for instance, isn't actually that well-demonstrated once you get beyond Turkic).