More Thoughts On Red River

The first twelve episode cours of the anime Red River a.k.a. Anatolia story, based upon the long hit manga series of the same name finished yesterday, and has prompted me to research the actual history of the period depicted in this historical fiction piece (another twelve episodes are contracted for the fourth quarter of this year).

One of the points highlighted by the series that often gets overlooked in academic research is that: (1) the Hittites, the Mittani kingdom, a Mesopotamian regime, and the Egyptian 18th dynasty, were all contemporaneous, and (2) that these kingdoms meaningfully interacted with each other, exchanging correspondence, diplomats, and brides with each other, and engaging in military conflicts with the intermediate Hittite empire.

At least two royal Egyptian brides were from the Mittani Kingdom in roughly the 14th century BCE when Red River is set.

This is especially notable because, while the everyday commoners in the Mittani Kingdom were Hurrian language speakers (a language associated with the highlands of the Zargos Mountains and to a lesser extent the eastern Anatolian highlands where the possibly related Hattic language was spoken), the Mittani elites in the 1300s BCE spoke a Sanskrit derived Indo-Aryan language (that gave rise, most famously, to the Hindi language of northern India) and worshiped Indo-Aryan gods in their pantheon that became part of the Hindu religion rather than the Avestan language and religion that was starting to emerge in what is now Iran at around this time. (A cultural affiliation that neither the anime or the manga make much of.)

The Indo-Aryan linguistic and religious link to western Iran and connection the Anatolia and Egypt, disappears, however, when the Mittani kingdom falls, for historical reasons that like its brief appearance in the Mittani kingdom have since been lost and are currently unknown.

The Mittani kingdom featured in Red River as a major military adversary of the Hitties, therefore, provides a concrete human, person to person bridge between the culture of South Asian Indo-Europeans and late Bronze Age ancient Egypt: two cultural worlds usually thought of as unrelated and independent of each other despite being contemporaneous.

Actual history is unclear over whether the famous ancient Egyptian Queen Nefertiti was one of those Mittani brides or not, as the manga and anime assert, because it is a legitimate historical possibility and makes for a good story. But the historicity of the Mittani kingdom providing two royal brides to Egypt in the historical era in which Red River is set is not seriously questioned, nor is the Red River story point that at least one of those marriages was driven to a significant extent by a Mittani expectation of receiving large amounts of gold from Egypt in exchange (although, historically, the Egypt failed to deliver the gold).

Layers Of Language and Culture In West Eurasia (An Overview)

A useful way to think about the history and pre-history of Europe and West Asia since the Last Glacial Maximum is to frame it as a matter of techno-linguistic-cultural waves and layers.

The earliest layer is that of European, Levantine, and Caucasian hunter-gatherers, who are quite distinct and segregated populations from each other and not merely gradual clines of different degrees of genetic admixture. Prior to the Neolithic Revolution, Caucasian hunter-gathers and Levantine hunter-gathers were as distinctively different from each other (or more so) than an Irishman is from a man in China today, at a distance of a few hundred miles from each other or less, and while there was admixture during and after the Fertile Crescent Neolithic Revolution, the populations remained very genetically distinct until the Bronze Age, and remain distinguishable, genetically, even today.

Hunter-gather cultures in Anatolia and the Levant are just on the verge of transitioning to becoming Neolithic farmer cultures in sites like Göbekli Tepe and signs of proto-farming in the Levant, when the Younger Dryas climate event hits and postpones that breakthrough for a few thousand years after these false starts, until you get the Fertile Crescent Neolithic revolution.

The Fertile Crescent Neolithic Revolution collects crops and animals, which are native to different parts of the Fertile Crescent, to domesticate and then combined them into a Fertile Crescent Neolithic package over a few centuries (that was tweaked somewhat with a few more domesticated plants and animals in each direction it expanded , like the donkey added in Egypt and a few more crops in Greece and the Balkans), but still not fully merging ethnically (and probably not linguistically either) and instead remaining ethnically distinct first farmer cultures and populations.

The group of first farmers derived from an ethnicity known in ancient DNA circles as Caucasian hunter-gatherers heads east to bring herding and farming into West Asia. 

The group of first farmers in the Levant heads south to bring herding and farming into Egypt, Ethiopia, and the rest of North Africa. This branch can be associated with the Afro-Asiatic languages, although whether the Afro-Asiatic languages originated in the Neolithic Levant, or were a back reaction from some Northeast African hunter-gatherer language that dominated culturally over the original Levantine farmers and then expanded back to North Africa and the Levant from perhaps Ethiopia or upper Egypt, is hard to know.

The group of first farmers in Western Anatolia expands in two waves that split off from the same source West into Europe: the Linear Pottery Neolithic (LBK) farmers more or less to the north along central and eastern Europe's great rivers, and the Cardial Pottery (CP) farmers more or less along the northern coast of the Mediterranean. The archaeological record also suggest that the LBK farmers in turn had a fairly basal split into two distinct branches with different material culture traditions. Probably each of the three major components of the Western Anatolian first farmer traditions spoke different, related languages within a Western Anatolian first farmer language family.

As these first farmers expanded into the more agriculturally suitable areas that they encountered, they did so primarily as families that largely replaced the much more thinly populated existing hunter-gather populations (in many cases, the population density of farmers was as much as a hundred times greater than the hunter-gathers who had preceded them in the area and the farmers were also much more prone to stand their ground to protect their crops than to migrate away although early herders were more flexible and hunter-gathers transitioned to herding more easily than they transitioned to farming), although a small number of locals were integrated into each expanding first farmer population, mostly women taken as brides by first farmer men.

In most of Europe, societies in cultural continuity with these first farmers start to collapse. Maybe its due to unsustainable agricultural practices, maybe its due to natural climate changes. In the earlier stages of this decline, there is some introgression of people who were part of remaining European hunter-gather cultures (sometimes partially adopting herding), who had continued to persist in places unsuitable for Neolithic farming, mostly women, and some first farmer communities revert to herding and hunting and gathering almost entirely, largely abandoning farming.

A few places, like Sumerian, Egyptian, and highlands West Asian societies, that were some of the earliest adopters of the Fertile Crescent Neolithic Revolution start to innovate and adopt early metallurgy, proto-writing or a true written language, and larger scale political and social organizations with kings and high priests who are more than just chiefs and shamans of small tribes or bands. They ran kingdoms and established full fledged bureaucratically organized religious institutions.

The ergative language speaking linguistic groups of the highlands of Anatolia, the Zargos mountains, and the Caucasus mountains, and of Mesopotamia constitute one group of early metal age societies which emerged in specific communities that used their technological advantages of conquer societies that were stuck in the Neolithic farming era and didn't adopt as fast. These specific communities probably emerged from an ergative language first farmer society. 

The Ancient Egyptians were another early adopter of metal age technologies whose military, economic, and cultural influence spread its non-ergative language Afro-Asiatic substrate across an ergative language first farmer substrate that extended, at least, to parts of North Africa, either via the Southern coast of the Mediterranean, or via Iberia.

The Harappan culture in the Indus River Valley and Northeast India is a third early adopter of technological advances of Copper Age technology that manages, somehow, to become dominant with much division or warfare.

Meanwhile, Pontic Caspian steppe hunter-gathers who had adopted herding and domesticated the horse, and made advances in making practical use of simple animal pulled wheeled vehicles enjoyed a fruitful synthesis with nearby West Anatolian derived first farmers from the LBK branch of their expansion into Europe, probably in Sredny Stog, that gave rise to the first proto-Indo-Europeans. Maybe the farmers had early metallurgy already, maybe the herders borrowed it from neighboring societies like the Caucasians, or maybe it arose independently not long after the synthesis that created proto-Indo-European society. But, the Indo-Europeans were already a society of Bronze Age horsemen and charioteers before their main expansion. One of the earliest expansions from this PIE core is east into the Tarim Basin where they become the Tocharians.

When a large area arid climate event strikes West and South Eurasia from Ireland to the Middle East and North Africa to Harappan territory in South Asia, in a time frame that peaks around 2500 BCE to 1500 BCE with climate leading its impacts on the affected societies, societies that were still Neolithic farming societies or were less advanced entirely collapse, while societies that had advanced to the copper age or very early Bronze Age are weakened and vulnerable to conquest, but don't actually collapse.

Indo-Europeans expand in all directions into the vacuum as the climate event strains existing cultures. In most places that had not reached the metal age when this happened and had almost fully collapsed, the Indo-Europeans almost fully wiped out existing hunter-gather and first farmer men, while assimilating some of the women from the existing culture, in patriarchal clans. This was the story for the Corded Ware Culture, more or less in central and eastern Europe, and the story of the Bell Beaker culture invaders of Great Britain and Ireland.

In places where early metal age cultures were still standing and just weakened when they arrived, like the Harappan culture of South Asia that gave rise to Sanskrit speaking Indo-Aryan society (that briefly extended as far as the Mittani empire at the Hittite Empire's border, before it was replaced by the Indo-Iranian Zoroastrian culture), the Hattic culture of Anatolia which came to be ruled by the Hittites, and the Aegean (where they conquered the Greeks and Hattic-related Minoans but adopted considerable parts of local language and culture), and Basque Country (it isn't entirely clear if this is a first farmer society remnant or if it was a distant and first farmer substrate influenced far outpost of early metal aged culture, probably the latter), there was more give and take, with a greater substrate influence on the conqueror's language through substrate influence, on the conqueror's religious beliefs and identity, and other deep rooted aspects of local culture (like Harappan curry). Isolating geography in Sardinia, and in the highlands of the Italian Peninsula's Etruscans and the Alpine kin, and in the highlands of Basque country (possibly assisted by its cluster of RH negative blood types) resisted longer and were changed less by the Indo-Europeans, although most ultimately fell to them, aided by somewhat less collapsed societies with somewhat more advanced early metal aged cultures (and by adopting technologies from the Indo-Europeans who sought to conquer them).

Indo-European expansion wasn't unchecked, however. The Afro-Asiatic cultures of the Levant and Egypt managed to resist them as did Mesopotamia, which Afro-Asiatic people had conquered from the Sumerians before this collapse. Geography prevented them from expanding past the Tarim Basin into East Asia and Central Asia. In Europe's far Northeast, as far as what is now Finland, northern Sweden, the Baltic states, and much of what is now Russia, as well as (much later) Hungary, Uralic people arrived as a post-Indo-European layer, or arrived to replace hunter-gather-fishing populations that the Indo-Europeans either never reached or didn't manage to hold onto for very long.

Then, another climate event triggered Bronze Age collapse around 1200 BCE. This only slightly unsettles the division of the world between Indo-European societies and Afro-Asiatic ones, for example, with the migration of Mycenaean Greek sea people into the Southern Levant after being fended off by more robust Egypt, to become the Philistines.

During Bronze Age collapse and its immediate aftermath, the waves of migration and war in Europe and West Asia become intramural fights between Indo-European people beyond the standoff between the Bell Beaker Indo-Europeans in Western Europe (known for their archery) and their successors, and the Corded Ware people to their east in Europe and their successors (know for their battle axes), whose respective territories shifted only a little (most notably midway through the Bronze Age in the vicinity of Denmark) from about 2000 BCE to 1200 BCE.

As Bronze Age collapse struck, Anatolian Indo-Europeans and Greek Indo-Europeans fought the Trojan War until it all collapsed into the Greek Dark Ages. Around that time that the Greek dark ages ended and classical Greek civilization started to emerge, Celtic peoples expanded from somewhere around Czechia as far west as Ireland and as far southeast as Anatolia. As Europe and West Asia emerged from the dark ages, the Iron Age technologies that the Hittites has managed to prevent its neighbors from acquiring prior to Bronze Age collapse, became ubiquitous. Iron wasn't actually a superior metal for weapons to bronze, but it was easier to mass produce and almost as good (and in isolated communities in what is now Iran, high quality steel far superior to bronze or iron was invented, around 1000 BCE, only to be lost centuries later before it could be adopted by the Roman Empire or the Islamic Empire).

The Iron Age was followed by Greco-Roman classical civilization eventually leading to Greek conquests of West Asia up to India (only to ultimately lose most of this territory one way or another in several big installments), and to the Roman Empire at its peak that reached Hadrian's Wall in Britain, Romania, the Levant, Egypt, North Africa, Southern Europe, and Anatolia. This lasted until another climate event led to the Western Roman Empire's collapse. A century after Rome collapsed, the Islamic empire expanded into vast swaths of territory in North Africa, Southwest and West Asia, Iberia, Malta, and the Balkans and beyond into South Asia and Southeast Asia and the Sahel, while the Christian Byzantine empire held on for several more centuries as it gradually lost territory, until it fell entirely to what had morphed in several rounds of Islamic regime changes into an Ottoman Empire that absorbed and coopted into Islam, Turkic invaders with origins in Southeast Asia, with the little interruption of the Mongol Empire along the way.

While the Islamic empire expanded, non-Muslim Europe collapsed with Germanic, Slavic, and Uralic tribes roaming about Europe in the migration period (giving rise to Hungary whose Magyar rulers swiftly converted from being pagans to Christians), Charlemagne and feudal lords running Europe in a fig leaf of a Holy Roman Empire under the Pope and launching several largely futile Crusades into the Levant, Viking raiders plundered Europe and briefly settled in North American only to collapse there and retreat (one branch of Vikings became the founding dynasty of and rulers of Russia's slavs), the Mongol Empire spanning from Persia to Korea before collapsing in the 13th century, multiple waves of the Black Plague ravaging Europe from its source in the east, missionaries re-Christianizing Europe from Ireland to the east until the last pagans of Europe are in the Urals and almost everyone else has nominally become Catholic by the late 11th century CE, and monastic orders doing what they could to preserve classical civilization for the thousand years of the Middle Ages that ended with the Columbian Exchange as Iberians and other Europeans colonized the Americas, with the Renaissance that finally restored classical Roman levels of technology and social order, with the Protestant Reformation, and with the end of the Reconquest of Iberia from the Moors. I'll end this survey with the start of this early modern period around 1500 CE.

Now, I'm writing this post from memory, which is partially why I've left out some things, particularly in West Asia and the details in far Northeast Europe and North Asia. I've omitted the stories of the Armenians, the Kurds, and the Druze. I skipped the process by which the Sumerian language was replaced by a succession of Semitic languages in Southwest Asia and Mesopotamia's trade ties to the Indus Valley Civilization and the eastern coast of Africa. I haven't adequately covered the history of the Caucuses. I've left out the fairly well understood history of the Jewish people after the fall of the Second Temple around 70 CE and haven't said enough about the Phoenicians and the Punic people. I haven't discussed the rise of Christianity during the Roman Empire or the demise of Zoroastrianism and polytheistic paganism. I haven't explored the connections between the Jewish, Christian and Muslim accounts of Southwest Asia's history through the legendary histories of their holy texts and the historical realities. Nor have I discussed why the Bronze Age is so full of what I call "legendary history" that is a mix of fiction and fact in purportedly fictional accounts that is so predominant across cultures in this era. I've left out the expansion around the time of the domestication of the camel that gave rise to the Berber people. I've barely touched on the repopulation of Europe by hunter-gathers from basically three refuges after the Last Glacial Maximum. I haven't mentioned the Silk Road or the history of Central Asia before and after the Mongols. I didn't cover how pottery made its way from the coasts of China and Japan about 16,000 years ago, over thousands of year to produce the transition from the pre-pottery Neolithic in the Levant to the pottery Neolithic of Europe and the Levant, or how the Black Plague got to Europe. I omitted the trans-Saharan slave trade, and Roman, Greek, Egyptian, Anatolian, Germanic and Viking slavery practices.

But the point isn't to cover all of  the details. That would take a book, not a blog post. It is to provide an overarching framework into which the details can fit and be better understood. And, of course, this post only minimally touches upon history and pre-history become its title's West Eurasian scope, even though there was lots going on in the rest of the world which is much less well known. Africa, for example, didn't start to fall decisively behind the rest of the world technologically and economically until perhaps five or six hundred years ago, and it took quite a while before the gaps became as stark as they are today (a process that only really started in earnest around the time of the trans-Atlantic slave trade that started after the time period covered by this post).

Actually, to be honest, I'd started trying to frame the issues presented by the origins, cultures, and linguistic history of Greece, West Asia and Southwest Asia up through the early Iron Age, and ended up going a little further afield with a forward outlining Western Civilization from its earliest roots which would be about ten pages in print. I did touch on that and frame it in a narrative (admittedly one that is sometimes hotly contested by legitimate academics even in the present). But, I can refocus on that in a more detailed and referenced manner in a future post. 

Red River

Red River (Japanese: 天は赤い河のほとり, Hepburn: Sora wa Akai Kawa no Hotori; lit. 'The Sky Is on the Banks of the Red River'), also known as Anatolia Story, is a Japanese manga series written and illustrated by Chie Shinohara. The series was published by Shōgakukan in their Sho-Comi magazine from January 1995 to June 2002 and was collected in 28 tankōbon volumes. It is published in English in North America by Viz Media. An anime television series adaptation produced by Tatsunoko Production is set to premiere in July 2026. 

As of March 2019, the manga had over 20 million copies in circulation, making it one of the best-selling manga series. In 2001, Red River won the Shogakukan Manga Award for the shōjo category.

From Wikipedia.

The river after which the series was named, the "Kızılırmak (Turkish pronunciation: [kɯˈzɯɫɯɾmak], Turkish for "Red River"), historically known as the Halys River (Ancient Greek: Ἅλυς), is the longest river flowing entirely within Turkey.

I read this manga series when my children were in middle school, basically in the early twenty-tens, not long after I began this blog, as one of the first really epic manga series that I'd read. American comics and graphic novels have almost no sub-genre that approximates this series. 

It is back on my radar screen because the first episode of an anime based upon this manga series was released today, and so far, so good. It is a pretty faithful and successful adaptation so far.

Why am I writing about it here?

Because this manga series was instrumental in spurring my interest in prehistory, anthropology, and historical linguistics, in a story that brought the late Bronze Age Hittite Empire to life and contributed a lot to me caring about all of these fields. Some of my own writing on the Hittites can be found here.

And honestly, while it has fictional and magical elements, much like Bronze Age legendary history works actually written at or within a few centuries of that time period, by and large, this series has stood the test of time and is broadly consistent with what archaeologists, anthropologists, ancient historians, and historical linguistics scholars still believe now.

What all of those disciplines lack, however, that historical fiction like this can provide, is synthesis, relatability, and meaning. Academic scholars tend to focus in on tiny details and cower from providing a larger narrative or connecting the dots for fear of being wrong. But doing so takes away the joy and allure of that once captivated the people who are doing the work and keeps them motivated enough to continue to do so. Historical fiction can give the dry piecemeal reconstructions life and a "vibe" allowing you to feel some sense of what life was like back then.

The fictional account does so in ways big and small. For example, while the dialog is in Japanese (and translated into English in the versions I consume), this series retains enough of the historically accurate Hittite proper names to make those names relatable and not so intimidating, when you encounter them as you study the actual history of the Hittite people, a culture the remains the source of pivotal and important open questions in the broader picture of the Bronze Age and Indo-European linguistics.

Even the magical and supernatural and religious aspects of the story, while not actually things that happened in the past, are largely consistent with the religious and metaphysical worldviews of the people who lived in that era in Anatolia.

A Quick Recap Regarding The Indo-European Languages

 

This post is pretty much entirely old news that I've blogged about previously. But every once and a while it is worth recapping the basics for folks who are new to the discussion (and quite frankly, I just haven't had the time lately to post in more depth about more up to date developments in this field).

The Indo-European Languages

More than 40% of humans alive today speak an Indo-European language as their mother tongue, some 3.4 billion people (and well north of 50% if you count second-language learners). The top ten are:

Spanish ~484 million

English ~390 million

Hindi ~345 million

Portuguese ~250 million

Bengali ~242 million

Russian ~145 million

Punjabi ~120 million

Marathi ~83 million

Urdu ~78 million

German ~76 million

Via Razib Khan

It is also worth noting that the 'Indo" part of "Indo-European", basically, languages derived from Sanskrit (formally known as the Indo-Aryan language family) as it existed ca. 1500 BCE, is a huge part of the total with about 868 million speakers (about 39% of the top ten) among the top ten Indo-European languages, compared to about 1365 million for European languages (including native speakers of versions of those languages spoken mostly in their New World colonies in North America and South America, and in Australia and New Zealand) among the top ten Indo-European languages. There are more Sanskrit derived language speakers in the top ten than there are Latin derived (Romance) language speakers in the top ten.

Where Did The Indo-European Languages Come From?

All Indo-European languages are derived from the Proto-Indo-European language spoken by about 10,000-20,000 people in what is now Ukraine, probably making up several tribes of people with a mixed herder-farmer form of subsistence, around 3000 BCE. 

Speculatively, Proto-Indo-European may have arisen from a fusion of the language of an early herder community in the region and an early farmer community in the reegion.

The Indo-European language expansion had a large demic component (i.e. it involved Indo-Europeans people replacing or demographically swamping existing populations), although the extent that this happened varied considerably, from about 90% replacement in the British Isles ca. 2500-2400 BCE, to less than 15% in parts of Southern India (where Indo-European languages are currently not widely spoken in daily life as a first language). 

Indo-European Languages In South Asia

In India, the Indo-European demic component in places where Dravidian languages are now the predominant native language, is probably the product of a first wave of Indo-European conquest that covered almost all of the Indian subcontinent and led to the extinction of most of the then existing Dravidian language. This conquest was then followed by a Dravidian reconquest of most of the formerly Dravidian linguistic territory by speakers of a sole surviving Dravidian language in a small area that managed to escape language shift at the hands of the Indo-Aryan conquerors. The reconquest kept the invader's proto-Hindu religion (maintained to this day by members of a broad Brahmin caste called a "varna" in South India, who have significant ancestry from those invaders), however, mostly intact but with regional influences. Subsequent waves of Indo-European people migrated to Northern India after this reconquest, but not to Southern India.

This explains why the last date of mass Indo-European admixture is older in Southern India than in Northern India (which is mostly Indo-European speaking), why the Dravidian language family looks so young despite the fact that the most plausible time for it to emerge is in the South Asian Neolithic Revolution ca. 2500 BCE (not all that different from the Proto-Indo-European language, despite the fact that the Indo-European language family that is far more diverse and has far more time depth), why Indo-European ancestry found across all of India but in varying proportions by location and caste, and why Indo-European language speaking Hindus are much more likely to be vegetarians than Dravidian language speaking Hindus (vegetarianism was one aspect of the invader's religion that didn't survive the Dravidian reconquest).

Their expansion is summarized in  broad brush without some of the finer details in the map above, which is generally accurate but subject to revision as new evidence from archaeology and ancient DNA and historical linguistics refines it. 

Indo-European Anatolian Languages.

Probably the most controversial part of the map pertains to how the Anatolian Indo-European languages (which are now extinct) relate to the other Indo-European languages. 

These languages are greatly diverged from other Indo-European languages (and there is not much Steppe ancestry in ancient DNA from Neolithic and Bronze Age Anatolia), which has led some historical linguists to try to come up with contorted theories to explain what seems like a very old date of divergence of the Anatolian languages from the other Indo-European languages, in the face of genetic evidence, ancient historical records from nearby areas, and archaeology, that don't seem to fit this narrative.

For example, some scholars think that the Indo-European languages originated in Anatolia in the Neolithic era and then had a secondary expansion to almost everywhere else sometime after 3000 BCE. This well-intentioned effort to fit the linguistic distinctiveness of the Anatolian languages to the other evidence is wrong.

In my informed but not credentialed opinion, the Indo-European languages originated on the Steppe, and one wave of Indo-European migrants travelled to Anatolia around 2000 BCE (at a time when Indo-Europeans were rapidly expanding in all directions due to a climate driven collapse of civilizations in Europe and India at the time). The Anatolian languages are more distinct from other Indo-European languages. But this is not because the time depth of their relationship is older. 

Instead, it is because unlike most other places that the Indo-European languages expanded to, the local copper age/early Bronze Age civilization in Anatolia has not collapsed to nearly the same extent, so the Anatolian languages spread more through elite dominance than demically, and the Anatolian languages had a stronger substrate influence from the Hattic language spoken in the region before it was conquered by an Indo-European elite in the centuries following 2000 BCE from a couple of modest Indo-European villages, in a process of conquest that is historically attested that ultimately gave rise to a Hittite empire. Most historically attested Indo-European Anatolian languages are known only after the Hittite language fractured after the Hittite Empire collapsed in the regional phenomena known as Bronze Age collapse, ca. 1200 BCE, in a process similar to the fragmentation of the Romance languages after the fall of the Roman Empire. Only two or three of the Anatolian languages (including Hittite) predate this fragmentation.

The Anatolian languages also seem more distinct because the substrate languages for Indo-European languages in Europe were all part of the same Neolithic Paleo-European language family of the first farmers of Europe (who largely replaced early European hunter-gatherers), derived from their common origins in Western Anatolia (before Anatolia experienced a language shift in the Copper Age or early Bronze Age as invaders from the Caucuses and Western Asian highlands conquered its Neolithic civilization).

Some of what looks like shared Indo-European roots in European Indo-European languages is really the product of a shared Paleo-European linguistic substrate that is absent in the Anatolian languages and Tocharian languages (which are the most diverged from other European language causing some linguists to assume that the greater divergence represented greater time depth of the divergence).

The Tocharian language family

Another, less intense controversy in Indo-European historical linguistics is how the extinct Tocharian language family fits into the overall picture.

The Tocharian languages, attested in written form and spoken historically in the Tarim Basin of Central Asia, is the attested Indo-European language family that is probably most conservative with respect to Proto-Indo-European. This is because it experienced far less contact with other languages and had almost no substrate influence as the Tocharians moved into basically unoccupied territory. In the same way and for the same reasons, Icelandic is the most conservative Germanic language, the Spanish of the American Southwest is the most conservative Spanish dialect, and the Appalachian English dialect is closest in pronunciation to Shakespearian English. 

In my own life, I've personally seen that the Korean language dialect of Korean migrants to the U.S. is more conservative than that of Koreans who stayed in Korea. Languages evolve most slowly at the frontiers if they have limited language contract with other languages (something that obviously isn't true of second generation and later Korean language speakers in the U.S., of course).

Some Linguistic Hypotheses

* I think that it is very likely that the Korean language family and the Japanese language family are related, even if it is challenging to find "smoking gun" evidence of it today. Japanese may have also have some Manchurian linguistic influence. The broader Altaic hypothesis has less strong support, but there may be something to it.

* I think that it is very likely that the Dravidian language family was influenced by an African language family, with the vectors of that transmission probably being people from the Horn of Africa who also brought some key African Sahel domesticates to Southern India around the time of the South Indian Neolithic ca. 2500 BCE. 

* The Harappan language is almost surely not Indo-European, not Dravidian, and not Munda as a language family. It could conceivably have some connection to language isolates in the general region known as Indo-Pacific languages, or it might not. It is probably the main substrate influence on Sanskrit and through Sanskrit on the other Indo-European languages of India. The script associate with it was probably a proto-script, like a set of emojis or trademarks, and not a full written language. The same is true of the early Vinca script used in the Neolithic Balkans.

* I think that it is very likely that Indo-Aryans (Sanskrit speaking derived people) conquered almost all of India sometime in pre-history and imposing their language and the Hindu religion (although not as faithfully to some of its tenants like vegetarianism), except a small last stronghold, more or less in the vicinity of the modern city of Visakhapatnam, which then reconquered territory from the Indo-Aryans, restoring their dialect of the Dravidian language, but not effectively displacing the Hindu religion that the Indo-Aryan conquerors brought with them. This is why the Dravidian language family seems younger than it really is; it's historic linguistic diversity was wiped out at this point with most of its variants extinguished at this time. As I noted in a post at Wash Park Prophet:

[A]reas that are linguistically Indo-Aryan are more likely to be vegetarian than areas that are linguistically Dravidian, Munda or Tibeto-Burmese. Meat eating may reflect a thinner Indo-Aryan influence even in places that experienced a language shift to Indo-Aryan languages. Vegetarianism may alternatively reflect a stronger influence from the pre-Indo-Aryan Harappan society.

* Brahui, a Dravidian language pocket found far from the geographic range of the other Dravidian language, probably was not within the historic range of the Dravidian languages. Instead, it is probably a result of language shift through elite dominance around 1000 CE or so, by some foreign Dravidian warlord or king.

* Sometime around the Copper Age (a.k.a. the Eneolithic) in Anatolia, people from the eastern highlands brought the Hattic language (which preceded the Hittite language) to Anatolia. It is related to Kassite, other Iranian highland languages, and more remotely to most of the Caucasian languages (which are related to each other even if the connections are hard to establish), to Sumerian, and probably to Elamite. It is also probably related to Minoan. One of the litmus tests of all of these languages is that they were ergative. 

Hattic probably replaced the Neolithic language(s) of Anatolia, including the Western Neolithic language which spread across Europe in two main branches, the Linear Pottery culture (LBK) to through the rivers of the north, and the Cardial Pottery culture to more or less along the Mediterranean coast, which was very different from Hattic. The Western Anatolian Neolithic languages were the substrate languages for the Indo-European language in most of Europe, but not in Anatolia where the Hattic language was the substrate. Hattic substrate influence is the reason that Anatolian Indo-European languages like Hittite seem so diverged from other Indo-European languages, because the Hattic society was much healthier when the Indo-Europeans arrived than in other places where the Indo-Europeans conquered Neolithic societies in a state of collapse. The most basil branch of Indo-European was probably that spoken in the Tarim Basin, which was on a frontier with almost no substrate influence.

* It is very likely that the languages of the European hunter-gatherers are completely lost. The Uralic languages arrived much later. In the Americas and Japan and Australia, we know that indigenous hunter-gather language substrates had very little impact on the food producing conquerer languages, even when indigenous peoples made a large genetic contribution to the people speaking the food producer languages.

* Basque, therefore, is very unlikely to be an indigenous European hunter-gatherer language. It could be the last survivor of the language family of the first farmers of Europe rooted in Western Anatolia frmo around 6000 BCE to 4000 BCE, or it could reflect a very distant outpost of a Copper Age language probably in the same language family as Hattic and Minoan. I probably lean towards the Neolithic hypothesis, as the corpus of Hattic (which remained a written liturgical language for a thousand years after the Hittites took over) and of Basque are both large enough that a connection would have been established by linguists by now if it was present, even though both are ergative languages, but the rarity of ergative languages outside the West Asian highlands, ancient Mesopotamia, and places to the east of that, favor a copper age origin for it. The Paleo-Hispanic languages may have all been a coherent group and Tartessos in Southwest Iberia was metal rich and a strong candidate for the source for Plato's Atlantis story. The "Tartessian culture was born around the 9th century B.C. as a result of hybridization between the Phoenician settlers and the local inhabitants. Scholars refer to the Tartessian culture as "a hybrid archaeological culture".

* We know the Etruscan, Raetic, and Lemnian (together called the Tyrsenian languages, an areal designation, since while the connection of Etruscan and Raetic is pretty solid, the linguistic family connection to Lemnian is not, and possibly Camunic as well, although it could also be related to Celtic) are also not Indo-European languages and pre-date Indo-European:

• Etruscan: 13,000 inscriptions, the overwhelming majority of which have been found in Italy; the oldest Etruscan inscription dates back to the 8th century BC, and the most recent one is dated to the 1st century AD.
• Raetic: 300 inscriptions, the overwhelming majority of which have been found in the Central Alps; the oldest Raetic inscription dates back to the 6th century BC.
• Lemnian: 2 inscriptions plus a small number of extremely fragmentary inscriptions; the oldest Lemnian inscription dates back to the late 6th century BC.
• Camunic: may be related to Raetic; about 170 inscriptions found in the Central Alps; the oldest Camunic inscriptions dates back to the 5th century BC.

The ergative substrate influence probably explains its presence in Indo-European Pashto, Kurdish languages and Indo-Aryan languages, which was shared with Basque and is absent from most Indo-European languages. It suggest that Harappan was probably ergative. The Tyresnian languages apparently non-ergative character suggests that they aren't part of the same language family as Basque, and tends to favor a Copper Age origin for Basque rather than a Neolithic origin for it.

But we haven't deciphered them very well since the corpus of those writings has mostly been lost, and what we have left is mostly monolingual and short. We can't even say with completge confidence that they were all in the same language family, although ancient Rhaetic spoken to the north of Etruscan (not linguistically related to the similarly named modern Indo-European minority language of Switzerland) was probably in the same language family with Etruscan. somewhat conflicting historical evidence suggests that Lemnians were migrants from the Alps and/or northern Italy, probably during the Greek dark ages after Bronze Age collapse had run its course.

We also don't know much about the substrate language that influenced Mycenaean Greek.

Late Linguistic Arrivals To Europe

Hungarian entered the Carpathian Basin at the tail end of the 9th century and Finnish and its congeners arrived in the Baltic region around the same time [Ed. some scholars, however, date it to much earlier in the 1st Millennium BCE], ultimately both from the southern Urals (hence Uralic) and Turkey, formerly populated by speakers of numerous Anatolian (ergo, IE) languages, including Lydian, Carian, and Hittite, the first IE tongue, which were overlaid by Turkic speakers from the distant east beginning in the 11th century.

From Language Log.

Note, however, that between the era in which Anatolian language were spoken in what is now Turkey, and the 11th century dominance of the Turkic language, there were also other languages spoken there, including Greek, Persian (which is moderately related to its fellow Indo-Iranian Kurdish languages, which are first attested in the 9th century but are surely at least somewhat older) and Armenian, all of which are also Indo-European languages, as well as the Semitic Arabic language, which was first spoken by significant numbers of people in Anatolia (and also in Iberia) in the 7th century.

Other languages also arose or first appeared in Europe in the Middle Ages.

The Indo-Aryan (i.e. Sanskrit derived) language(s) of the Romani people, a remote branch of the Indo-European language not previously found in Europe arrived in the 9th to 14th centuries. The Semitic influenced Germanic Yiddish language arose roughly the 9th century. The Semitic Maltese language also didn't come into being until the Middle Ages, arising roughly the 11th century.

Basque is the only remaining non-Indo-European language in Europe which was present there prior to the Middle Ages, although others, such as Etruscan, which was last attested in the 1st century, survived into the Roman era.

Evolution In Human Pigmentation In Europe

As recently as 2500 years ago, many Europeans were a lot less white. 

The colour of eyes, hair, and skin among Eurasians and Africans is no longer a mystery. The evolution of light skin, hair, and eyes in Eurasia occurred over thousands of years, influenced by natural selection of genes and complex migration, reveals a new preprint study.

“The shift towards lighter pigmentation turned out to be slower than expected, with half of the individuals showing dark or intermediate skin colours well into the Copper and Iron Ages,” wrote the researchers in the study.

Researchers from the University of Ferrara, Italy, have used ancient DNA evidence to understand the natural colour of skin, eyes, and hair in humans from Eurasia. The study analysed DNA samples ranging from 45,000 to 1,700 years old, representing about 34 countries. . . .

[T]he first humans in Eurasia were dark-skinned and dark-haired, originating from warm climates. These darker-skinned humans had more melanin—a pigment that blocks the UV rays the body uses to produce vitamin D—compared to their lighter-skinned kin in the evolutionary cycle. Vitamin D, in turn, is crucial for bone health and strengthening the immune system, as well as aiding calcium absorption and muscle function. . . .

By the Iron Age (1200 BC to 500 BC), light-skinned people became as common as dark-skinned ones, with gene flow being the major driver of change, as noted by the researchers in the study.

The Neolithic farmers from Anatolia, present-day Turkey, “profoundly changed the genetic makeup of populations,” write the researchers, leading to a “population turnover”.

These farmers had two key advantages over the local hunter-gatherers: a stable food supply ensured by farming and animal herding, and a lighter skin tone. A lighter skin tone is better adapted to northern regions where the intensity of UV rays is low, as low melanin content in lighter skin helps produce more vitamin D. These advantages enabled the farmers’ population to grow at a faster rate than the local hunter-gatherers, causing a major shift in the appearance of Europeans.

However, the migration of Neolithic farmers was not the sole cause of the transformation of skin colour in Europe. The researchers have attributed this transformation to a localised process of migration and interbreeding of different isolated populations.

From here.

This excerpt doesn't call out a couple of other significant factors, however, and the analysis seems a bit muddled. And, like many papers in this genre, its technical analysis is strong, but its review of the literature and ability to put their own results in that context is weak.

There was massive population replacement in Europe in the Neolithic era as farmers with ancestors predominantly in Western Anatolia expanded in a southern Cardial Pottery wave and a northern LBK wave surged into Europe starting ca. 6000 BCE in the Southeast, and finishing about 4000 BCE in the Northwest and Southwest. The amount of Mesolithic European hunter-gatherer ancestry was quite modest by the time that this had run its course. So attributing light skin to Anatolian farmer ancestry is problematic. 

The closest modern proxy for Anatolian farmer ancestry is found in the people who are native to Sardinia, depicted below (from here):

Modern Anatolians have had, on average, perhaps 10% Turkic admixture due to events taking place in the Middle Ages, also experienced significant admixture from the Eastern highlands of Iran and the Caucuses during the Copper Age, and some modest Indo-European admixture with Hittite and Greek and Persian invasions from the Bronze Age to the Iron Age. So, modern Anatolians look less like the first farmers of Europe than Sardinians do.

In most Europeans, other than Sardinians and some far northern Scandinavians, this was followed by the significant demographic shift associated with the migration of light skinned, dark eyed Indo-Europeans with ancestral roots in the vicinity of modern day Ukraine to Europe, largely in the Copper Age and Bronze Age, with something close to modern admixtures in place by around the time of Bronze Age collapse in 1200 BCE, prior to the Iron Age. In some places, like the British Isles, the demographic turnover was quite rapid (maybe a century or two) and almost total.

Also, the blue eye pigment mutation that arose once, probably around 4000 BCE in far Northern Europe, probably among some of the last European hunter-gatherers (although a recent discovery suggests that it existed in very low frequencies that mutation rate analysis misses almost twice as long ago), impacted the pigmentation phenotype. As indicated by the quoted material above, they would have been quite dark skinned despite their blue eyes. This does seem to be discussed in the paper itself, even though it isn't really discussed in the article quoted above about the paper.

The modern Northern European pigmentation phenotype didn't really come together until blue eyed Northern European farmers and herders admixed with lighter skinned Indo-Europeans.

The discussion of the paper also seems to understate the importance of human evolution based upon selective fitness, which was definitely an important factor that has been documented in multiple studies of ancient DNA over time, and is ongoing. Pigmentation genes have been some of the stronger sites of selective fitness based evolution in the European gene pool.

Neanderthals would have been lighter skinned than European hunter-gatherers for the entire time that they co-existed in Europe, although light skin and light colored eyes in modern Europeans is not believed to be a product of Neanderthal admixture.

The pre-print and its abstract are as follows:

Light eyes, hair and skins probably evolved several times as Homo sapiens dispersed from Africa. In areas with lower UV radiation, light pigmentation alleles increased in frequency because of their adaptive advantage and of other contingent factors such as migration and drift. However, the tempo and mode of their spread is not known. Phenotypic inference from ancient DNA is complicated, both because these traits are polygenic, and because of low sequence depth. 

We evaluated the effects of the latter by randomly removing reads in two high-coverage ancient samples, the Paleolithic Ust’-Ishim from Russia and the Mesolithic SF12 from Sweden. We could thus compare three approaches to pigmentation inference, concluding that, for suboptimal levels of coverage (<8x), a probabilistic method estimating genotype likelihoods leads to the most robust predictions. 

We then applied that protocol to 348 ancient genomes from Eurasia, describing how skin, eye and hair color evolved over the past 45,000 years. The shift towards lighter pigmentations turned out to be all but linear in time and place, and slower than expected, with half of the individuals showing dark or intermediate skin colors well into the Copper and Iron ages. We also observed a peak of light eye pigmentation in Mesolithic times, and an accelerated change during the spread of Neolithic farmers over Western Eurasia, although localized processes of gene flow and admixture, or lack thereof, also played a significant role.

Silvia Perretti, Maria Teresa Vizzari, Patrícia Santos, Enrico Tassani, Andrea Benazzo, Silvia Ghirotto, Guido Barbujani, "Inference of human pigmentation from ancient DNA by genotype likelihood" bioRxiv (February 12, 2025) https://doi.org/10.1101/2025.01.29.635495

The results section of the paper states, in part::

Paleolithic period

(from approximately 45,000 to 13,000 years ago; 12 samples; 11 typed for eye color, hereafter E, 10 for hair color, hereafter H; 12 for skin color, hereafter S; one of them is the Ust’-Ishim test sample). 

Dark phenotypes are inferred for all traits for almost all the samples analyzed. The only exception is a Russian sample, Kostenki 14, dated to between 38,700 and 36,200 years ago, which exhibits an intermediate skin color.

Mesolithic period

(from approximately 14,000 to 4,000 years ago; 66 samples; 35 E, 63 H, 53 S; one of them is the SF12 test sample). 

Light eye colors are inferred for 11 samples; they come from Northern Europe, France and Serbia. By contrast, all 24 samples from the easternmost regions only display the dark phenotype. In Serbia both phenotypes coexist, one with blue eyes and four with brown eyes. 

61 samples show dark hair phenotypes, with the exception of 1 Swedish and 1 Serbian sample, both showing blonde features. 

Skin color displays a broader range of phenotypes: predominantly dark (43 samples), with regions in Europe also showing intermediate phenotypes (seven samples from Denmark, France, Georgia, Russia, Serbia, and Spain) and the earliest light phenotypes observed in this study (three samples from France and Sweden). 

In this time transect we observe for the first time an individual with inferred blue eyes, blonde hair, and light skin, NEO27, a hunter-gatherer from Sweden who lived approximately 12,000 years ago.

Neolithic period

(from approximately 10,000 to 4,000 years ago; 132 samples, 93 E, 120 H, 93 S). 

We still observe the majority of individuals showing the dark eye phenotype (81 samples), including France, in which we previously found only light phenotype. Both dark and light eye phenotypes are observed in Northern and Central-Eastern Europe, with the light phenotype inferred in 12 samples from Austria, Denmark, Greece, Ireland, Latvia, Serbia, and Sweden. 

Hair color is predicted as dark in almost all samples, with one exception from Austria who has an intermediate phenotype and five from Denmark, Greece, Ireland, and Serbia with light phenotype. Additionally, we observed for the first time in our dataset one sample with red hair, from Turkey. 

The skin phenotype is more variable, with regions in Europe (Portugal, Italy, Austria, Germany, Hungary, Estonia, and Russia) and Western Asia (Iran and Turkey) exhibiting exclusively a dark phenotype, whereas other regions show either both dark and intermediate phenotypes (25 samples exhibit the latter, from Croatia, Denmark, France, Greece, Ireland, Latvia, Malta, Poland, Serbia, Sweden, and Ukraine), or even light skin phenotypes (in five samples from the Czech Republic, Great Britain, Latvia, Sweden, and Ukraine).

Copper Age

(from approximately 6,000 to 3,500 years ago; 42 samples, 31 E, 33 H, 28 S). 

Even during the Copper Age dark phenotypes are prevalent. Most samples, 26, showed dark eyes, with the light phenotype present in five samples from Denmark, Hungary, Italy, and Romania.

Hair phenotypes remain mostly dark, with only one sample showing intermediate hair color (Denmark) and one samples exhibiting light hair color (Romania). 

Skin color is still predominantly dark (17 samples) in Eastern Europe, and the Iberian Peninsula, but intermediate skin tones are observed in Spain, Kazakhstan, and Central Europe (seven samples from Hungary, Italy, the Netherlands, Poland, and Romania), and light skins in Denmark, Great Britain, and Romania (four samples).

Bronze Age

(from approximately 7,000 to 3,000 years ago; 71 samples, 55 E, 64 H, 43 S). 

In this time period we observed an increasing proportion of light eye phenotype. While 39 samples throughout Europe and Asia are still exhibiting dark eyes, 16 samples display a light phenotype. These light phenotypes are still mainly found in Europe, but are also emerging in other regions such as Russia and Jordan, and as far East as Kazakhstan. 

Dark hair phenotypes remain predominant in most of Europe and Asia (49 samples), with intermediate phenotypes present in two samples from Denmark and Hungary. However, there is a greater proportion of light phenotypes (12 samples), specifically in Northern and Central-Eastern Europe, and they appear in Italy, Russia, Jordan, and Kazakhstan. One sample from Greece exhibits red hair. 

Western Europe, Southern Europe, Russia, and Southern Asia still exhibit a higher frequency of dark skin phenotypes (22 samples), but we also observed an increase in intermediate phenotypes in Central Europe and Central-Eastern Europe, as well as their first appearance in Russia (15 samples in total). The light phenotype emerged in six samples from the Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, France, Great Britain, and Hungary. 

During this period, we observed an increase in the co-occurrence of estimated blue eyes, blonde hair, and light skin, with four samples exhibiting this combination of phenotypes: I7198 from the Czech Republic, EKA1 from Estonia, I2445 from England, and SZ1 from Hungary.

Iron Age

(from approximately 3,000 to 1,700 years ago; 25 samples, 15 E, 19 H, 11 S). 

In this phase, the dark eye phenotype (10 samples) is present in Great Britain, Spain, and Russia, while the light eye phenotype (3 samples) is found in Denmark and Finland. Italy, and Kazakhstan exhibit both phenotypes. 

Hair remains predominantly dark throughout Europe and Asia (14 samples), with one intermediate phenotype observed in Denmark and four light phenotypes in Denmark, Finland, Italy, and Kazakhstan. 

Skin color analysis shows the dark phenotype (six samples) in Russia, Kazakhstan, and Italy. The intermediate phenotype (three samples) in Denmark, Kazakhstan, and reappears in Spain. The light phenotype (two samples) is still present in Northern Europe. 

A combination of blue eyes, blonde hair, and pale skin is observed in two samples: VK521 from Denmark and DA236 from Finland.

Indo-European Genetic Origins

I'm still not convinced that they are analyzing the data in a way the correctly interprets what is going on with the Anatolians. To be clear, I'm not disputing their genetic data, only the narrative that they've employed to explain it.

The Yamnaya archaeological complex appeared around 3300 bc across the steppes north of the Black and Caspian Seas, and by 3000 bc it reached its maximal extent, ranging from Hungary in the west to Kazakhstan in the east. To localize Yamnaya origins among the preceding Eneolithic people, we assembled ancient DNA from 435 individuals, demonstrating three genetic clines. 

A Caucasus–lower Volga (CLV) cline suffused with Caucasus hunter-gatherer ancestry extended between a Caucasus Neolithic southern end and a northern end at Berezhnovka along the lower Volga river. Bidirectional gene flow created intermediate populations, such as the north Caucasus Maikop people, and those at Remontnoye on the steppe. 

The Volga cline was formed as CLV people mixed with upriver populations of Eastern hunter-gatherer ancestry, creating hypervariable groups, including one at Khvalynsk. 

The Dnipro cline was formed when CLV people moved west, mixing with people with Ukraine Neolithic hunter-gatherer ancestry along the Dnipro and Don rivers to establish Serednii Stih groups, from whom Yamnaya ancestors formed around 4000 bc and grew rapidly after 3750–3350 bc. 

The CLV people contributed around four-fifths of the ancestry of the Yamnaya and, entering Anatolia, probably from the east, at least one-tenth of the ancestry of Bronze Age central Anatolians, who spoke Hittite. We therefore propose that the final unity of the speakers of ‘proto-Indo-Anatolian’, the language ancestral to both Anatolian and Indo-European people, occurred in CLV people some time between 4400 bc and 4000 bc.

Iosif Lazaridis, et al, "The genetic origin of the Indo-Europeans" Nature (February 5, 2025).

Note that I blogged the pre-print of this paper in April of 2024. I haven't determined yet what, if anything, has changed since the pre-print.

Korean, Japanese, Vietnamese, and Cantonese

Korean and Cantonese (a.k.a. Yue Chinese) share some similarities because Cantonese preserves more ancient pronunciations than other Chinese languages, and Korean was influenced by Chinese at a time when these ancient pronunciations were used for words that it borrowed from Chinese. Japanese loan words from Chinese also sound more like Cantonese than other Chinese languages for the same reason. Specifically, Cantonese and these loanwords all have pronunciations that were used by Middle Chinese.

Presumably, then, these loan word pronunciations in Korean and Japanese date to the time period from roughly the 6th to 10th centuries, or perhaps as late as a couple of centuries later, when Middle Chinese was spoken. In the case of Korean, this corresponds to Old Korean. In the case of Japanese, this corresponds to Old Japanese and early Middle Japanese. 

Prior to Old Korean and Old Japanese, which were written with Chinese characters, neither Korean languages or Japanese languages had a written form, and the Chinese loan words were also probably mostly absent. There were three languages or dialects in Korea, before the language of the unified Silla Kingdom that united the southern two-thirds of the peninsula and lead to the extinction of the two sister languages spoken by the kingdoms it conquered. The Proto-Japonic language that preceded Old Japanese probably arrived in Japan from Korea. "Most scholars believe that Japonic was brought to northern Kyushu from the Korean peninsula around 700 to 300 BC by wet-rice farmers of the Yayoi culture and spread throughout the Japanese archipelago, replacing indigenous languages." This was during the Korean Iron Age and prior to the proto-Three Kingdoms period. In this time period:

Gojoseon was the first Korean kingdom, located in the north of the peninsula and Manchuria, later alongside the state of Jin in the south of the peninsula. . . . 

The historical Gojoseon kingdom was first mentioned in the Chinese record in a text called Guanzi, attributed to 7th century BCE. By about the 4th century BC, Gojoseon had developed to the point where its existence was well known in China, and around this time, its capital moved to Pyongyang.

In 194 BC, the King of Gojoseon was overthrown by Wi Man (also known as Wei Man), a Korean-Chinese refugee from the Han vassal state of Yan. Wi Man then established Wiman Joseon. In 128 BC, Nan Lü (南閭), a leader of Ye who was receiving pressure from Wiman Joseon, surrendered to the Han dynasty and became the Canghai Commandery. In 108 BC, the Chinese Han dynasty defeated Wiman Joseon and installed four commanderies in the northern Korean peninsula. . . . 

Around 300 BC, a state called Jin arose in the southern part of the Korean peninsula. Very little is known about Jin, but it established relations with Han China and exported artifacts to the Yayoi of Japan. Around 100 BC, Jin evolved into the Samhan confederacies.

Many smaller states sprang from the former territory of Gojoseon such as Buyeo, Okjeo, Dongye, Goguryeo, and Baekje. The Three Kingdoms refer to Goguryeo, Baekje, and Silla, although Buyeo and the Gaya confederacy existed into the 5th and 6th centuries respectively.

Modern Korean is derived from Middle Korean:

Middle Korean is the period in the history of the Korean language succeeding Old Korean and yielding in 1600 to the Modern period. The boundary between the Old and Middle periods is traditionally identified with the establishment of Goryeo in 918, but some scholars have argued for the time of the Mongol invasions of Korea (mid-13th century). Middle Korean is often divided into Early and Late periods corresponding to Goryeo (until 1392) and Joseon respectively. It is difficult to extract linguistic information from texts of the Early period, which are written using adaptations of Chinese characters. The situation was transformed in 1446 by the introduction of the Hangul alphabet, so that Late Middle Korean provides the pivotal data for the history of Korean.

Given this timing, it would appear that the bulk of Chinese loan words into Korean were received in the Old Korean time period, which coincided with Middle Chinese. And, since the earliest Korean writing is in Chinese characters and dates to about the 6th or 7th centuries, prior to that time, Korean may not have had a written language at all. Since written Chinese is much older than that, it makes sense that Chinese loan words into Korean date to around the same time that Korean started to be written with Chinese characters.

Old Korean (North Korean name: 고대 조선어; South Korean name: 고대 한국어) is the first historically documented stage of the Korean language, typified by the language of the Unified Silla period (668–935).

The boundaries of Old Korean periodization remain in dispute. Some linguists classify the sparsely attested languages of the Three Kingdoms of Korea as variants of Old Korean, while others reserve the term for the language of Silla alone. Old Korean traditionally ends with the fall of Silla in 935. This too has recently been challenged by South Korean linguists who argue for extending the Old Korean period to the mid-thirteenth century, although this new periodization is not yet fully accepted. This article focuses on the language of Silla before the tenth century.

Old Korean is poorly attested. Due to the paucity and poor quality of sources, modern linguists have "little more than a vague outline" of the characteristics of Old Korean. The only surviving literary works are a little more than a dozen vernacular poems called hyangga. Hyangga use hyangchal writing. Other sources include inscriptions on steles and wooden tablets, glosses to Buddhist sutras, and the transcription of personal and place names in works otherwise in Classical Chinese. All methods of Old Korean writing rely on logographic Chinese characters, used to either gloss the meaning or approximate the sound of the Korean words. Thus, the phonetic value of surviving Old Korean texts is opaque. Its phoneme inventory seems to have included fewer consonants but more vowels than Middle Korean. In its typology, it was a subject-object-verb, agglutinative language, like both Middle and Modern Korean. However, Old Korean is thought to have differed from its descendants in certain typological features, including the existence of clausal nominalization and the ability of inflecting verb roots to appear in isolation.

Despite attempts to link the language to the putative Altaic family and especially to the Japonic languages, no links between Old Korean and any non-Koreanic language have been uncontroversially demonstrated. . . . 

For what it is worth, I have almost no doubts about the linguistic relatedness of the Korean and Japanese languages, and I see their connection to at least parts of the larger Altaic family as at least more likely than not. Some scholars suspect that Japanese is a descendants of one of the two pre-Old Korean languages of Korea that have since died.

Old Korean is generally defined as the ancient Koreanic language of the Silla state (BCE 57–CE 936), especially in its Unified period (668–936). Proto-Koreanic, the hypothetical ancestor of the Koreanic languages understood largely through the internal reconstruction of later forms of Korean, is to be distinguished from the actually historically attested language of Old Korean.

Old Korean semantic influence may be present in even the oldest discovered Silla inscription, a Classical Chinese-language stele dated to 441 or 501. Korean syntax and morphemes are visibly attested for the first time in Silla texts of the mid- to late sixth century, and the use of such vernacular elements becomes more extensive by the Unified period.

Initially only one of the Three Kingdoms of Korea, Silla rose to ascendancy in the sixth century under monarchs Beopheung and Jinheung. After another century of conflict, the kings of Silla allied with Tang China to destroy the other two kingdoms—Baekje in 660, and Goguryeo in 668—and to unite the southern two-thirds of the Korean Peninsula under their rule. This political consolidation allowed the language of Silla to become the lingua franca of the peninsula and ultimately drove the languages of Baekje and Goguryeo to extinction, leaving the latter only as substrata in later Korean dialects. Middle Korean, and hence Modern Korean, are thus direct descendants of the Old Korean language of Silla.

Little data on the languages of the other two kingdoms survive, but most linguists agree that both were related to the language of Silla. Opinion differs as to whether to classify the Goguryeo and Baekje languages as Old Korean variants, or as related but independent languages. Lee Ki-Moon and S. Roberts Ramsey argue in 2011 that evidence for mutual intelligibility is insufficient, and that linguists ought to "treat the fragments of the three languages as representing three separate corpora". Earlier in 2000, Ramsey and Iksop Lee note that the three languages are often grouped as Old Korean, but point to "obvious dissimilarities" and identify Sillan as Old Korean "in the truest sense". Nam Pung-hyun and Alexander Vovin, on the other hand, classify the languages of all three kingdoms as regional dialects of Old Korean. Other linguists, such as Lee Seungjae, group the languages of Silla and Baekje together as Old Korean while excluding that of Goguryeo. The LINGUIST List gives Silla as a synonym for Old Korean while acknowledging that the term is "often used to refer to three distinct languages".

In a similar exercise the different stages of the evolution of the Japanese language can be compared to the era when Middle Chinese was spoken. These corresponds to Old Japanese, when Chinese characters were used to make it a written language, and Early Middle Japanese.

Prehistory

Proto-Japonic, the common ancestor of the Japanese and Ryukyuan languages, is thought to have been brought to Japan by settlers coming from the Korean peninsula sometime in the early- to mid-4th century BC (the Yayoi period), replacing the languages of the original Jōmon inhabitants, including the ancestor of the modern Ainu language. Because writing had yet to be introduced from China, there is no direct evidence, and anything that can be discerned about this period must be based on internal reconstruction from Old Japanese, or comparison with the Ryukyuan languages and Japanese dialects.

Old Japanese

The Chinese writing system was imported to Japan from Baekje around the start of the fifth century, alongside Buddhism. The earliest texts were written in Classical Chinese, although some of these were likely intended to be read as Japanese using the kanbun method, and show influences of Japanese grammar such as Japanese word order. The earliest text, the Kojiki, dates to the early eighth century, and was written entirely in Chinese characters, which are used to represent, at different times, Chinese, kanbun, and Old Japanese. As in other texts from this period, the Old Japanese sections are written in Man'yōgana, which uses kanji for their phonetic as well as semantic values.

Based on the Man'yōgana system, Old Japanese can be reconstructed as having 88 distinct morae. Texts written with Man'yōgana use two different sets of kanji for each of the morae now pronounced き (ki), ひ (hi), み (mi), け (ke), へ (he), め (me), こ (ko), そ (so), と (to), の (no), も (mo), よ (yo) and ろ (ro).[7] (The Kojiki has 88, but all later texts have 87. The distinction between mo1 and mo2 apparently was lost immediately following its composition.) This set of morae shrank to 67 in Early Middle Japanese, though some were added through Chinese influence. Man'yōgana also has a symbol for /je/, which merges with /e/ before the end of the period.

Several fossilizations of Old Japanese grammatical elements remain in the modern language – the genitive particle tsu (superseded by modern no) is preserved in words such as matsuge ("eyelash", lit. "hair of the eye"); modern mieru ("to be visible") and kikoeru ("to be audible") retain a mediopassive suffix -yu(ru) (kikoyu → kikoyuru (the attributive form, which slowly replaced the plain form starting in the late Heian period) → kikoeru (all verbs with the shimo-nidan conjugation pattern underwent this same shift in Early Modern Japanese)); and the genitive particle ga remains in intentionally archaic speech.

Early Middle Japanese

Early Middle Japanese is the Japanese of the Heian period, from 794 to 1185. It formed the basis for the literary standard of Classical Japanese, which remained in common use until the early 20th century.

During this time, Japanese underwent numerous phonological developments, in many cases instigated by an influx of Chinese loanwords. These included phonemic length distinction for both consonants and vowels, palatal consonants (e.g. kya) and labial consonant clusters (e.g. kwa), and closed syllables. This had the effect of changing Japanese into a mora-timed language.

Late Middle Japanese

Late Middle Japanese covers the years from 1185 to 1600, and is normally divided into two sections, roughly equivalent to the Kamakura period and the Muromachi period, respectively. The later forms of Late Middle Japanese are the first to be described by non-native sources, in this case the Jesuit and Franciscan missionaries; and thus there is better documentation of Late Middle Japanese phonology than for previous forms (for instance, the Arte da Lingoa de Iapam). Among other sound changes, the sequence /au/ merges to /ɔː/, in contrast with /oː/; /p/ is reintroduced from Chinese; and /we/ merges with /je/. Some forms rather more familiar to Modern Japanese speakers begin to appear – the continuative ending -te begins to reduce onto the verb (e.g. yonde for earlier yomite), the -k- in the final mora of adjectives drops out (shiroi for earlier shiroki); and some forms exist where modern standard Japanese has retained the earlier form (e.g. hayaku > hayau > hayɔɔ, where modern Japanese just has hayaku, though the alternative form is preserved in the standard greeting o-hayō gozaimasu "good morning"; this ending is also seen in o-medetō "congratulations", from medetaku).

Late Middle Japanese has the first loanwords from European languages – now-common words borrowed into Japanese in this period include pan ("bread") and tabako ("tobacco", now "cigarette"), both from Portuguese.

Modern Japanese

Modern Japanese is considered to begin with the Edo period (which spanned from 1603 to 1867). Since Old Japanese, the de facto standard Japanese had been the Kansai dialect, especially that of Kyoto. However, during the Edo period, Edo (now Tokyo) developed into the largest city in Japan, and the Edo-area dialect became standard Japanese. Since the end of Japan's self-imposed isolation in 1853, the flow of loanwords from European languages has increased significantly. The period since 1945 has seen many words borrowed from other languages—such as German, Portuguese and English. Many English loan words especially relate to technology—for example, pasokon (short for "personal computer"), intānetto ("internet"), and kamera ("camera"). Due to the large quantity of English loanwords, modern Japanese has developed a distinction between [tɕi] and [ti], and [dʑi] and [di], with the latter in each pair only found in loanwords. . . . 

The language experienced a massive influx of Sino-Japanese vocabulary after the introduction of Buddhism in the 6th century and peaking with the wholesale importation of Chinese culture in the 8th and the 9th centuries. The loanwords now account for about half the lexicon. They also affected the sound system of the language by adding compound vowels, syllable-final nasals, and geminate consonants, which became separate morae. Most of the changes in morphology and syntax reflected in the modern language took place during the Late Middle Japanese period (13th to 16th centuries). . . . 

There is fragmentary evidence suggesting that now-extinct Japonic languages were spoken in the central and southern parts of the Korean peninsula. Vovin calls these languages Peninsular Japonic and groups Japanese and Ryukyuan as Insular Japonic.

The most-cited evidence comes from chapter 37 of the Samguk sagi (compiled in 1145), which contains a list of pronunciations and meanings of placenames in the former kingdom of Goguryeo. As the pronunciations are given using Chinese characters, they are difficult to interpret, but several of those from central Korea, in the area south of the Han River captured from Baekje in the 5th century, seem to correspond to Japonic words. Scholars differ on whether they represent the language of Goguryeo or the people that it conquered.

Traces from the south of the peninsula are very sparse: The Silla placenames listed in Chapter 34 of the Samguk sagi are not glossed, but many of them can be explained as Japonic words.

• Alexander Vovin proposes Japonic etymologies for two of four Baekje words given in the Book of Liang (635).
• A single word is explicitly attributed to the language of the southern Gaya confederacy, in Chapter 44 of the Samguk sagi. It is a word for 'gate' and appears in a similar form to the Old Japanese word to2, with the same meaning.
• Vovin suggests that the ancient name for the kingdom of Tamna on Jeju Island, tammura, may have a Japonic etymology tani mura 'valley settlement' or tami mura 'people's settlement'. . . . 

According to Shirō Hattori, more attempts have been made to link Japanese with other language families than for any other language. None of the attempts has succeeded in demonstrating a common descent for Japonic and any other language family.

The most systematic comparisons have involved Korean, which has a very similar grammatical structure to Japonic languages. Samuel Elmo Martin, John Whitman, and others have proposed hundreds of possible cognates, with sound correspondences. However, Alexander Vovin points out that Old Japanese contains several pairs of words of similar meaning in which one word matches a Korean form, and the other is also found in Ryukyuan and Eastern Old Japanese, suggesting that the former is an early loan from Korean. He suggests that to eliminate such early loans, Old Japanese morphemes should not be assigned a Japonic origin unless they are also attested in Southern Ryukyuan or Eastern Old Japanese. That procedure leaves fewer than a dozen possible cognates, which may have been borrowed by Korean from Peninsular Japonic.

There was also contemporaneous Chinese linguistic influence in Vietnam, with all three waves of Chinese loan words more or less corresponding to the Tang Dynasty of China:

During the Tang dynasty (618–907), Chinese writing, language and culture were imported wholesale into Vietnam, Korea and Japan. Scholars in those countries wrote in Literary Chinese and were thoroughly familiar with the Chinese classics, which they read aloud in systematic local approximations of Middle Chinese. With those pronunciations, Chinese words entered Vietnamese, Korean and Japanese in huge numbers.

The plains of northern Vietnam were under Chinese control for most of the period from 111 BC to AD 938. After independence, the country adopted Literary Chinese as the language of administration and scholarship. As a result, there are several layers of Chinese loanwords in Vietnamese. The oldest loans, roughly 400 words dating from the Eastern Han, have been fully assimilated and are treated as native Vietnamese words. Sino-Vietnamese proper dates to the early Tang dynasty, when the spread of Chinese rime dictionaries and other literature resulted in the wholesale importation of the Chinese lexicon.

Isolated Chinese words also began to enter Korean from the 1st century BC, but the main influx occurred in the 7th and 8th centuries after the unification of the peninsula by Silla. The flow of Chinese words into Korean became overwhelming after the establishment of civil service examinations in 958.

Japanese has two well-preserved layers and a third that is also significant: 

• Go-on readings date to the introduction of Buddhism to Japan from Korea in the 6th century. Based on the name, they are widely believed to reflect pronunciations of Jiankang in the lower Yangtze area during the late Northern and Southern dynasties period. However, this cannot be substantiated, and Go-on appears to reflect an amalgam of different Chinese varieties transmitted through Korea.
• Kan-on readings are believed to reflect the standard pronunciation of the Tang period, as used in the cities of Chang'an and Luoyang. It was transmitted directly by Japanese who studied in China.
• Tōsō-on readings were introduced by followers of Zen Buddhism in the 14th century and are thought to be based on the speech of Hangzhou. . . . 

In contrast, vocabulary of Chinese origin in Thai, including most of the basic numerals, was borrowed over a range of periods from the Han (or earlier) to the Tang.

Since the pioneering work of Bernhard Karlgren, these bodies of pronunciations have been used together with modern varieties of Chinese in attempts to reconstruct the sounds of Middle Chinese. They provide such broad and systematic coverage that the linguist Samuel Martin called them "Sino-Xenic dialects", treating them as parallel branches with the native Chinese dialects. The foreign pronunciations sometimes retain distinctions lost in all the modern Chinese varieties, as in the case of the chongniu distinction found in Middle Chinese rime dictionaries. Similarly, the distinction between grades III and IV made by the Late Middle Chinese rime tables has disappeared in most modern varieties, but in kan-on, grade IV is represented by the Old Japanese vowels i1 and e1 while grade III is represented by i2 and e2.

Vietnamese, Korean and Japanese scholars also later each adapted the Chinese script to write their languages, using Chinese characters both for borrowed and native vocabulary. Thus, in the Japanese script, Chinese characters may have both Sino-Japanese readings (on'yomi) and native readings (kun'yomi). Similarly, in the chữ Nôm script used for Vietnamese until the early 20th century, some Chinese characters could represent both a Sino-Vietnamese word and a native Vietnamese word with similar meaning or sound to the Chinese word, but would often be marked with a diacritic when the native reading was intended. However, in the Korean mixed script, Chinese characters (hanja) are only used for Sino-Korean words. The character-based Vietnamese and Korean scripts have since been replaced by the Vietnamese alphabet and hangul respectively, although Korean does still use Hanja to an extent.

The Tang Dynasty was a big deal in the history of China (and incidentally, coincided with the early Islamic Empire and the Migration Period in the West):

The Tang empire in 661, at its greatest extent.

The Tang dynasty (/tɑːŋ/, [tʰǎŋ]; Chinese: 唐朝), or the Tang Empire, was an imperial dynasty of China that ruled from 618 to 907, with an interregnum between 690 and 705. It was preceded by the Sui dynasty and followed by the Five Dynasties and Ten Kingdoms period. Historians generally regard the Tang as a high point in Chinese civilization, and a golden age of cosmopolitan culture. Tang territory, acquired through the military campaigns of its early rulers, rivaled that of the Han dynasty.

The Li family founded the dynasty after taking advantage of a period of Sui decline and precipitating their final collapse, in turn inaugurating a period of progress and stability in the first half of the dynasty's rule. The dynasty was formally interrupted during 690–705 when Empress Wu Zetian seized the throne, proclaiming the Wu Zhou dynasty and becoming the only legitimate Chinese empress regnant. The devastating An Lushan Rebellion (755–763) led to the decline of central authority in the dynasty's latter half. Like the previous Sui dynasty, the Tang maintained a civil-service system by recruiting scholar-officials through standardized examinations and recommendations to office. The rise of regional military governors known as jiedushi during the 9th century undermined this civil order. The dynasty and central government went into decline by the latter half of the 9th century; agrarian rebellions resulted in mass population loss and displacement, widespread poverty, and further government dysfunction that ultimately ended the dynasty in 907.

The Tang capital at Chang'an (present-day Xi'an) was the world's most populous city for much of the dynasty's existence. Two censuses of the 7th and 8th centuries estimated the empire's population at about 50 million people, which grew to an estimated 80 million by the dynasty's end. From its numerous subjects, the dynasty raised professional and conscripted armies of hundreds of thousands of troops to contend with nomadic powers for control of Inner Asia and the lucrative trade-routes along the Silk Road. Far-flung kingdoms and states paid tribute to the Tang court, while the Tang also indirectly controlled several regions through a protectorate system. In addition to its political hegemony, the Tang exerted a powerful cultural influence over neighboring East Asian nations such as Japan and Korea.

Cantonese preservation of ancient Chinese pronunciations is mentioned, for example, by the Encyclopedia Britannica, which states that:

Cantonese preserves more features of Ancient Chinese than do the other major Chinese languages; its various dialects retain most of the final consonants of the older language and have at least six tones, in contrast to the four tones of Modern Standard Chinese, to distinguish meaning between words or word elements that have the same arrangement of consonant and vowel sounds. The language has fewer initial consonants than Modern Standard Chinese and about twice as many distinctively different syllables. 

According to Wikipedia, per the link above:

Cantonese is the traditional prestige variety of Yue Chinese, a Sinitic language belonging to the Sino-Tibetan language family. It originated in the city of Guangzhou (formerly known as Canton) and its surrounding Pearl River Delta [ed. a.k.a. the Guangdong–Hong Kong–Macao Greater Bay Area].

Cantonese is regarded as an integral and inextricable component of the cultural identity of its native speakers across a vast expanse of southeastern China, Hong Kong, and Macau, as well as in overseas communities. In mainland China, Cantonese is the lingua franca of the Chinese province of Guangdong (being the majority language of the Pearl River Delta) and neighbouring areas such as Guangxi. It is also the dominant and co-official language of Hong Kong and Macau. Furthermore, Cantonese is widely spoken among overseas Chinese in Southeast Asia (most notably in Vietnam and Malaysia, as well as in Singapore and Cambodia to a lesser extent) and the Western world.

Despite the considerable overlap in vocabulary between Cantonese and Mandarin, as well as other varieties of Chinese, these Sinitic languages are not mutually intelligible. This is due to a combination of factors, including phonological differences and variations in grammar and vocabulary.

 

Thus, the similarity exists despite the significant geographic distance between the areas where Cantonese has its origins and is most widely spoken on one hand, and Korea and Japan on the other, and despite the fact that less similar topolects of Chinese exist between these two regions.

The Chinese language began to be spoken on a widespread basis in the Pearl River Delta region starting around 214 BCE when ethically Han Chinese people began to migrate to the region in large numbers after it was conquered by the Qin Dynasty. According to the same link:

Successive waves of immigration followed at times of upheaval in Northern and Central China, such as the collapse of the Han, Tang and Song dynasties. The most popular route was via the Xiang River, which the Qin had connected to the Li River by the Lingqu Canal, and then into the valley of the Xi Jiang. A secondary route followed the Gan River and then the Bei Jiang into eastern Guangdong. Yue-speakers were later joined by Hakka speakers following the North River route, and Min speakers arriving by sea.

After the fall of Qin, the Lingnan area was part of the independent state of Nanyue for about a century, before being incorporated into the Han empire in 111 BC. After the Tang dynasty collapsed, much of the area became part of the state of Southern Han, one of the longest-lived states of the Five Dynasties and Ten Kingdoms, between 917 and 971.

Large waves of Chinese migration throughout succeeding Chinese dynasties assimilated huge numbers of Yue aborigines, with the result that today's Southern Han Chinese Yue-speaking population is descended from both groups. 

The colloquial layers of Yue varieties contain elements influenced by the Tai languages formerly spoken widely in the area and still spoken by people such as the Zhuang and Dong.

The port city of Guangzhou lies in the middle of Pearl River Delta, with access to the interior via the Xi, Bei, and Dong rivers, which all converge at the delta. It has been the economic centre of the Lingnan region since Qin times, when it was an important shipbuilding centre. By 660, it was the largest port in China, part of a trade network stretching as far as Arabia. During the Southern Song, it also became the cultural centre of the region. Like many other Chinese varieties it developed a distinct literary layer associated with the local tradition of reading the classics. The Guangzhou dialect (Cantonese) was used in the popular Yuèōu, Mùyú and Nányīn folksong genres, as well as Cantonese opera. There was also a small amount of vernacular literature, written with Chinese characters extended with a number of non-traditional characters for Cantonese words.

Guangzhou became the centre of rapidly expanding foreign trade after the maritime ban was lifted, with the British East India Company establishing a chamber of commerce in the city in 1715. The ancestors of most of the Han Chinese population of Hong Kong came from Guangzhou after the territory was ceded to Britain in 1842. As a result, Hong Kong Cantonese, the most widely spoken language in Hong Kong and Macau, is an offshoot of the Guangzhou dialect. . . . 

Yue varieties are among the most conservative of Chinese varieties regarding the final consonants and tonal categories of Middle Chinese, so that the rhymes of Tang poetry are clearer in Yue dialects than elsewhere. However they have lost several distinctions in the initial consonants and medial vowels that other Chinese varieties have retained.

Initials and medials

In addition to aspirated and unaspirated voiceless initials, Middle Chinese had a series of voiced initials, but voicing has been lost in Yue and most other modern Chinese varieties apart from Wu and Old Xiang. In the Guangfu, Siyi and Gao–Yang subgroups, these initials have yielded aspirated consonants in the level and rising tones, and unaspirated consonants in the departing and entering tones. These initials are uniformly unaspirated in Gou–Lou varieties and uniformly aspirated in Wu–Hua.

In many Yue varieties, including Cantonese, Middle Chinese /kʰ/ has become [h] or [f] in most words; in Taishanese, /tʰ/ has also changed to [h], for example, in the native name of the dialect, "Hoisan". In Siyi and eastern Gao–Yang, Middle Chinese /s/ has become a voiceless lateral fricative [ɬ].

Most Yue varieties have merged the Middle Chinese retroflex sibilants with the alveolar sibilants, in contrast with Mandarin dialects, which have generally maintained the distinction. For example, the words 將; jiāng and 張; zhāng are distinguished in Mandarin, but in modern Cantonese they are both pronounced as jēung.

Many Mandarin varieties, including the Beijing dialect, have a third sibilant series, formed through a merger of palatalized alveolar sibilants and velars, but this is a recent innovation, which has not affected Yue and other Chinese varieties. For example, 晶, 精, 經 and 京 are all pronounced as jīng in Mandarin, but in Cantonese the first pair is pronounced jīng, while the second pair is pronounced gīng. The earlier pronunciation is reflected in historical Mandarin romanizations, such as "Peking" for Beijing, "Kiangsi" for Jiangxi, and "Tientsin" for Tianjin.

Some Yue speakers, such as many Hong Kong Cantonese speakers born after World War II, merge /n/ with /l/, but Taishanese and most other Yue varieties preserve the distinction. Younger Cantonese speakers also tend not to distinguish between /ŋ/ and the zero initial, though this distinction is retained in most Yue dialects. Yue varieties retain the initial /m/ in words where Late Middle Chinese shows a shift to a labiodental consonant, realized in most Northern varieties of Chinese as [w]. Nasals can be independent syllables in Yue words, e.g. Cantonese 五; ńgh; 'five', and 唔; m̀h; 'not', although Middle Chinese did not have syllables of this type.

In most Yue varieties (except for Tengxian), the rounded medial /w/ has merged with the following vowel to form a monophthong, except after velar initials. In most analyses velars followed by /w/ are treated as labio-velars.

Most Yue varieties have retained the Middle Chinese palatal medial, but in Cantonese it has also been lost to monophthongization, yielding a variety of vowels.

Final consonants and tones

Middle Chinese syllables could end with glides /j/ or /w/, nasals /m/, /n/ or /ŋ/, or stops /p/, /t/ or /k/. Syllables with vocalic or nasal endings could occur with one of three tonal contours, called 平; 'level', 上; 'rising', or 去; 'departing'. Syllables with final stops were traditionally treated as a fourth tone category, the entering tone 入; rù, because the stops were distributed in the same way as the corresponding final nasals.

While northern and central varieties have lost some of the Middle Chinese final consonants, they are retained by most southern Chinese varieties, though sometimes affected by sound shifts. They are most faithfully preserved in Yue dialects. Final stops have disappeared entirely in most Mandarin dialects, including the Beijing-based standard, with the syllables distributed across the other tones. For example, the characters 裔, 屹, 藝, 憶, 譯, 懿, 肄, 翳, 邑, and 佚 are all pronounced yì in Mandarin, but they are all distinct in Yue: in Cantonese, yeuih, ngaht, ngaih, yīk, yihk, yi, yih, ai, yāp, and yaht, respectively.

Similarly, in Mandarin dialects the Middle Chinese final /m/ has merged with /n/, but the distinction is maintained in southern varieties of Chinese such as Hakka, Min and Yue. For example, Cantonese has 譚; taahm and 壇; tàahn versus Mandarin tán, 鹽; yìhm and 言; yìhn versus Mandarin yán, 添; tìm and 天; tìn versus Mandarin tiān, and 含; hàhm and 寒; hòhn versus Mandarin hán.

Middle Chinese is described in contemporary dictionaries as having four tones, where the fourth category, the entering tone, consists of syllables with final stops. Many modern Chinese varieties contain traces of a split of each of these four tones into two registers, an upper or yīn register from voiceless initials and a lower or yáng register from voiced initials. Most Mandarin dialects retain the register distinction only in the level tone, yielding the first and second tones of the standard language (corresponding to the first and fourth tones in Cantonese), but have merged several of the other categories. Most Yue dialects have retained all eight categories, with a further split of the upper entering tone conditioned by vowel length, as also found in neighbouring Tai dialects. A few dialects spoken in Guangxi, such as the Bobai dialect, have also split the lower entering tone.

Middle Chinese, meanwhile, is first attested around 500 CE by Shen Yue:

Middle Chinese (formerly known as Ancient Chinese) or the Qieyun system (QYS) is the historical variety of Chinese recorded in the Qieyun, a rime dictionary first published in 601 and followed by several revised and expanded editions. The Swedish linguist Bernhard Karlgren believed that the dictionary recorded a speech standard of the capital Chang'an of the Sui and Tang dynasties. However, based on the preface of the Qieyun, most scholars now believe that it records a compromise between northern and southern reading and poetic traditions from the late Northern and Southern dynasties period. This composite system contains important information for the reconstruction of the preceding system of Old Chinese phonology (early 1st millennium BC).

The fanqie method used to indicate pronunciation in these dictionaries, though an improvement on earlier methods, proved awkward in practice. The mid-12th-century Yunjing and other rime tables incorporate a more sophisticated and convenient analysis of the Qieyun phonology. The rime tables attest to a number of sound changes that had occurred over the centuries following the publication of the Qieyun. Linguists sometimes refer to the system of the Qieyun as Early Middle Chinese and the variant revealed by the rime tables as Late Middle Chinese.

The dictionaries and tables describe pronunciations in relative terms, but do not give their actual sounds. Karlgren was the first to attempt a reconstruction of the sounds of Middle Chinese, comparing its categories with modern varieties of Chinese and the Sino-Xenic pronunciations used in the reading traditions of neighbouring countries. Several other scholars have produced their own reconstructions using similar methods.

The Qieyun system is often used as a framework for Chinese dialectology. With the exception of Min varieties, which show independent developments from Old Chinese, modern Chinese varieties can be largely treated as divergent developments from Middle Chinese. The study of Middle Chinese also provides for a better understanding and analysis of Classical Chinese poetry, such as the study of Tang poetry. 

. . . 

The tone system of Middle Chinese is strikingly similar to those of its neighbours in the Mainland Southeast Asia linguistic area—proto-Hmong–Mien, proto-Tai and early Vietnamese—none of which is genetically related to Chinese. Moreover, the earliest strata of loans display a regular correspondence between tonal categories in the different languages. In 1954, André-Georges Haudricourt showed that Vietnamese counterparts of the rising and departing tones corresponded to final /ʔ/ and /s/, respectively, in other (atonal) Austroasiatic languages. He thus argued that the Austroasiatic proto-language had been atonal, and that the development of tones in Vietnamese had been conditioned by these consonants, which had subsequently disappeared, a process now known as tonogenesis. Haudricourt further proposed that tone in the other languages, including Middle Chinese, had a similar origin. 

Other scholars have since uncovered transcriptional and other evidence for these consonants in early forms of Chinese, and many linguists now believe that Old Chinese was atonal.

Around the end of the first millennium AD, Middle Chinese and the southeast Asian languages experienced a phonemic split of their tone categories. Syllables with voiced initials tended to be pronounced with a lower pitch, and by the late Tang dynasty, each of the tones had split into two registers conditioned by the initials, known as the "upper" and "lower". When voicing was lost in most varieties (except in the Wu and Old Xiang groups and some Gan dialects), this distinction became phonemic, yielding up to eight tonal categories, with a six-way contrast in unchecked syllables and a two-way contrast in checked syllables. Cantonese maintains these tones and has developed an additional distinction in checked syllables, resulting in a total of nine tonal categories. However, most varieties have fewer tonal distinctions. For example, in Mandarin dialects the lower rising category merged with the departing category to form the modern falling tone, leaving a system of four tones. Furthermore, final stop consonants disappeared in most Mandarin dialects, and such syllables were reassigned to one of the other four tones.

Changes from Old to Modern Chinese

Middle Chinese had a structure similar to many modern varieties, especially conservative ones like Cantonese, with largely monosyllabic words, little or no derivational morphology, three tones, and a syllable structure consisting of initial consonant, glide, main vowel and final consonant, with a large number of initial consonants and a fairly small number of final consonants. Without counting the glide, no clusters could occur at the beginning or end of a syllable.

Old Chinese, on the other hand, had a significantly different structure. There were no tones, a smaller imbalance between possible initial and final consonants, and many initial and final clusters. There was a well-developed system of derivational and possibly inflectional morphology, formed using consonants added onto the beginning or end of a syllable. The system is similar to the system reconstructed for Proto-Sino-Tibetan and still visible, for example, in Classical Tibetan; it is also largely similar to the system that occurs in the more conservative Austroasiatic languages, such as modern Khmer.

The main changes leading to the modern varieties have been a reduction in the number of consonants and vowels and a corresponding increase in the number of tones (typically through a Pan-East-Asiatic tone split that doubled the number of tones and eliminated the distinction between voiced and unvoiced consonants). That has led to a gradual decrease in the number of possible syllables. Standard Mandarin has only about 1,300 possible syllables, and many other varieties of Chinese even fewer (for example, modern Shanghainese has been reported to have only about 700 syllables). The result in Mandarin, for example, has been the proliferation of the number of two-syllable compound words, which have steadily replaced former monosyllabic words; most words in Standard Mandarin now have two syllables.

Middle Chinese continues to be attested through at least 1150 CE. Old Chinese meanwhile, is much older:

Old Chinese, also called Archaic Chinese in older works, is the oldest attested stage of Chinese, and the ancestor of all modern varieties of Chinese. The earliest examples of Chinese are divinatory inscriptions on oracle bones from around 1250 BC, in the Late Shang period. Bronze inscriptions became plentiful during the following Zhou dynasty [ed. 1046 BCE to 256 BCE]. The latter part of the Zhou period saw a flowering of literature, including classical works such as the Analects, the Mencius, and the Zuo Zhuan. These works served as models for Literary Chinese (or Classical Chinese), which remained the written standard until the early twentieth century, thus preserving the vocabulary and grammar of late Old Chinese.

The transition from Middle Chinese to modern Chinese topolects appears to date from sometime between the 10th and 13th centuries.

After the fall of the Northern Song dynasty and subsequent reign of the Jurchen Jin and Mongol Yuan dynasties in northern China, a common speech (now called Old Mandarin) developed based on the dialects of the North China Plain around the capital. The 1324 Zhongyuan Yinyun was a dictionary that codified the rhyming conventions of new sanqu verse form in this language. Together with the slightly later Menggu Ziyun, this dictionary describes a language with many of the features characteristic of modern Mandarin dialects.

Up to the early 20th century, most Chinese people only spoke their local variety. Thus, as a practical measure, officials of the Ming and Qing dynasties carried out the administration of the empire using a common language based on Mandarin varieties, known as 官话; 官話; Guānhuà; 'language of officials'. For most of this period, this language was a koiné based on dialects spoken in the Nanjing area, though not identical to any single dialect. By the middle of the 19th century, the Beijing dialect had become dominant and was essential for any business with the imperial court.

In the 1930s, a standard national language (国语; 國語; Guóyǔ), was adopted. After much dispute between proponents of northern and southern dialects and an abortive attempt at an artificial pronunciation, the National Language Unification Commission finally settled on the Beijing dialect in 1932. The People's Republic founded in 1949 retained this standard but renamed it 普通话; 普通話; pǔtōnghuà; 'common speech'. The national language is now used in education, the media, and formal situations in both mainland China and Taiwan.

In Hong Kong and Macau, Cantonese is the dominant spoken language due to cultural influence from Guangdong immigrants and colonial-era policies, and is used in education, media, formal speech, and everyday life—though Mandarin is increasingly taught in schools due to the mainland's growing influence.

Influence

Historically, the Chinese language has spread to its neighbors through a variety of means. Northern Vietnam was incorporated into the Han dynasty (202 BCE – 220 CE) in 111 BCE, marking the beginning of a period of Chinese control that ran almost continuously for a millennium. The Four Commanderies of Han were established in northern Korea in the 1st century BCE but disintegrated in the following centuries. Chinese Buddhism spread over East Asia between the 2nd and 5th centuries CE, and with it the study of scriptures and literature in Literary Chinese. Later, strong central governments modeled on Chinese institutions were established in Korea, Japan, and Vietnam, with Literary Chinese serving as the language of administration and scholarship, a position it would retain until the late 19th century in Korea and (to a lesser extent) Japan, and the early 20th century in Vietnam. Scholars from different lands could communicate, albeit only in writing, using Literary Chinese.

Although they used Chinese solely for written communication, each country had its own tradition of reading texts aloud using what are known as Sino-Xenic pronunciations. Chinese words with these pronunciations were also extensively imported into the Korean, Japanese and Vietnamese languages, and today comprise over half of their vocabularies. This massive influx led to changes in the phonological structure of the languages, contributing to the development of moraic structure in Japanese and the disruption of vowel harmony in Korean.

Borrowed Chinese morphemes have been used extensively in all these languages to coin compound words for new concepts, in a similar way to the use of Latin and Ancient Greek roots in European languages. Many new compounds, or new meanings for old phrases, were created in the late 19th and early 20th centuries to name Western concepts and artifacts. These coinages, written in shared Chinese characters, have then been borrowed freely between languages. They have even been accepted into Chinese, a language usually resistant to loanwords, because their foreign origin was hidden by their written form. Often different compounds for the same concept were in circulation for some time before a winner emerged, and sometimes the final choice differed between countries. The proportion of vocabulary of Chinese origin thus tends to be greater in technical, abstract, or formal language. For example, in Japan, Sino-Japanese words account for about 35% of the words in entertainment magazines, over half the words in newspapers, and 60% of the words in science magazines.

Vietnam, Korea, and Japan each developed writing systems for their own languages, initially based on Chinese characters, but later replaced with the hangul alphabet for Korean and supplemented with kana syllabaries for Japanese, while Vietnamese continued to be written with the complex chữ Nôm script. However, these were limited to popular literature until the late 19th century. Today Japanese is written with a composite script using both Chinese characters called kanji, and kana. Korean is written exclusively with hangul in North Korea, although knowledge of the supplementary Chinese characters called hanja is still required, and hanja are increasingly rarely used in South Korea. As a result of its historical colonization by France, Vietnamese now uses the Latin-based Vietnamese alphabet.

Why Is Cantonese linguistically conservative?

The Sino-Tibetan language family has its origins in Northern China, and not Southern China. Prior to the arrival of the Han Chinese in 214 BCE, languages belonging the Thai language family thrived where Cantonese is now spoken. Other language families now spoken mostly in Southeast Asia also had their origins in Southern China. 

Presumably the preservation of ancient pronunciations in Cantonese reflects the general linguistic principle the historic features of languages tend to be more strongly preserved on frontiers of a language's range, than near the core of its range. See also Appalachian English (which is the modern English dialect closest to Shakespearian English), New Mexican Spanish (which is the only place that some archaic features of the Spanish language have survived), and the Icelandic language (which is closest to Old Norse, the Germanic proto-language).

The Chinese Min languages, which have some features that predate Middle Chinese, are likewise Chinese languages that developed on the frontier of the range of Chinese languages.

Many Min languages have retained notable features of the Old Chinese language, and there is linguistic evidence that not all Min varieties are directly descended from Middle Chinese of the Sui–Tang dynasties. Min languages are believed to have a significant linguistic substrate from the languages of the inhabitants of the region before its sinicization. . . .

The Min homeland of Fujian was opened to Han Chinese settlement by the defeat of the Minyue state by the armies of Emperor Wu of Han in 110 BC. The area features rugged mountainous terrain, with short rivers that flow into the South China Sea. Most subsequent migration from north to south China passed through the valleys of the Xiang and Gan rivers to the west, so that Min varieties have experienced less northern influence than other southern groups. As a result, whereas most varieties of Chinese can be treated as derived from Middle Chinese—the language described by rhyme dictionaries such as the Qieyun (601 AD)—Min varieties contain traces of older distinctions. Linguists estimate that the oldest layers of Min dialects diverged from the rest of Chinese around the time of the Han dynasty. However, significant waves of migration from the North China Plain occurred: 

• The Uprising of the Five Barbarians during the Jin dynasty, particularly the Disaster of Yongjia in 311 AD, caused a tide of immigration to the south.
• In 669, Chen Zheng and his son Chen Yuanguang from Gushi County in Henan set up a regional administration in Fujian to suppress an insurrection by the She people.
• Wang Chao was appointed governor of Fujian in 893, near the end of the Tang dynasty, and brought tens of thousands of troops from Henan. In 909, following the fall of the Tang dynasty, his son Wang Shenzhi founded the Min Kingdom, one of the Ten Kingdoms in the Five Dynasties and Ten Kingdoms period.

Jerry Norman identifies four main layers in the vocabulary of modern Min varieties: 

1. A non-Chinese substratum from the original languages of Minyue, which Norman and Mei Tsu-lin believe were Austroasiatic.
2. The earliest Chinese layer, brought to Fujian by settlers from Zhejiang to the north during the Han dynasty (compare Eastern Han Chinese).
3. A layer from the Northern and Southern dynasties period, which is largely consistent with the phonology of the Qieyun dictionary (Early Middle Chinese).
4. A literary layer based on the koiné of Chang'an, the capital of the Tang dynasty (Late Middle Chinese).

Laurent Sagart (2008) disagrees with Norman and Mei Tsu-lin's analysis of an Austroasiatic substratum in Min. The hypothesis proposed by Jerry Norman and Mei Tsu-lin arguing for an Austroasiatic homeland along the middle Yangtze has been largely abandoned in most circles and left unsupported by the majority of Austroasiatic specialists. Rather, recent movements of analyzing archeological evidence, posit an Austronesian layer, rather than an Austroasiatic one.

As a footnote, I have argued repeatedly that the highly divergent features of the Anatolian language relative to the time when these languages are first attested and when the first archaeological evidence of Indo-European cultural litmus tests in Anatolia appear, is due to language contact with languages such as the pre-Hittite Hattic language which is very different from the substrate Indo-European languages of Europe. 

But another possibility is that the Anatolian languages preserved archaic features of the language family because they were located at a language frontier of the Indo-European linguistic range. Again, not because they have so much more time depth than the Indo-European languages of Europe, but because they were isolated on the frontier from developments in the Indo-European linguistic community elsewhere, which were more connected to each other, that led those languages to collectively evolve in similar ways.