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Rice (2011) 4:121–133 DOI How Many Independent Rice Vocabularies in Asia?

Laurent Sagart

Received: 30 September 2011 / Accepted: 10 December 2011 / Published online: 5 January 2012 © Springer Science+Business Media, LLC 2011

Abstract The process of moving from collecting plants in the wild to cultivating and gradually domesticating them has as its linguistic corollary the formation of a specific vocabulary to designate the plants and their parts, the fields in which they are cultivated, the tools and activities required to cultivate them and the food preparations in which they enter. From this point of view, independent domestications of a plant can be expected to result in wholly independent vocabularies. Conversely, when cultivation of a plant spreads from one population to another, one expects elements of the original vocabulary to spread with cultivation practices. This paper examines the vocabularies of rice in Asian languages for evidence of linguistic transfers, concluding that there are at least two independent vocabularies of rice in Asia. This suggests at least two independent starts of cultivation and domestications of Asian rice.

Keywords Rice · Domestication. Asia. Linguistics

The spread of rice as a multidisciplinary problem

How can geneticists, anthropologists, archaeologists, cultural historians, linguists, arrive together at a deeper understanding of recent human prehistory in Asia? A hypothesis unifying our various problematics is that in that period, roughly the past 10,000 years, the expansions in East and South Asia of human populations, their languages, the cereals they cultivated, together with the genes of these cereals, all have the same underlying cause: the shift to agriculture and its demographic consequences. Populations of farmers can support larger families than hunter-gatherers, which gives them higher densities, and lets them expand with their genes, their crops and their languages. This is the well-known Bellwood–Renfrew farming/language hypothesis. This hypothesis is adopted here, with the standard caveat that not all linguistic expansions need to be agriculturally based (Eskimo–Aleut an obvious case) and with the refinement, introduced in Bellwood (2005b) that while agriculture per se will normally induce an increase in population density, it will not by itself suffice to lead to geographical expansion: another prerequisite is the possession of a diversified, versatile food procurement strategy, permitting adaptation to changing natural environments. In that sense, exclusive specialization in one kind of cereal is not conducive to wide geographical expansion.

With rice, the problem we face is to match each start of cultivation with a node dominating a clade in the genetic tree of varieties of Oryza sativa, with an archaeologically attested culture, and with a node in one of the region’s language phylogenies. There is no consensus on the number of starts of cultivation for rice. There are currently theories that say Asian rice, O. sativa, was put into cultivation only once (the “snowball model” of Vaughn et al.) and theories that say there were at least two (Kovach et al. 2007): at least once for Indica-and-Aus, and at least once for Japonica-Javanica-Basmati. Londo et al. (2006) claim that indica was domesticated in South Asia and japonica in East Asia. There are still regions in Southeast Asia (Burma, Laos, Cambodia) where yet undetected starts of cultivation may have taken place. The rice dendrogram in Garris et al. (2005) has three main clades: Indica, Japonica, and Aus.

To linguists, a start of cultivation is a time during which a specific vocabulary is formed in a language to attend to the L. Sagart (✉) CRLAO, 42bis Avenue de la Belle Gabrielle, 75012 Paris, France e-mail: laurent.sagart@gmail.com