科普 | 《自然》最新研究：日语、韩语或都发源于中国东北

“宇宙的尽头是 （东北）铁岭”，这是段曾广为流传的网络段子，充满幽默成分，但中国东北真的摊上“人类大事”了。它肯定不是宇宙的尽头，但可能是数亿人说的语言的源头！

根据路透社报道，一项综合了语言、基因和考古学证据的研究发现，包括现代日语、韩语、土耳其语和蒙古语等同一语系的语言以及说这些语言的人，都起源于大约 9000 年前生活在中国东北地区种植谷子的古代农民。

A study combining linguistic, genetic and archaeological evidence has traced the origins of the family of languages including modern Japanese, Korean, Turkish and Mongolian and the people who speak them to millet farmers who inhabited a region in northeastern China about 9,000 years ago.

The researchers from Britain, China, the Czech Republic, France, Germany, Japan, New Zealand, South Korea, Russia, the Netherlands and the United States published their findings in the journal Nature on Wednesday.

The origins and degree to which the five groups that make up the Transeurasian family are related has long been an area of contention among scholars, but the team said that recent studies “have shown a reliable core of evidence” supporting the theory that they emerged from a common ancestor.

The researchers said a data set representing more than 250 vocabulary concepts in 98 languages showed the roots of the language family reaching back 9,181 years to millet farmers living in the region of the West Liao River.

There are 98 Transeurasian languages. Among these are Korean and Japanese as well as: various Turkic languages including Turkish in parts of Europe, Anatolia, Central Asia and Siberia; various Mongolic languages including Mongolian in Central and Northeast Asia; and various Tungusic languages in Manchuria and Siberia.

This language family's beginnings were traced to Neolithic millet farmers in the Liao River valley, an area encompassing parts of the Chinese provinces of Liaoning and Jilin and the region of Inner Mongolia. As these farmers moved across northeastern Asia, the descendant languages spread north and west into Siberia and the steppes and east into the Korean peninsula and over the sea to the Japanese archipelago over thousands of years.

这份研究的主要作者马丁·罗贝兹（Martine Robbeets）坦言：“接受自己的语言、文化和祖先来自现有的国家边界之外，是一种身份的屈服，这让一些人还没准备好。”

Accepting that the roots of one's language, culture or people lie beyond the present national boundaries is a kind of surrender of identity, which some people are not yet prepared to make," said comparative linguist Martine Robbeets, leader of the Archaeolinguistic Research Group at the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History in Germany and lead author of the study published in the journal Nature.

本文来源：中国日报整理自路透社、南华早报