Austronesian and Chinese words for the millets

Laurent Sagart (1) , Tze-Fu Hsu , Yuan-Ching Tsai , Yue-Ie Hsing

1 CRLAO - Centre de Recherches Linguistiques sur l'Asie Orientale

After reviewing recent evidence from related disciplines arguing for an origin of the Austronesian peoples in northeastern China, this paper discusses the Proto-Austronesian and Old Chinese names of the millets, Setaria italica and Panicum miliaceum. Partly based on linguistic data collected in Taiwan by the authors, proposed Proto-Austronesian cognate sets for millet terms are re-evaluated and the Proto-Austronesian sets are identified. The reasons for the earlier confusion among Old Chinese terms for the millets are explained: the Austronesian term for Panicum miliaceum and one of the Chinese terms for the same plant are shown to obey the sound correspondences

Mots clés: Taiwan; Austronesian linguistics; Chinese linguistics; millet; East Asian agriculture; neolithic archaeology; linguistic reconstruction

Domaines: Linguistique

Laurent Sagart, Tze-Fu Hsu, Yuan-Ching Tsai, Yue-Ie Hsing. Austronesian and Chinese words for the millets. Language Dynamics and Change, 2017, 7 (2), pp.187-209. ⟨10.1163/22105832-00702002⟩. ⟨hal-03146013⟩