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30-513: Additionally, Hmong–Mien languages are included by some linguists, and even Japanese was speculated to be Austric in an early version of the hypothesis by Paul K. Benedict . The Austric macrofamily was first proposed by the German missionary Wilhelm Schmidt in 1906. He showed phonological , morphological , and lexical evidence to support the existence of an Austric phylum consisting of Austroasiatic and Austronesian . Schmidt's proposal had

60-455: A "Greater Austric" family. In the second half of the last century, Paul K. Benedict raised a vocal critique of the Austric proposal, eventually calling it an 'extinct' proto-language. Hayes' lexical comparisons, which were presented as supporting evidence for Austric between 1992 and 2001, were criticized for the greater part as methodologically unsound by several reviewers. Robert Blust ,

90-690: A highly tonal language family of southern China and northern Southeast Asia . They are spoken in mountainous areas of southern China, including Guizhou , Hunan , Yunnan , Sichuan , Guangxi , Guangdong and Hubei provinces; the speakers of these languages are predominantly " hill people ", in contrast to the neighboring Han Chinese , who have settled the more fertile river valleys. Hmongic (Miao) and Mienic (Yao) are closely related, but clearly distinct. For internal classifications, see Hmongic languages and Mienic languages . The largest differences are due to divergent developments in their phonological systems . The Hmongic languages appear to have kept

120-407: A leading scholar in the field of Austronesian comparative linguistics, pointed out "the radical disjunction of morphological and lexical evidence" which characterizes the Austric proposal; while he accepts the morphological correspondences between Austronesian and Austroasiatic as possible evidence for a remote genetic relationship, he considers the lexical evidence unconvincing. A 2015 analysis using

150-449: A mixed reception among scholars of Southeast Asian languages, and received only little scholarly attention in the following decades. Research interest into Austric resurged in the late 20th century, culminating in a series of articles by La Vaughn H. Hayes, who presented a corpus of Proto-Austric vocabulary together with a reconstruction of Proto-Austric phonology, and by Lawrence Reid, focussing on morphological evidence. Reid (2005) lists

180-453: Is a collaborative project applying computational approaches to comparative linguistics using a database of word lists. The database is open access and consists of 40-item basic-vocabulary lists for well over half of the world's languages. It is continuously being expanded. In addition to isolates and languages of demonstrated genealogical groups, the database includes pidgins , creoles , mixed languages , and constructed languages . Words of

210-624: Is not widely accepted among historical linguists as an adequate method to establish or evaluate relationships between language families. It is part of the Cross-Linguistic Linked Data project hosted by the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History . ASJP was originally developed as a means for objectively evaluating the similarity of words with the same meaning from different languages, with

240-680: Is quite typical of the region. They are SVO in word order but are not as rigidly right-branching as the Tai–Kadai languages or most Mon–Khmer languages , since they have genitives and numerals before the noun like Chinese. They are extremely poor in adpositions : serial verb constructions replace most functions of adpositions in languages like English. For example, a construction translating as "be near" would be used where in English prepositions like "in" or "at" would be used. Besides their tonality and lack of adpositions, another striking feature

270-557: Is that they constitute a family of their own, the lexical and typological similarities among Hmong–Mien and Sinitic languages being attributed to contact-induced influence. Paul K. Benedict , an American scholar, extended the Austric theory to include the Hmong–Mien languages. The hypothesis never received much acceptance for Hmong–Mien, however. Kosaka (2002) argued specifically for a Miao– Dai family. The most likely homeland of

300-614: Is the abundance of numeral classifiers and their use where other languages use definite articles or demonstratives to modify nouns. Various unclassified Sinitic languages are spoken by ethnic Miao and Yao . These languages have variously been proposed as having Hmong-Mien substrata or as mixed languages , including languages such as She Chinese , Laba , Lingling , Maojia , Badong Yao , various Lowland Yao languages including Yeheni , Shaozhou Tuhua , and various Pinghua dialects. Automated Similarity Judgment Program The Automated Similarity Judgment Program ( ASJP )

330-480: Is the insertion, deletion, or substitution of a symbol. Within the Levenshtein approach, differences in word length can be corrected for by dividing LD by the number of symbols of the longer of the two compared words. This produces normalized LD (LDN). An LDN divided (LDND) between the two languages is calculated by dividing the average LDN for all the word pairs involving the same meaning by the average LDN for all

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360-618: The Automated Similarity Judgment Program (ASJP) did not support the Austric hypothesis. In this analysis, the supposed "core" components of Austric were assigned to two separate, unrelated clades: Austro-Tai and Austroasiatic-Japonic. Note however that ASJP is not widely accepted among historical linguists as an adequate method to establish or evaluate relationships between language families. Hmong%E2%80%93Mien languages The Hmong–Mien languages (also known as Miao–Yao and rarely as Yangtzean ) are

390-437: The ethnonym Mien may be preferred as less ambiguous. Like many languages in southern China, the Hmong–Mien languages tend to be monosyllabic and syntactically analytic . They are some of the most highly tonal languages in the world: Longmo and Zongdi Hmong have as many as twelve distinct tones. They are notable phonologically for the occurrence of voiceless sonorants and uvular consonants ; otherwise their phonology

420-627: The Austric hypothesis and extended it to include the Kra–Dai (Thai–Kadai) languages as an immediate sister branch to Austronesian , and further speculated on the possibility to include the Hmong–Mien (Miao–Yao) languages as well. However, he later abandoned the Austric proposal in favor of an extended version of the Austro-Tai hypothesis . Sergei Starostin adopted Benedict's extended 1942 version of Austric (i.e. including Kra–Dai and Hmong–Mien) within

450-528: The Automated Similarity Judgment Program (ASJP), an experimental algorithm for automatic generation of phonologically based phylogenies. The Mandarin names for these languages are Miáo and Yáo . In Vietnamese , the name for Hmong is H'Mông , and the name for Mien is Dao (i.e., Yao), although Miền is also used. Meo , Hmu , Mong , Hmao , and Hmong are local names for Miao, but since most Laotian refugees in

480-619: The Hmong–Mien languages is in Southern China between the Yangtze and Mekong rivers, but speakers of these languages might have migrated from Central China either as part of the Han Chinese expansion or as a result of exile from an original homeland by Han Chinese. Migration of people speaking these languages from South China to Southeast Asia took place during the 17th century (1600–1700). Ancient DNA evidence suggests that

510-649: The United States call themselves Hmong/Mong , this name has become better known in English than the others in recent decades. However, except for some scholars who prefer the word, the term 'Hmong/Mong' is only used within certain Hmong/Miao language speaking communities in China, where the majority of the Miao speakers live. In Mandarin, despite the fact that it was once a derogatory term, the word Miao (Chinese: 苗;

540-746: The ancestors of the speakers of the Hmong–Mien languages were a population genetically distinct from that of the Tai–Kadai and Austronesian language source populations at a location on the Yangtze River . Recent Y-DNA phylogeny evidence supports the proposition that people who speak the Hmong–Mien languages are descended from a population that is distantly related to those who now speak the Mon-Khmer languages. The date of Proto-Hmong–Mien has been estimated to be about 2500 BP (500 BC) by Sagart, Blench, and Sanchez-Mazas using traditional methods employing many lines of evidence, and about 4243 BP (2250 BC) by

570-424: The consortium was Cecil H. Brown . Søren Wichmann is daily curator of the project. A third central member of the consortium is Eric W. Holman, who has created most of the software used in the project. While word lists used were originally based on the 100-item Swadesh list , it was statistically determined that a subset of 40 of the 100 items produced just as good if not slightly better classificatory results than

600-439: The database are transcribed into a simplified standard orthography ( ASJPcode ). The database has been used to estimate dates at which language families have diverged into daughter languages by a method related to but still different from glottochronology , to determine the homeland ( Urheimat ) of a proto-language , to investigate sound symbolism , to evaluate different phylogenetic methods, and several other purposes. ASJP

630-613: The following pairs as "probable" cognates between Proto-Austroasiatic and Proto-Austronesian . Among the morphological evidence, he compares reconstructed affixes such as the following, and notes that shared infixes are less likely to be borrowed (for a further discussion of infixes in Southeast Asian languages, see also Barlow 2022). Below are 10 selected Austric lexical comparisons by Diffloth (1994), as cited in Sidwell & Reid (2021): The first extension to Austric

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660-426: The framework of his larger Dené–Daic proposal, with Austric as a coordinate branch to Dené–Caucasian , as shown in the tree below. Hmong–Mien Austroasiatic Kra–Dai Austronesian Dené–Caucasian Another long-range proposal for wider connections of Austric was brought forward by John Bengtson , who grouped Nihali and Ainu together with Austroasiatic , Austronesian , Hmong–Mien , and Kra–Dai in

690-559: The large set of initial consonants featured in the protolanguage but greatly reduced the distinctions in the syllable finals, in particular losing all glides and stop codas . The Mienic languages, on the other hand, have largely preserved syllable finals but reduced the number of initial consonants. Early linguistic classifications placed the Hmong–Mien languages in the Sino-Tibetan family , where they remain in many Chinese classifications. The current consensus among Western linguists

720-446: The standard QWERTY keyboard. A ~ mark follows two consonants so that they are considered to be in the same position. Thus, kʷat becomes kw~at . Syllables like kat , wat , kaw and kwi are considered lexically similar to kw~at . Similarly, a $ mark follows three consonants so that they are considered to be in the same position. ndy$ im is considered similar to nim , dam and yim . " marks

750-549: The tone varies according to the Sinitic dialect) is now commonly used by members of all nationalities to refer to the language and the ethnolinguistic group. The Mandarin name Yao, on the other hand, is for the Yao nationality , which is a multicultural rather than ethnolinguistic group. It includes peoples speaking Mien, Kra–Dai , Yi , and Miao languages, the latter called Bùnǔ rather than Miáo when spoken by Yao. For this reason,

780-408: The ultimate goal of classifying languages computationally, based on the lexical similarities observed. In the first ASJP paper two semantically identical words from compared languages were judged similar if they showed at least two identical sound segments. Similarity between the two languages was calculated as a percentage of the total number of words compared that were judged as similar. This method

810-494: The whole list. So subsequently word lists gathered contain only 40 items (or less, when attestations for some are lacking). In papers published since 2008, ASJP has employed a similarity judgment program based on Levenshtein distance (LD). This approach was found to produce better classificatory results measured against expert opinion than the method used initially. LD is defined as the minimum number of successive changes necessary to convert one word into another, where each change

840-514: The word pairs involving different meanings. This second normalization is intended to correct for chance similarity. The ASJP uses the following 40-word list. It is similar to the Swadesh–Yakhontov list , but has some differences. ASJP version from 2016 uses the following symbols to encode phonemes : p b f v m w 8 t d s z c n r l S Z C j T 5 y k g x N q X h 7 L 4 G ! i e E 3 a u o They represent 7 vowels and 34 consonants, all found on

870-401: Was applied to 100-item word lists for 250 languages from language families including Austroasiatic , Indo-European , Mayan , and Muskogean . The ASJP Consortium, founded around 2008, came to involve around 25 professional linguists and other interested parties working as volunteer transcribers and/or extending aid to the project in other ways. The main driving force behind the founding of

900-497: Was first proposed Wilhelm Schmidt himself, who speculated about including Japanese within Austric, mainly because of assumed similarities between Japanese and the Austronesian languages . While the proposal about a link between Austronesian and Japanese still enjoys some following as a separate hypothesis, the inclusion of Japanese was not adopted by later proponents of Austric. In 1942, Paul K. Benedict provisionally accepted

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