1st Edition

Linguistic Reconstruction and Historical Ecology in the North Pacific Rim

Edited By Martine Robbeets, Martijn Knapen Copyright 2027
352 Pages 34 B/W Illustrations
by Routledge

Linguistic Reconstruction and Historical Ecology in the North Pacific Rim explores human-environmental interactions in the Northern Pacific Rim over the last 10,000 years. It introduces students and researchers to linguistic methods for reconstructing how humans have managed and modified landscapes over millennia. The chapters cover a variety of temporal and geographical ranges, including the... Read more

Linguistic Reconstruction and Historical Ecology: An Introduction   

Martine Robbeets and Martijn Knapen

Part I. Landscape transformation

Chapter 1. Language, Species, and Culture: Reflections from Historical Ecology 

William Balée   

Chapter 2. The Vocabulary of Reindeer Herding in Dolgan within the Context of Dolgan -Evenki Contact 

Uluhan Özalan

Chapter 3. Northern Pacific Rim Substratum Interference in Japonic, Koreanic and Tungusic

Martine Robbeets

Part II. Landscape stratigraphy

Chapter 4. New Linguistic Evidence for the Northern Origin of the Southern Dene/Athabaskan Languages

Willem J. de Reuse

Chapter 5. Ecological Lexical Borrowings between Japano-Koreanic and Sinitic on the Southern Edge of the North Pacific Rim

Bingcong Deng

Chapter 6. Paleoecology, Biogeographic Adaptation and the Development of Proto-Aleut and Dene during the Neoglacial and Later Periods

Anna Berge, Ben A. Potter, Jason Rogers and Matthew J. Wooller

Chapter 7. The role of climate change in Mid-Holocene migrations and language spreads from Asia into North America

Michael Fortescue

Chapter 8. Ecological Vocabulary in Bella Coola: Evidence for Old Trade and Migration Routes, Lexical Copying and Diffusion in the Pacific Northwest

Hank Nater

Part III. Traditional ecological knowledge

Chapter 9. Ethnobotany on Sakhalin: The History and Structure of Nivkh, Uilta and Ainu Taxonyms and Taxonomies

Martijn Knapen, Miki Mizushima, Hidetoshi Shiraishi, Itsuji Tangiku and Yoshiko Yamada

Chapter 10. Ethnolinguistic Aspects of Birch Trees in Tungusic and Beyond

Andreas Hölzl  

Chapter 11. Yukaghir ‘Mammoth’ in North Siberian Contexts  

Václav Blážek

Biography

Prof. Dr. habil Martine Robbeets is the head of the Language and the Anthropocene Research Group at the Max Planck Institute of Geoanthropology in Jena and Honorary Professor of General and Comparative linguistics at the Johannes Gutenberg University in Mainz. She holds a PhD in Comparative Linguistics from the University of Leiden and a Habilitation in Linguistic Typology from the University of Mainz. She wrote several monographs and edited various volumes, among which Routledge’s Critical Concepts in Linguistics on “the Transeurasian Languages”, “The Oxford Guide to Transeurasian Languages” and “The Oxford Handbook of Archaeology and Language”.

Martijn Knapen is a doctoral researcher in the Language and the Anthropocene research group at the Max Planck Institute of Geoanthropology in Jena. He holds an MA in Linguistic Diversity and Digital Humanities from the University of Helsinki. He is a linguist specializing in three Indigenous linguistic lineages of Northeast Asia: Nivkh (or Amuric), Tungusic and Ainu. His ongoing research focuses on the interactions of their speakers among themselves and their interrelations with their local landscapes and seascapes.