Comparative linguistic research seems to indicate that the Tai people were a proto Tai-Kadai speaking culture of southern China, and that they, like the Malay-Polynesians, may have originally been of Austronesian descent. Prior to inhabiting mainland China, the Tai are suspected to have migrated from a homeland on the island of Taiwan where they spoke a dialect of Proto-Austronesian or one of its descendant languages. After the arrival of Sino-Tibetan speaking ethnic groups from mainland China to the island of Taiwan, the Tai would have then migrated into mainland China, perhaps along the Pearl River, where their language greatly changed in character from the other Austonesian languages under influence of Sino-Tibetan and Hmong-Mien language infusion. The coming of the Han Chinese to this region of southern China may have prompted the Tai to migrate in mass once again, this time southward over the mountains of southern China into Southeast Asia via the mountains of Burma and Laos to the north of Thailand. It is believed that the Tai ethnic groups began migrating southward from China and into Southeast Asia during the first millennium A.D. While this theory of the origin of the Tai is currently the leading theory, there is insufficient archaeological evidence to prove or disprove the proposition at this time, and the linguistic evidence alone is not conclusive. However, in further support of the theory, it is believed that the O1 Y-DNA haplogroup is associated with both the Austronesian people and the Tai.
2 comments:
More on the linguistic origins of Thai.
I hadn't seen that article before. (I wrote the Wikipedia article on the Peopling of Thailand, some years ago, and should probably update it with more of the information available these days.) I am a strong proponent of the Austronesian-Thai link. I personally speak Thai, and I would love to try to put together an etymology of the language. There are many cognates from Indo-European, Sino-Tibetan and Austronesian languages that I can discern. From just listening to other Asian languages spoken, and comparing them to what I know of Thai, I notice, for one, Tagalog consonant clusters are very similar to Thai. I don't have any working knowledge of any Austro-Asiatic language, although the tone structure of Vietnamese seems very familiar. As far as Hmong-Mien, my wife has a Hmong friend, and to me, when she speaks, it sounds nothing at all like any of the above language families. I visited Burma, and I thought Mynmar, although very different from Thai, also had some similarities. If I had to guess, just based on hearing the languages spoken, I would put Thai and Austronesian close together on a language tree (as the O1 DNA seems to suggest anyway), and put Austro-Asiatic and Sino-Tibetan on the next branch, and Hmong-Mien a little further out. I know that's not a very scientific analysis, but one's ears can tell a lot.
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