Origin of the Alans

[Alanus]

Hi, Jan

I searched for Mair's paper for almost a year. Due to the high number of sinologists that agreed with him, I kept up the search even though all I had was the usual, "Mair 1990." If you Google the full title of his thesis, the date, and ad his name, you should find it.

Yes, it's amazing. The number of borrowings for wheel, chariot, and even metal yoke ring, among a few, all point to an Early Iranian infusion into Old Chinese. These two terms (Early Iranian and Old Chinese) were not used by Mair... perhaps because they were not coined in 1990. The important factors, as far as I'm concerned, are the origins. They are Early Iranian or Old Iranian, not Tocharian. This pinpoints the direction in which they arrived in China, the North to Northeast and not from Xinjiang in the west. Thus the language itself can be traced back through Mongolia, up through the Western Sayan, to finally reach the Karasuk culture, the replacement of the Andronovo culture which originated the chariot and a Proto-Iranian language.

What is really important is the presence of these intruders in "high places;" we have Magi, a Shang Queen, and the Duke of Peng, in the highest civil and military positions in both Shang and Zhou courts, and then we have a substantial Old Iranian vocabulary.

The studies go back to 1936 when Carl Karstien held the opinion that, "Chinese corresponds most ideally to the hypothetic prototype of Indo-European." In 1967, Jan Ulenbrook claimed 57 words were related. Shortly afterwards, Tor Ulving produced a thesis in which 238 Chinese words were similar to Indo-European. He stated, "the dominance of Indo-European vocabulary in Chinese was already consolidated in the second half of the second millennium B.C."

Wheel:
OC    kulu/kolo       PIE    kwelos        Toch.    kuka

Chariot's metal yoke ring:
OC    ?rek        PIE    hreg        Toch.    rak

Chariot:
OC    sheng        PIE    kleng        Toch.A    klank   

Other studies have been done by Alexander Lubotsky, Zhou Jixu, Tsung-tung Chang, Robert S. Bauer (whom you mentioned), and many others, all of which point to a significant intrusion of IE into OC. According to Mair, the split beween PIE and Proto-Iranian occurred before the split between PIE and Tocharian. In the above examples, we can see that spoken OC is closer to PIE than to Tocharian. In this respect, I agree that Old Iranian reached interior China prior to Tocharian and created a heavier influence on terminology, particularly in wheeled technology.

John C. Didier notes, "...groups to the north and east of the Shang... were of Indo-Iranian Caucasoid or mixed Indo-Iranian and indigenous Siberian/Manchurian Mongoloid descent." (In and Outside the Square, Sino-Platonic Papers, No. 192, Vol 2, Sept. 2009)


We receive something similar from Christine Lee speaking of the pre-Xiongnu period , "Populations within the Northern Zone and Manchuria experienced a higher degree of migration and admixture than did the populations of the Central Plains and the Western Regions. The introduction of the horse and subsequent technologies to the Northern Zone and Manchuria may have been a casual factor in the homogenization of the populations within these two regions."

Some of these scholars may have "overshot the mark," if you get my drift, making the influence of IE in China greater than it was. But we are still looking at quite the phenomenon... and one that has not yet been fully explored, particularly in relation to Old Iranian, Proto-Iranian, or whatever you want to call it.