The Tai people refined an irrigated rice culture in southern China some 2,000 years ago that enabled them to expand far beyond their geographic origins and to project their economic and political influence to much of mainland Southeast Asia. Many toponyms, especially at the village level, are derived from identifiable features of both the natural and human-created landscape that map distinctive features of their evolving history and culture. Examples include water sources, landforms and bioforms, rice fields, and passageways. An environmental record and indigenous knowledge system has thus been preserved in toponyms. Many of the earlier Tai place names and the cultural, linguistic and human history they encapsulate have been obscured by time, political change, and the work of official government map makers. Many toponyms also document extensive linguistic and cultural borrowing, which is an important, largely undemonstrated or overlooked part of the Tai expansion.
This research project will construct a geographic information system (GIS) database of Tai toponyms in southern China and mainland Southeast Asia. The investigators will use spatial analytic techniques in order to present a macro-regional view of historically significant linguistic and cultural practices encapsulated in naming places in these areas. Many toponyms are derived from identifiable features of the natural and manmade landscape and thus reflect boundaries of natural regions. Preliminary research by the investigators has shown that naming practices follow regional patterns that illustrate periodized Sinitic influence on proto-Tai in the northern sweep of the domain and Sanskritic in the southern reaches. The investigators will examine Tai toponyms at a range of different spatial scales. This exploratory project will be a test of methodologies combining linguistics and GIS that will produce sets of GIS data and explain the spatial patterns of Tai toponyms.
This project will use GIS and spatial analysis techniques to analyze the linguistic processes and cultural practices of naming places in the landscape with physical and manmade features. It will further provide the basis for inferring population movements across geographic and political boundaries based on language commonalities and changes, and it is expected to uncover continuities and breaks in their naming practices. In a broad sense, it will confirm and illustrate that language and culture exhibit knowable patterns of human behavior and that they tend to cluster in regions, in this case Sinitic and Sanskritic zones of cultural influence. The investigators hope to create a model for constructing a repository of an indigenous knowledge system based on a semantic analysis of village names that has not been available up until now. Results from this project will be available on the Web for free use by researchers and the general public, and they will create a virtual online laboratory for studying the region transnationally. The project will demonstrate to small and threatened groups of the area how they can ally themselves with brethren groups living far away for mutual empowerment. The results also will be valuable to international groups working with indigenous peoples.
