The origin and early dispersal of speakers of Transeurasian languages—that is, Japanese, Korean, Tungusic, Mongolic and Turkic—is among the most disputed issues of Eurasian population history1–3. A key problem is the relationship between linguistic dispersals, agricultural expansions and population movements4,5. Here we address this question by ‘triangulating’ genetics, archaeology and linguistics in a unified perspective. We report wide-ranging datasets from these disciplines, including a comprehensive Transeurasian agropastoral and basic vocabulary; an archaeological database of 255 Neolithic–Bronze Age sites from Northeast Asia; and a collection of ancient genomes from Korea, the Ryukyu islands and early cereal farmers in Japan, complementing previously published genomes from East Asia. Challenging the traditional ‘pastoralist hypothesis’6–8, we show that the common ancestry and primary dispersals of Transeurasian languages can be traced back to the first farmers moving across Northeast Asia from the Early Neolithic onwards, but that this shared heritage has been masked by extensive cultural interaction since the Bronze Age. As well as marking considerable progress in the three individual disciplines, by combining their converging evidence we show that the early spread of Transeurasian speakers was driven by agriculture.

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Korean has a large number of taste terms and the paradigm is continuously expanding since the lexicalization operates systematically on a few robust principles. Based on the taste terms collected from lexicons, dictionaries, web-postings, and elsewhere, we classified the terms and analyzed the lexicalization patterns. In addition to the widely-known five classes of tastes, i.e.,sweet, salty, sour, bitterandumami, Korean has three more classes in the basic category, i.e.,pungent, fishyandbland. A large number of tactile sensory words to describe the touch sensations in the mouth at the tasting event and expressions denoting characteristic food texture and mastication also join in creating a rich taste vocabulary. The Korean taste lexicalization system is equipped with the means to signal diverse aspects of gustatory sensation, i.e., intensity, depth, purity and duration. Among such means are vowel polarity, consonantal sound symbolism, reduplication and onomatopoeia. The systematicity of taste lexicalization contributes to the plasticity of the paradigm, making the Korean taste vocabulary one of the most productive and elaborate paradigms.

This paper addresses the origin and development of the system of Korean nominalizers from Old to Present-day Korean, paying special attention to their sources, the semantic changes they underwent over time, the competition between various nominalizers for the same functional domain, and the subsequent specialization of some of the forms. The study shows that, in order to avoid functional overlaps, certain nominalizers have become constrained to appear in particular contexts (e.g. -ki and -ci, restricted to affirmative and negative constructions respectively) or to express different levels of illocutionary force (e.g. -m, -ki, -ci and -kes when used as sentential end-markers). The paper also shows how certain nominalizers which overlapped functionally lost their original nominalizing function and acquired new uses in related functional spaces (e.g. the adnominalizers -n and -l, derived from old nominalizers).

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