Katana VentraIP

Sino-Tibetan languages

Sino-Tibetan, also cited as Trans-Himalayan in a few sources,[1][2] is a family of more than 400 languages, second only to Indo-European in number of native speakers.[3] Around 1.4 billion people speak a Sino-Tibetan language.[4] The vast majority of these are the 1.3 billion native speakers of Sinitic languages. Other Sino-Tibetan languages with large numbers of speakers include Burmese (33 million) and the Tibetic languages (6 million). Other languages of the family are spoken in the Himalayas, the Southeast Asian Massif, and the eastern edge of the Tibetan Plateau. Most of these have small speech communities in remote mountain areas, and as such are poorly documented.

Sino-Tibetan

Central Asia, East Asia, South Asia and Southeast Asia

One of the world's primary language families

Proto-Sino-Tibetan

Some 40 well-established subgroups, of which those with the most speakers are:

sit

79- (phylozone)

sino1245

Several low-level subgroups have been securely reconstructed, but reconstruction of a proto-language for the family as a whole is still at an early stage, so the higher-level structure of Sino-Tibetan remains unclear. Although the family is traditionally presented as divided into Sinitic (i.e. Chinese languages) and Tibeto-Burman branches, a common origin of the non-Sinitic languages has never been demonstrated. The Kra–Dai and Hmong–Mien languages are generally included within Sino-Tibetan by Chinese linguists but have been excluded by the international community since the 1940s. Several links to other language families have been proposed, but none have broad acceptance.

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Typology[edit]

The most commonly cited hypothesis associates the family with the Neolithic (7000–5000 years BP) of the Yellow River basin, with an expansion driven by millet agriculture.[64] This scenario is associated with a proposed primary split between Sinitic in the east and the Tibeto-Burman languages, often assigned to the Majiayao culture (5300–4000 years BP) in the upper reaches of the Yellow River on the northeast edge of the Tibetan plateau.[63] For example, James Matisoff proposes a split around 6000 years BP, with Chinese-speakers settling along the Yellow River and other groups migrating south down the Yangtze, Mekong, Salween and Brahmaputra rivers.[65]

Yangshao culture

proposes a Sino-Tibetan homeland in the Sichuan Basin before 9000 years BP, with an associated taxonomy reflecting various outward migrations over time, first into northeast India, and later north (the predecessors of Chinese and Tibetic) and south (Karen and Lolo–Burmese).[66]

George van Driem

argues that agriculture cannot be reconstructed for Proto-Sino-Tibetan.[67] Blench and Mark Post have proposed that the earliest speakers of Sino-Tibetan were not farmers but highly diverse foragers in the eastern foothills of the Himalayas in Northeast India, the area of greatest diversity, around 9000 years BP.[68] They then envisage a series of migrations over the following millennia, with Sinitic representing one of the groups that migrated into China.[69]

Roger Blench

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Word order[edit]

Except for the Chinese, Bai, Karenic, and Mruic languages, the usual word order in Sino-Tibetan languages is object–verb.[96] However, Chinese and Bai differ from almost all other subject–verb–object languages in the world in placing relative clauses before the nouns they modify.[97] Most scholars believe SOV to be the original order, with Chinese, Karen, and Bai having acquired SVO order due to the influence of neighbouring languages in the Mainland Southeast Asia linguistic area.[98][99] This has been criticized as being insufficiently corroborated by Djamouri et al. 2007, who instead reconstruct a VO order for Proto-Sino-Tibetan.[100]

Phonology[edit]

Contrastive tones are a feature found across the family although absent in some languages like Purik.[101] Phonation contrasts are also present among many, notably in the Lolo-Burmese group.[102] While Benedict contended that Proto-Tibeto-Burman would have a two-tone system, Matisoff refrained from reconstructing it since tones in individual languages may have developed independently through the process of tonogenesis.[103]

"Tibeto-Burman languages and their subgrouping"

James Matisoff

Bruhn, Daniel; Lowe, John; Mortensen, David; Yu, Dominic (2015), Sino-Tibetan Etymological Dictionary and Thesaurus Database Software, Software, UC Berkeley Dash, :10.6078/D1159Q.

doi

Sino-Tibetan Branches Project (STBP)

Behind the Sino-Tibetan Database of Lexical Cognates: Introductory remarks

Sinotibetan Lexical Homology Database

"The Genetic Position of Chinese"

Guillaume Jacques

(2014), "Why Sino-Tibetan reconstruction is not like Indo-European reconstruction (yet)"

Marc Miyake

Andrew Hsiu (2018),

"Linking the Sino-Tibetan fallen leaves"

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