Sino-Tibetan languages

Sino-Tibetan
Geographic distribution:	East Asia, Southeast Asia, South Asia
Linguistic classification:	One of the world's primary language families
Subdivisions:	Some 40 well-established low-level groups (see Van Driem (2011), some of which may not belong to Sino-Tibetan at all Many proposed higher-level groupings Traditional division: Sinitic vs. the rest (Tibeto-Burman)
ISO 639-2 / 5:	sit
Glottolog:	sino1245
The extension of various branches of Sino-Tibetan

The Sino-Tibetan languages are a family of more than 400 languages spoken in East Asia, Southeast Asia and South Asia. The family is second only to the Indo-European languages in terms of the number of native speakers. The Sino-Tibetan languages with the most native speakers are the varieties of Chinese (1.2 billion speakers), Burmese (33 million) and the Tibetic languages (8 million). Many Sino-Tibetan languages are spoken by small communities in remote mountain areas and are poorly documented.

Several low-level groupings are well established, but the higher-level structure of the family remains unclear. Although the family is often presented as divided into Sinitic and Tibeto-Burman branches, a common origin of the non-Sinitic languages has never been demonstrated, and is rejected by an increasing number of researchers. A minority of researchers call the whole family "Tibeto-Burman", and the name "Trans-Himalayan" has also been proposed.

History

A genetic relationship between Chinese, Tibetan, Burmese and other languages was first proposed in the early 19th century, and is now broadly accepted. The initial focus on languages of civilizations with long literary traditions has been broadened to include less widely spoken languages, some of which have only recently, or never, been written. However, the reconstruction of the family is much less developed than for families such as Indo-European or Austroasiatic. Difficulties have included the great diversity of the languages, the lack of inflection in many of them, and the effects of language contact. In addition, many of the smaller languages are spoken in mountainous areas that are difficult to access, and are often also sensitive border zones.

Early work

During the 18th century, several scholars had noticed parallels between Tibetan and Burmese, both languages with extensive literary traditions. Early in the following century, Brian Houghton Hodgson and others noted that many non-literary languages of the highlands of northeast India and Southeast Asia were also related to these. The name "Tibeto-Burman" was first applied to this group in 1856 by James Richardson Logan, who added Karen in 1858. The third volume of the Linguistic Survey of India, edited by Sten Konow, was devoted to the Tibeto-Burman languages of British India.

Studies of the "Indo-Chinese" languages of Southeast Asia from the mid-19th century by Logan and others revealed that they comprised four families: Tibeto-Burman, Tai, Mon–Khmer and Malayo-Polynesian. Julius Klaproth had noted in 1823 that Burmese, Tibetan and Chinese all shared common basic vocabulary but that Thai, Mon, and Vietnamese were quite different. Ernst Kuhn envisaged a group with two branches, Chinese-Siamese and Tibeto-Burman. August Conrady called this group Indo-Chinese in his influential 1896 classification, though he had doubts about Karen. Conrady's terminology was widely used, but there was uncertainty regarding his exclusion of Vietnamese. Franz Nikolaus Finck in 1909 placed Karen as a third branch of Chinese-Siamese.

Jean Przyluski introduced the term sino-tibétain as the title of his chapter on the group in Meillet and Cohen's Les langues du monde in 1924. He retained Conrady's two branches of Tibeto-Burman and "Sino-Daic", with Miao–Yao included within Daic (Tai–Kadai). The English translation "Sino-Tibetan" first appeared in a short note by Przyluski and Luce in 1931.

Shafer and Benedict

In 1935, the anthropologist Alfred Kroeber started the Sino-Tibetan Philology Project, funded by the Works Project Administration and based at the University of California, Berkeley. The project was supervised by Robert Shafer until late 1938, and then by Paul K. Benedict. Under their direction, the staff of 30 non-linguists collated all the available documentation of Sino-Tibetan languages. The result was 8 copies of a 15-volume typescript entitled Sino-Tibetan Linguistics. This work was never published, but furnished the data for a series of papers by Shafer, as well as Shafer's five-volume Introduction to Sino-Tibetan and Benedict's Sino-Tibetan, a Conspectus.

Benedict completed the manuscript of his work in 1941, but it was not published until 1972. Instead of building the entire family tree, he set out to reconstruct a Proto-Tibeto-Burman language by comparing five major languages, with occasional comparisons with other languages. He reconstructed a two-way distinction on initial consonants based on voicing, with aspiration conditioned by pre-initial consonants that had been retained in Tibetic but lost in many other languages. Thus, Benedict reconstructed the following initials:

TB	Tibetan	Jingpho	Burmese	Garo	Mizo	S'gaw Karen	Old Chinese
*k	k(h)	k(h) ~ g	k(h)	k(h) ~ g	k(h)	k(h) ~ h	*k(h)
*g	g	g ~ k(h)	k	g ~ k(h)	k	k(h) ~ h	*gh
*ŋ	ŋ	ŋ	ŋ	ŋ	ŋ	y	*ŋ
*t	t(h)	t(h) ~ d	t(h)	t(h) ~ d	t(h)	t(h)	*t(h)
*d	d	d ~ t(h)	t	d ~ t(h)	t	d	*dh
*n	n	n	n	n	n	n	*n ~ *ń
*p	p(h)	p(h) ~ b	p(h)	p(h) ~ b	p(h)	p(h)	*p(h)
*b	b	b ~ p(h)	p	b ~ p(h)	p	b	*bh
*m	m	m	m	m	m	m	*m
*ts	ts(h)	ts ~ dz	ts(h)	s ~ tś(h)	s	s(h)	*ts(h)
*dz	dz	dz ~ ts ~ ś	ts	tś(h)	f	s(h)	?
*s	s	s	s	th	th	θ	*s
*z	z	z ~ ś	s	s	f	θ	?
*r	r	r	r	r	r	γ	*l
*l	l	l	l	l	l	l	*l
*h	h	∅	h	∅	h	h	*x
*w	∅	w	w	w	w	w	*gjw
*y	y	y	y	tś ~ dź	z	y	*dj ~ *zj

Although the initial consonants of cognates tend to have the same place and manner of articulation, voicing and aspiration is often unpredictable. This irregularity was attacked by Roy Andrew Miller, though Benedict's supporters attribute it to the effects of prefixes that have been lost and are often unrecoverable. The issue remains unsolved today. It was cited together with the lack of reconstructable shared morphology, and evidence that much shared lexical material has been borrowed from Chinese into Tibeto-Burman, by Christopher Beckwith, one of the few scholars still arguing that Chinese is not related to Tibeto-Burman.

Study of literary languages

Ancient Chinese text on bamboo strips

Old Chinese is by far the oldest recorded Sino-Tibetan language, with inscriptions dating from 1200 BC and a huge body of literature from the first millennium BC, but the Chinese script is not alphabetic. Scholars have sought to reconstruct the phonology of Old Chinese by comparing the obscure descriptions of the sounds of Middle Chinese in medieval dictionaries with phonetic elements in Chinese characters and the rhyming patterns of early poetry. The first complete reconstruction, the Grammata Serica Recensa of Bernard Karlgren, was used by Benedict and Shafer. It was somewhat unwieldy, with many sounds with a highly non-uniform distribution. Later scholars have refined Karlgren's work by drawing on a range of other sources. Some proposals were based on cognates in other Sino-Tibetan languages, though workers have also found solely Chinese evidence for them. For example, recent reconstructions of Old Chinese have reduced Karlgren's 15 vowels to a six-vowel system originally suggested by Nicholas Bodman on the basis of comparisons with Tibetic. Similarly, Karlgren's *l has been recast as *r, with a different initial interpreted as *l, matching Tibeto-Burman cognates, but also supported by Chinese transcriptions of foreign names. A growing number of scholars believe that Old Chinese was an atonal language, and that the tones of Middle Chinese developed from final consonants. One of these, *-s, is believed to be a suffix, with cognates in other Sino-Tibetan languages.

Old Tibetan text found at Turfan

Tibetic has extensive written records from the adoption of writing by the Tibetan Empire in the mid-7th century. The earliest records of Burmese (such as the 12th-century Myazedi inscription) are more limited, but later an extensive literature developed. Both languages are recorded in alphabetic scripts ultimately derived from the Brahmi script of Ancient India. Most comparative work has used the conservative written forms of these languages, following the dictionaries of Jäschke (Tibetan) and Judson (Burmese), though both contain entries from a wide range of periods.

There are also extensive records in Tangut, the language of the Western Xia (1038–1227). Tangut is recorded in a Chinese-inspired logographic script, whose interpretation presents many difficulties, even though multilingual dictionaries have been found.

Gong Hwang-cherng has compared Old Chinese, Tibetic, Burmese and Tangut in an effort to establish sound correspondences between those languages. He found that Tibetic and Burmese /a/ correspond to two vowels, *a and *ə, in Old Chinese. While this has been considered evidence for a separate Tibeto-Burman subgroup, Hill (2014) finds that Burmese still distinguishes the specific rhymes *-aj (> -ay) and *-əj (> -i), and hence the development *ə > *a should be considered to have occurred independently in Tibetan and Burmese.

Fieldwork

The descriptions of non-literary languages used by Shafer and Benedict were often produced by missionaries and colonial administrators of varying linguistic skill. Most of the smaller Sino-Tibetan languages are spoken in inaccessible mountainous areas, many of which are politically or militarily sensitive and thus closed to investigators. Until the 1980s, the best-studied areas were Nepal and northern Thailand. In the 1980s and 1990s, new surveys were published from the Himalayas and southwestern China. Of particular interest was the discovery of a new branch of the family, the Qiangic languages of western Sichuan and adjacent areas.

Classification

Several low-level branches of the family, particularly Lolo-Burmese, have been securely reconstructed, but in the absence of a secure reconstruction of proto-Sino-Tibetan, the higher-level structure of the family remains unclear. Thus, a conservative classification of Sino-Tibetan/Tibeto-Burman would posit several dozen small coordinate families and isolates; attempts at subgrouping are either geographic conveniences or hypotheses for further research.

Li (1937)

In a survey in the 1937 Chinese Yearbook, Li Fang-Kuei described the family as consisting of four branches:

Indo-Chinese (Sino-Tibetan)

• Chinese
• Tai (later expanded to Kam–Tai)
• Miao–Yao (Hmong–Mien)
• Tibeto-Burman

Tai and Miao–Yao were included because they shared isolating typology, tone systems and some vocabulary with Chinese. At the time, tone was considered so fundamental to language that tonal typology could be used as the basis for classification. In the Western scholarly community, these languages are no longer included in Sino-Tibetan, with the similarities attributed to diffusion across the Mainland Southeast Asia linguistic area, especially since Benedict (1942). The exclusions of Vietnamese by Kuhn and of Tai and Miao–Yao by Benedict were vindicated in 1954 when André-Georges Haudricourt demonstrated that the tones of Vietnamese were reflexes of final consonants from Proto-Mon–Khmer.

Many Chinese linguists continue to follow Li's classification. However, this arrangement remains problematic. For example, there is disagreement over whether to include the entire Tai–Kadai family or just Kam–Tai (Zhuang–Dong excludes the Kra languages), because the Chinese cognates that form the basis of the putative relationship are not found in all branches of the family and have not been reconstructed for the family as a whole. In addition, Kam–Tai itself no longer appears to be a valid node within Tai–Kadai.

Benedict (1942)

Benedict overtly excluded Vietnamese (placing it in Mon–Khmer) as well as Hmong–Mien and Tai–Kadai (placing them in Austro-Tai). He otherwise retained the outlines of Conrady's Indo-Chinese classification, though putting Karen in an intermediate position:

Sino-Tibetan

• Chinese
• Tibeto-Karen
  • Karen
  • Tibeto-Burman

Shafer (1955)

Shafer criticized the division of the family into Tibeto-Burman and Sino-Daic branches, which he attributed to the different groups of languages studied by Konow and other scholars in British India on the one hand and by Henri Maspero and other French linguists on the other. He proposed a detailed classification, with six top-level divisions:

Sino-Tibetan

• Sinitic
• Daic
• Bodic
• Burmic
• Baric
• Karenic

Shafer was skeptical of the inclusion of Daic, but after meeting Maspero in Paris decided to retain it pending a definitive resolution of the question.

Matisoff (1978)

James Matisoff abandoned Benedict's Tibeto-Karen hypothesis:

Sino-Tibetan

• Chinese
• Tibeto-Burman

Some more-recent Western scholars, such as Bradley (1997) and La Polla (2003), have retained Matisoff's two primary branches, though differing in the details of Tibeto-Burman. However, Jacques (2006) notes, "comparative work has never been able to put forth evidence for common innovations to all the Tibeto-Burman languages (the Sino-Tibetan languages to the exclusion of Chinese)" and that "it no longer seems justified to treat Chinese as the first branching of the Sino-Tibetan family," because the morphological divide between Chinese and Tibeto-Burman has been bridged by recent reconstructions of Old Chinese.

Starostin (1996)

Sergei Starostin proposed that both the Kiranti languages and Chinese are divergent from a "core" Tibeto-Burman of at least Bodish, Lolo-Burmese, Tamangic, Jinghpaw, Kukish, and Karen (other families were not analysed) in a hypothesis called Sino-Kiranti. The proposal takes two forms: that Sinitic and Kiranti are themselves a valid node or that the two are not demonstrably close, so that Sino-Tibetan has three primary branches:

Sino-Tibetan (version 1)

• Sino-Kiranti
• Tibeto-Burman

Sino-Tibetan (version 2)

• Chinese
• Kiranti
• Tibeto-Burman

Van Driem (1997, 2001)

Van Driem, like Shafer, rejects a primary split between Chinese and the rest, suggesting that Chinese owes its traditional privileged place in Sino-Tibetan to historical, typological, and cultural, rather than linguistic, criteria. He calls the entire family "Tibeto-Burman", a name he says has historical primacy, but other linguists who reject a privileged position for Chinese continue to call the resulting family "Sino-Tibetan".

Like Matisoff, van Driem acknowledges that the relationships of the "Kuki–Naga" languages (Kuki, Mizo, Meithei, etc.), both amongst each other and to the other languages of the family, remain unclear. However, rather than placing them in a geographic grouping, as Matisoff does, van Driem leaves them unclassified. He has proposed several hypotheses, including the reclassification of Chinese to a Sino-Bodic subgroup:

Tibeto-Burman

• Western (Baric, Brahmaputran, or Sal)
  • Dhimal
  • Bodo–Koch
  • Konyak
  • Kachin–Luic
• Eastern
  • Northern (Sino-Bodic)
    • Northwestern (Bodic): Bodish, Kirantic, West Himalayish, Tamangic and several isolates
    • Northeastern (Sinitic)
  • Southern
    • Southwestern: Lolo-Burmese, Karenic
    • Southeastern: Qiangic, Jiarongic
• a number of other small families and isolates as primary branches (Newar, Nungish, Magaric, etc.)

Van Driem points to two main pieces of evidence establishing a special relationship between Sinitic and Bodic and thus placing Chinese within the Tibeto-Burman family. First, there are a number of parallels between the morphology of Old Chinese and the modern Bodic languages. Second, there is an impressive body of lexical cognates between the Chinese and Bodic languages, represented by the Kirantic language Limbu.

In response, Matisoff notes that the existence of shared lexical material only serves to establish an absolute relationship between two language families, not their relative relationship to one another. Although some cognate sets presented by van Driem are confined to Chinese and Bodic, many others are found in Sino-Tibetan languages generally and thus do not serve as evidence for a special relationship between Chinese and Bodic.

Van Driem (2011)

Van Driem has also proposed a "fallen leaves" model that lists 40 well-established low-level groups while remaining agnostic about intermediate grouping of these:

• Bodish
• Tshangla
• West Himalayish
• Tamangic
• Newar
• Kiranti
• Lepcha
• Magaric
• Chepangic
• Raji–Raute
• Dura
• 'Ole
• Gongduk
• Lhokpu
• Siangic
• Kho-Bwa
• Hruso
• Digaro
• Midzu
• Tani
• Dhimal
• Bodo–Koch + Konyak
• Ao
• Angami–Pochuri
• Tangkhul
• Zeme
• Meithei
• Karbi
• Sinitic
• Bai
• Tujia
• Lolo-Burmese
• Qiangic
• rGyalrongic
• Kachin–Luic
• Nungish
• Karenic
• Pyu
• Mru
• Kukish

Van Driem considers the recently discovered 'Ole, Gongduk, and Lhokpu languages to be independent top-level subgroups and notes that there are probably even more subgroups than those listed above. He also suggests that the Sino-Tibetan language family be renamed "Trans-Himalayan", which he considers to be more neutral. Subgroups yet to be incorporated in the above are Ersuish and Naic.

Blench and Post (2013)

Roger Blench and Mark W. Post have criticized the applicability of conventional Sino-Tibetan classification schemes to minor languages lacking an extensive written history (unlike Chinese, Tibetic, and Burmese). They find that the evidence for the subclassification or even ST affiliation at all of several minor languages of northeastern India, in particular, is either poor or absent altogether.

While relatively little has been known about the languages of this region up to and including the present time, this has not stopped scholars from proposing that these languages either constitute or fall within some other Tibeto-Burman subgroup. However, in absence of any sort of systematic comparison – whether the data are thought reliable or not – such "subgroupings" are essentially vacuous. The use of pseudo-genetic labels such as "Himalayish" and "Kamarupan" inevitably give an impression of coherence which is at best misleading.

— Blench & Post (2013), p. 3

In their view, many such languages would for now be best considered unclassified, or "internal isolates" within the family. They propose a provisional classification of the remaining languages:

Sino-Tibetan

• Karbi (Mikir)
• Mruish
• (unnamed group)
  • (unnamed group)
    • Tani
    • Nagish: Ao, Kuki-Chin, Tangkhul, Zeme, Angami–Pochuri and Meithei
  • (unnamed group)
    • Western: Gongduk, 'Ole, Mahakiranti, Lepcha, Kham–Magaric–Chepang, Tamangic, and Lhokpu
    • Karenic
    • Jingpho–Konyak–Bodo
    • Eastern
      • Tujia
      • Bai
      • Northern Qiangic
      • Southern Qiangic
      • (unnamed group)
        • Chinese (Sinitic)
        • Lolo-Burmese–Naic
        • Bodish
      • Nungish

Because they propose that the three best-known branches may actually be much closer related to each other than they are to "minor" Sino-Tibetan languages, Blench and Post argue that "Sino-Tibetan" or "Tibeto-Burman" would be inappropriate names for a family whose earliest divergences led to different languages altogether. They support the proposed name "Trans-Himalayan".

Typology

Word order

Except for the Chinese, Karen, and Bai languages, the usual word order in Sino-Tibetan languages is object–verb. Most scholars believe this to be the original order, with Chinese, Karen and Bai having acquired subject–verb–object order due to the influence of neighbouring languages in the Mainland Southeast Asia linguistic area. However, Chinese and Bai differ from almost all other VO languages in the world in placing relative clauses before the nouns they modify.

Morphology

Hodgson had in 1849 noted a dichotomy between "pronominalized" (inflecting) languages, stretching across the Himalayas from Himachal Pradesh to eastern Nepal, and "non-pronominalized" (isolating) languages. Konow (1909) explained the pronominalized languages as due to a Munda substratum, with the idea that Indo-Chinese languages were essentially isolating as well as tonal. Maspero later attributed the putative substratum to Indo-Aryan. It was not until Benedict that the inflectional systems of these languages were recognized as (partially) native to the family. Scholars disagree over the extent to which the agreement system in the various languages can be reconstructed for the proto-language.

In morphosyntactic alignment, many Tibeto-Burman languages have ergative and/or anti-ergative (an argument that is not an actor) case marking. However, the anti-ergative case markings can not be reconstructed at higher levels in the family and are thought to be innovations.

Vocabulary

See also: List of numbers in various languages

Sino-Tibetan numerals

gloss	Old Chinese	Old Tibetan	Old Burmese	Jingpho	Garo	Limbu	Kanauri
"one"	一 *ʔjit	gcig	ac	–	–	thik	id
"two"	二 *njijs	gnyis	nhac	–	gin-i	nɛtchi	niš
"three"	三 *sum	gsum	sumḥ	mə̀sūm	git-tam	sumsi	sum
"four"	四 *sjijs	bzhi	liy	mə̀lī	bri	lisi	pə:
"five"	五 *ŋaʔ	lnga	ṅāḥ	mə̀ŋā	boŋ-a	nasi	ṅa
"six"	六 *C-rjuk	drug	khrok	krúʔ	dok	tuksi	țuk
"seven"	七 *tsʰjit	–	khu-nac	sə̀nìt	sin-i	nusi	štiš
"eight"	八 *pret	brgyad	rhac	mə̀tshát	cet	yɛtchi	rəy
"nine"	九 *kjuʔ	dgu	kuiḥ	cə̀khù	sku	–	sgui
"ten"	十 *gjəp	–	kip	–	–	gip	–
	–	bcu	chay	shī	ci-kuŋ	–	səy

External classification

Beyond the traditionally recognized families of Southeast Asia, a number of possible broader relationships have been suggested. One of these is the "Sino-Caucasian" hypothesis of Sergei Starostin, which posits that the Yeniseian languages and North Caucasian languages form a clade with Sino-Tibetan. The Sino-Caucasian hypothesis has been expanded by others to "Dené–Caucasian" to include the Na-Dené languages of North America, Burushaski, Basque and, occasionally, Etruscan. Edward Sapir had commented on a connection between Na-Dené and Sino-Tibetan. A narrower binary Dené–Yeniseian family has recently been well-received, though not conclusively demonstrated. In contrast, Laurent Sagart proposes a Sino-Austronesian family relating Sino-Tibetan to the Austronesian and Tai–Kadai languages.

Peoples and languages

Proportion of first-language speakers of larger branches of Sino-Tibetan

  Chinese (94.28%)

  Lolo-Burmese (3.39%)

  Tibetic (0.44%)

  Karen (0.30%)

  Other (1.59%)

There is no ethnic unity among the many peoples who speak Sino-Tibetan languages. The most numerous are the Han Chinese, numbering 1.3 billion. The Hui (10 million) also speak Chinese but are officially classified as ethnically distinct by the Chinese government. The more numerous peoples speaking other Sino-Tibetan languages are the Burmese (42 million), Yi (Lolo) (7 million), Tibetans (6 million), Karen (5 million), Meitheis (1.5 million), Naga (1.2 million), Tamang (1.1 million), Chin (1.1 million), Newar (1 million), Bodo (1.5 million), and Kachin (1 million). The Burmese live in Burma (Myanmar). Kachin, Karen, Red Karen, and Chin peoples live in the Rakhine, Kachin, Kayin, Kayah, and Chin states of Burma. Tibetans live in the Tibet Autonomous Region, Qinghai, western Sichuan, Gansu, and northern Yunnan provinces in China and in Ladakh in the Kashmir region of Pakistan and India, whereas Manipuris, Mizo, Naga, Tripuri, Idu Mishmis, and Garo live in Manipur, Mizoram, Nagaland, Tripura, and Meghalaya states of India. Bodo and Karbi live in Assam, India, whereas Adi, Nishi, Apa Tani, and Galo live in Arunachal Pradesh, India. The Newar and Tamang live in Nepal and Sikkim, India.

J. A. Matisoff proposed that the urheimat of the Sino-Tibetan languages was located around the upper reaches of the Yangtze, Brahmaputra, Salween, and Mekong. This view is in accordance with the hypothesis that bubonic plague, cholera, and other diseases made the easternmost foothills of the Himalayas between China and India difficult for people outside to migrate in but relatively easily for the indigenous people, who had been adapted to the environment, to migrate out.

References

Works cited

• reprinted as

General

External links

• James Matisoff, Tibeto-Burman languages and their subgrouping
• The Genetic Position of Chinese, by Guillaume Jacques
• Sino-Tibetan at the Linguist List MultiTree Project (not functional as of 2014): Genealogical trees attributed to Conrady 1896, Benedict 1942, Shafer 1955, Benedict 1972, Egerod 1991, Matisoff & Namkung 1996, Peiros 1998, Thurgood & LaPolla 2003, and Matisoff 2006. (Caution: The tree attributed to Bradley 2007 does not actually correspond to that article.)