huba bartos

Sino-Tibetan languages

Huba Bartoshttp://budling.nytud.hu/~bartos/kurzus/kinai.html

The Sino-Tibetan languagefamily

� 2nd largest lg. family (number of native speakers; 2nd only to Indo-European)

� cca. 350–400 lg’s (9 has >1 million speakers)

� longer written tradition: Chinese ( >3000 yrs), Tibetan (cca. 1300 yrs), Burmese (cca. 900 yrs)

� many uncertainties in classification (← few of these lg’s have script, and even those are often notphonetic + a mix of genetic vs. areal relations)

Geographical distribution

Source: WALS

Geographical distribution

Source: G. Jacques

Language families in East Asia

Source: G. Jacques

Sino-Tibetan

Austroasiatic

Austronesian

Tai-Kadai

Hmong-Mien

… and the Altaic languages

Source: G. Jacques

Speakers of ST languages

� The largest ST languages :– Chinese: 1.3 billion

– Burmese: 42 million

– Lolo / Yi (彝): 7 million

– Tibetan: 6 million

– Karen: 5 million

– Dzongkha (Bhutanese): 1.5 million

– Bodo: 1.5 million

– Naga: 1.2 million

– Jingphaw: 1 million

A little bit of history ofscience

� The development of the Sino-Tibetanhypothesis

Early errors

� John C. Leyden (1808): Indo-Chinese family –lg’s of the region spanning from India to China, as well as lg’s of the ‘Eastern Seas’

� Max Müller (1855): Turanic theory (Ural-Altaic+ Dravidian ( + Caucasian?) lg’s ( + Chinese?) ( + Japanese?)) – mostly relying on typologicalfeatures (rather than a comparative basis)– (Turanic = ’the rest’: Eurasian lg’s = Semitic

(Afroasiatic) + Aryan (Indo-European) + Turanic)

Early moves in the right direction� Julius Heinrich Klaproth (1823): Tibetan and

Chinese are close relatives, but Vietnameseand Thai do not belong to the same family

� key difficulty: Chinese writing has neverbeen consistently phonetic

� therefore: it tells us next to nothing aboutOld and Proto-Chinese morphology, and itspotential complexity

� → difficult to support any genealogicalhypotheses

Early moves in the right direction

� And yet:

� C.R. Lepsius (1861): Old Chinese couldhave certain morphological traits(affixes) that have disappeared by now(and may, e.g., be the predecessors of tones)

� Wilhelm Grube (1881): Old Chineseprobably had affixal elements

Tibeto-Burman

� Nathan Brown (1854): the Karen lg. is genetically related to Tibetan, Burmese, Jinghpaw, and other Himalayan lg’s

� James R. Logan (1859): Tibeto-Burmanlg family (including Karen)

Indo-Chinese →→→→ Sino-Tibetan

� August Conrady (1896): Indo-Chinese= Tibeto-Burman + Chinese + Kadai

– attempted to prove this hypothesis ongrounds of grammar similarities

� Jean Przyluski (1924): „sino-tibétain”(the French translation of the term„Indo-Chinese” )

– Hmong-Mien lg’s also included (on theKadai (’Sino-Daic’) branch)

Indo-Chinese →→→→ Sino-Tibetan

� → „Sino-Tibetan” = rebranded and corrected „Indo-Chinese” (?)

Indo-Chinese=

Sino-Tibetan

Sino-ThaiOr

Sino-Daic

Tibeto-Burman(without Karen)

ChineseTai-Kadai

(incl.: Hmong-Mien)

Robert Shafer (1893-1973?)

� worked in the Sino-Tibetan philologyproject at UC Berkeley

� Shafer was NOT a trained comparativelinguist, but spent enormous efforts onclassifying a vast body of data from/onST-languages

Robert Shafer

� Shafer (1966–1974): hesitationsconcerning the primary branches, as wellas the status of the Kadai langauges

Sino-Tibetan

Chinese Daic Bodic Burmese Baric Karen

Robert Shafer

� Shafer (1966–1974): hesitationsconcerning the primary branches, as wellas the status of the Kadai langauges

Sino-Tibetan

Tibeto-BurmanChinese Daic

Robert Shafer

Old Chinese Written Tib. Written Brm. meaning*ngag 我 nga Na ‘I'*s´m 三 gsum sum ‘three'*ngag 五 lnga Na ‘five'*mj´k 目 mig mjak ‘eye'*ngjag 鱼 nya Na ‘fish'*khwin 犬 khyi khwe ‘dog'*srat 杀 bsat sat ‘kill'*sjin 薪 shing sac ‘firewood'*mjing 名 ming ´-man) ‘name’*khag 苦 kha kha ‘bitter'

Beyond cognate words: structural similarities

– many of these lg’s are tonal (e.g., Chinese, Lhasa Tibetan, Burmese)

– typically monosyllabic and morphologicallyanalitic (isolating)

– frequent use of classsifiers

– SVO (Chin., Karen, Bai) vs. SOV (all other TB)

� BUT: how much of this is due to arealinfluences?

� AND: whence the lack of systematicsound correspondences?

Indosphere ~ Sinosphere

� division of the TB-branch by typological and culturaltraits: Indosphere vs. Sinosphere (acc. to thedominance of Indo-Aryan vs. Chinese languages)

Indosphere Sinosphere

� synthetic/agglutinative

� polisyllabicity

� non-tonal

� analytic/isolating

� monosyllabicity

� tonal

Shafer’s ”heritage”

� Paul K. Benedict(1941/1972, 1976):

ST = Chinese + Tibeto-Burman/Tibeto-Karen– expels the Kadai lg’s from

ST; problems of thefamily tree (Stammbaum) representation

– basis of the currentlymost widely known and accepted hypothesis

Sino-Tibetan

ChineseTibeto-Karen

Tibeto-Burman Karen

Shafer’s ”heritage”

� Paul K. Benedict(1941/1972, 1976):

ST = Chinese + Tibeto-Burman/Tibeto-Karen– expels the Kadai lg’s from

ST; problems of thefamily tree (Stammbaum) representation

– basis of the currentlymost widely known and accepted hypothesis

Sino-Tibetan

ChineseTibeto-Burman

But what do the Chinese say?(Li Fang-Kuei (李方桂李方桂李方桂李方桂), Luo Changpei (罗常培罗常培罗常培罗常培))

The great summary of the ST-hypothesis: Matisoff / STEDT

� James A. Matisoff (2003)

� Proto-Sino-Tibetan homeland: on theHimalayan Plateau, in the sourceregion of the great rivers (Huanghe, Yangtze, Mekong, Brahmaputra, Salween, Irrawaddy), up to cca. 4000

� STEDT project:

� http://stedt.berkeley.edu/index.html


homeland ?

STEDT and the age of great changes

� reconstruction of Old Chinese: a revisionof Karlgren’s system (Pulleyblank, Jaxontov, Li Fang-Kuei, Coblin, Baxter, …)

� exploration of Proto-ST morphology(Sagart, Baxter)

� on the TB side: fieldwork → significantbody of new data, new lg descriptions

STEDT and the age of great changes

→ Benedict’s system can and must be thoroughly revised

� results from other fields and disciplinesmust be added / taken intoconsideration: archeology, genetics

→ a whole new interdisciplinary approach

Some recent proposals

� Nicholas Bodman (1980): Tibetan is a closerrelative of Chinese than of other Himalayanand Burman languages → Sino-Himalayanhypothesis

Sino-Himalayan

Sino-TibetanTibeto-Burman(Himalayan)

Chinese Tibetan


� Sergei A. Starostin (1994): the closest relativesof Chinese within TB are Kiranti (Bodic etc.) lg’s → Sino-Kiranti hypothesis

Sino-Tibetan

Sino-Kiranti Tibeto-Burman

Chinese Kiranti


� Starostin redux (2005): under the influence of

Nostratic theory – Sino-Dené-Caucasian

Variations on the Sino-Bodic

theme: Van Driem

� primary basis: newly reconstructed OC and well described TB morphologicalpatterns (Van Driem 1997)

� lexicostatistic, archeological and genetic evidence is sought tosupport/complement the linguisticmodel (Van Driem 1999)


theme: Van Driem

� Proto-TB homeland: in Sichuan, up toabout 10.000 B.C.

PTB

Western TB Eastern TB

NorthernTB Southern TB

NW-TB NE-TB

Majiayao neolithic c. Yangshao neol. c.

Bodic Sinitic

Eastern neolithic c. of India

Lolo-Burmese, Karen, Qiangic


theme: Van Driem

Van Driem v2.0 (2011): Trans-Himalayan ”fallen leaves”

Sino-Austronesian: Sagart

� Laurent Sagart (1993, 1995, 2005): seeks genetic relation with Austronesianlangauges

– v1.0: Sino-Austronesian + remote/ questioned link b/w Chinese and TB

– v1.5: Sino – Tibeto-Burman – Austronesian

– v2.0: ‘Tibeto-Burmo – Austronesian’ (?)


Proto-Austronesian

Old Chinese Tibeto-Burman meaning

*punuq *nuk 脑 (s-)nuk ‘brain’

*qiCeluR *c´-lo(r?) 卵 twiy ‘egg’

*-kut *m-khut 掘 kot (Jingphaw) ‘dig’

*nunux *nok 乳 nuw ‘breast’

*uRung *k-rok 角 rung ‘horn’

*kurung *k´-rong 笼 krungH ‘cage’

And a denial…

� Ch. Beckwith:

– Chinese is NOT related to Tibeto-Burmanat all

– absence of regular sound correspondences

– no reconstructible common morphology

– shared lexical items: not cognates butborrowings (Chinese → TB)

Literature

� Beckwith, Ch. 2002. The Sino-Tibetan problem, in: Beckwith, Ch. Medieval Tibeto-Burman languages, Brill, Leiden, pp. 113–158

� Benedict, P.K. 1972. Sino-Tibetan: A Conspectus (Cambridge UP, Cambridge, UK)� van Driem, G. 1997. Sino-Bodic. Bulletin of the SOAS 60: 455-488.� van Driem, G. 1999. A new theory on the origin of Chinese. Indo-Pacific Prehistory

Association Bulletin 18: 43-58.� van Driem, G. 2011. The Trans-Himalayan Phylum and its Implications for Population

Prehistory. Communication on Contemporary Anthropology, 2011, 5, 135-142/ e20� Li Fang-Kuei 1973. 'Languages and Dialects of China'. Journal of Chinese Linguistics

1: 1-13� Ma Xueliang 1991. A General Introduction to Sino-Tibetan Languages. (Beijing

University Press, Beijing)� Matisoff, J.A. 2003. Handbook of Proto-Tibeto-Burman (Univ. of California Press, L.A.)� Shafer, R. 1966-1974. Introduction to Sino-Tibetan I-IV. (Harrassowitz, Wiesbaden)� Sagart, L. 1993. Chinese and Austronesian: Evidence for a genetic relationship.

Journal of Chinese Linguistics, 21(1): 1–62.� Sagart, L. 2005. Sino-Tibetan-Austronesian: an updated and improved argument. In:

L. Sagart, R.M. Blench and A. Sanchez-Mazas (szerk.) The Peopling of EastAsia:Putting Together Archaeology, Linguistics and Genetics (RoutledgeCurzon, London)

� Thurgood, G. & R. LaPolla (eds.) 2006. The Sino-Tibetan Languages. (Routledge, London)

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