Mainland Southeast Asia linguistic area
The Mainland Southeast Asia linguistic area is a sprachbund including languages of the Sino-Tibetan, Hmong–Mien (or Miao–Yao), Kra–Dai, Austronesian and Austroasiatic families spoken in an area stretching from Thailand to China.[1] Neighbouring languages across these families, though presumed unrelated, often have similar typological features, which are believed to have spread by diffusion.[2] James Matisoff referred to this area as the "Sinosphere", contrasted with the "Indosphere", but viewed it as a zone of mutual influence in the ancient period.[3]
Language distribution
The Austroasiatic languages include Vietnamese and Khmer, as well as many other languages spoken in scattered pockets as far afield as Malaya and eastern India. Most linguists believe that Austroasiatic languages once ranged continuously across southeast Asia and that their scattered distribution today is the result of the subsequent migration of speakers of other language groups from southern China.[4]
Chinese civilization and the Chinese language spread from their home in the North China Plain into the Yangtze valley and then into southern China during the first millennium BC and first millennium AD. Indigenous groups in these areas either became Chinese, retreated to the hill country, or migrated to the south. Thus the Kra–Dai languages, today including Thai, Lao and Shan, were originally spoken in what is now southern China, where the greatest diversity within the family is still found, and possibly as far north as the Yangtze valley. With the exception of
The upland regions of the interior of the area, as well as the plains of Burma, are home to speakers of other Sino-Tibetan languages, the Tibeto-Burman languages. The Austronesian languages, spoken across the Pacific and Indian Oceans, are represented in MSEA by the divergent Chamic group.
The far southern Sinitic languages Cantonese and Pinghua are also part of the Mainland Southeast Asia linguistic area, as demonstrated by Hilário de Sousa (2015).[7]
Mark Post (2015)
David Gil (2015)
Syllable structure
A characteristic of MSEA languages is a particular syllable structure involving
Most MSEA languages tend to have monosyllabic morphemes, but there are exceptions.[12] Some polysyllabic morphemes exist even in Old Chinese and Vietnamese, often loanwords from other languages. A related syllable structure found in some languages, such as the
Tone systems
Origin of tonal contrasts
The tone systems of
Vietnamese[a] | proto-Tai | proto-Hmong–Mien | Middle Chinese | suggested origin |
---|---|---|---|---|
*A (ngang-huyền) | *A | *A | 平 píng "level" | - |
*B (sắc-nặng) | *C | *B | 上 shǎng "rising" | *-ʔ |
*C (hỏi-ngã) | *B | *C | 去 qù "departing" | *-h < *-s |
The incidence of these tones in Chinese, Tai and Hmong–Mien words follows a similar ratio 2:1:1.[17] Thus
It was long believed that tone was an invariant feature of languages, suggesting that these groups must be related. However this category cut across groups of languages with shared basic vocabulary. In 1954 André-Georges Haudricourt solved this paradox by demonstrating that Vietnamese tones corresponded to certain final consonants in other (atonal) Austroasiatic languages. He thus argued that the Austroasiatic proto-language had been atonal, and that its development in Vietnamese had been conditioned by these consonants, which had subsequently disappeared, a process now known as
Loss of voicing with tone or register split
A characteristic
Many non-tonal languages instead developed a register split, with voiced consonants producing breathy-voiced vowels and unvoiced consonants producing normally voiced vowels. Often, the breathy-voiced vowels subsequently went through additional, complex changes (e.g. diphthongization). Examples of languages affected this way are Mon and Khmer (Cambodian). Breathy voicing has since been lost in standard Khmer, although the vowel changes triggered by it still remain.[21]
Many of these languages have subsequently developed some voiced obstruents. The most common such sounds are /b/ and /d/ (often pronounced with some implosion), which result from former preglottalized /ʔb/ and /ʔd/, which were common phonemes in many Asian languages and which behaved like voiceless obstruents. In addition, Vietnamese developed voiced fricatives through a different process (specifically, in words consisting of two syllables, with an initial, unstressed minor syllable, the medial stop at the beginning of the stressed major syllable turned into a voiced fricative, and then the minor syllable was lost).
Morphology and syntax
Most MSEA languages are of the
MSEA languages typically have well-developed systems of
See also
- Classification of Southeast Asian languages
- East Asian languages
- East Asian cultural sphere
- Sinosphere, the Chinese cultural sphere
- Southeast Asian Massif
- Tonogenesis
- Urheimat
Notes
- ^ In the later Sino-Vietnamese layer of loans, the correspondence of *B and *C is reversed.[16]
References
- ISBN 978-3-11-055814-2.
- ^ Enfield (2005), pp. 182–184.
- ^ Matisoff (1991), p. 486.
- ^ Sidwell & Blench (2011), pp. 339–340.
- ^ Ramsey (1987), p. 233.
- ^ Ramsey (1987), pp. 278–279.
- ^ de Sousa, Hilário. 2015. ‘The Far Southern Sinitic languages as part of Mainland Southeast Asia.’ In N. J. Enfield and B. Comrie, Eds. Languages of Mainland Southeast Asia: The State of the Art. Berlin, Mouton de Gruyter.
- ^ Post, M. W. 2015. ‘Morphosyntactic reconstruction in an areal-historical context: A pre-historical relationship between North East India and Mainland Southeast Asia?’ In N. J. Enfield and B. Comrie, Eds. Languages of Mainland Southeast Asia: The State of the Art. Berlin, Mouton de Gruyter: 205 – 261.
- ^ McWhorter, John H. 2007. Language Interrupted: Signs of non-native acquisition in standard language grammars. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
- ^ Gil, David. 2015. ‘The Mekong-Mamberamo linguistic area?’ In N. J. Enfield and B. Comrie, Eds. Languages of Mainland Southeast Asia: The State of the Art. Berlin, Mouton de Gruyter.
- ^ Enfield (2005), pp. 186–187.
- ^ a b Enfield (2005), p. 186.
- ^ Downer (1963).
- ^ Luo (2008), p. 11.
- ^ a b Norman (1988), p. 56.
- ^ Sagart (1986), p. 101.
- ^ a b Ballard (1985), p. 171.
- ^ Gedney (1989).
- ^ Ratliff (2002).
- ^ Norman (1988), p. 53.
- ^ Enfield (2005), pp. 192–193.
- ^ Enfield (2005), pp. 187–190.
- ^ Ramsey (1987), p. 280.
- ^ Enfield (2005), pp. 189–190.
- ^ Enfield (2005), p. 189.
- Works cited
- Ballard, W.L. (1985), "Aspects of the Linguistic History of South China", Asian Perspectives, 24 (2): 163–185, hdl:10125/16898.
- Downer, G.B. (1963), "Chinese, Thai, and Miao-Yao" (PDF), in Shorto, H.L. (ed.), Linguistic Comparison in South East Asia and the Pacific, School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, pp. 133–139.
- Enfield, N. J. (2005), "Areal Linguistics and Mainland Southeast Asia", Annual Review of Anthropology, 34: 181–206, .
- ISBN 978-0-89148-037-2.
- Luo, Yongxian (2008), "Sino-Tai and Tai–Kadai: Another Look", in Diller, Anthony; Edmondson, Jerold A.; Luo, Yongxian (eds.), The Tai–Kadai Languages, Routledge Language Family Series, Psychology Press, pp. 9–28, ISBN 978-0-7007-1457-5.
- JSTOR 2155809.
- ISBN 978-0-521-29653-3.
- Ramsey, S. Robert (1987), The Languages of China, Princeton University Press, ISBN 978-0-691-01468-5.
- .
- JSTOR 23754220.
- ISBN 978-0-85883-638-9.
Further reading
- Henderson, Eugénie J.A. (1965), "The topography of certain phonetic and morphological characteristics of South East Asian languages", Lingua, 15: 400–434, .
- Siebenhütter, Stefanie (2020), "Conceptual Transfer as an Areal Factor: Spatial Conceptualizations in Mainland Southeast Asia.", Berlin, Boston: De Gruyter Mouton. https://doi.org/10.1515/9781501506642
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