Sino-Tibetan languages
Sino-Tibetan | |
---|---|
Trans-Himalayan | |
Geographic distribution | Central Asia, East Asia, South Asia and Southeast Asia |
Linguistic classification | One of the world's primary language families |
Proto-language | Proto-Sino-Tibetan |
Subdivisions | Some 40 well-established subgroups, of which those with the most speakers are:
|
ISO 639-2 / 5 | sit |
Linguasphere | 79- (phylozone) |
Glottolog | sino1245 |
Groupings of 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.
Several low-level subgroups have been securely
History
A
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,
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,
Shafer and Benedict
In 1935, the anthropologist
Benedict completed the manuscript of his work in 1941, but it was not published until 1972.[22] 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.[23] 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.[24] Thus, Benedict reconstructed the following initials:[25]
TB | Tibetan | Jingpho
|
Burmese | Garo | Mizo | S'gaw Karen | Old Chinese[c] |
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
*k | k(h) | k(h) ~ g | k(h) | k(h) ~ g | k(h) | k(h) | *k(h) |
*g | g | g ~ k(h) | k | g ~ k(h) | k | k(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) | d | 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) | b | 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
Benedict also reconstructed, at least for Tibeto-Burman, prefixes such as the
Study of literary languages
Karlgren's reconstruction was somewhat unwieldy, with many sounds having a highly non-uniform distribution. Later scholars have revised it by drawing on a range of other sources.[33] Some proposals were based on cognates in other Sino-Tibetan languages, though workers have also found solely Chinese evidence for them.[34] For example, recent reconstructions of Old Chinese have reduced Karlgren's 15 vowels to a six-vowel system originally suggested by Nicholas Bodman.[35] 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.[36] A growing number of scholars believe that Old Chinese did not use tones, 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.[37]
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.[38]
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.[39][40]
Gong Hwang-cherng has compared Old Chinese, Tibetic, Burmese and Tangut in an effort to establish sound correspondences between those languages.[23][41] He found that Tibetic and Burmese /a/ correspond to two Old Chinese vowels, *a and *ə.[42] While this has been considered evidence for a separate Tibeto-Burman subgroup, Hill (2014) finds that Burmese has distinct correspondences for Old Chinese rhymes -ay : *-aj and -i : *-əj, and hence argues that the development *ə > *a occurred independently in Tibetan and Burmese.[43]
Fieldwork
The descriptions of non-literary languages used by Shafer and Benedict were often produced by missionaries and colonial administrators of varying linguistic skill.[44][45] 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.[46] In the 1980s and 1990s, new surveys were published from the Himalayas and southwestern China. Of particular interest was the increasing literature on the Qiangic languages of western Sichuan and adjacent areas.[47][48]
Distribution
Sinitic (94.3%) Lolo–Burmese (3.4%) Tibetic (0.4%) | Karenic (0.3%) others (1.6%) |
Most of the current spread of Sino-Tibetan languages is the result of historical expansions of the three groups with the most speakers – Chinese, Burmese and Tibetic – replacing an unknown number of earlier languages. These groups also have the longest literary traditions of the family. The remaining languages are spoken in mountainous areas, along the southern slopes of the Himalayas, the Southeast Asian Massif and the eastern edge of the Tibetan Plateau.
Contemporary languages
The branch with the largest number of speakers by far is the Sinitic languages, with 1.3 billion speakers, most of whom live in the eastern half of China.[50] The first records of Chinese are oracle bone inscriptions from c. 1250 BC, when Old Chinese was spoken around the middle reaches of the Yellow River.[51] Chinese has since expanded throughout China, forming a family whose diversity has been compared with the Romance languages. Diversity is greater in the rugged terrain of southeast China than in the North China Plain.[52]
The Tibetic languages are spoken by some 6 million people on the Tibetan Plateau and neighbouring areas in the Himalayas and western Sichuan.[57] They are descended from Old Tibetan, which was originally spoken in the Yarlung Valley before it was spread by the expansion of the Tibetan Empire in the seventh century.[58] Although the empire collapsed in the ninth century, Classical Tibetan remained influential as the liturgical language of Tibetan Buddhism.[59]
The remaining languages are spoken in upland areas. Southernmost are the
Homeland
There have been a range of proposals for the Sino-Tibetan
- The most commonly cited hypothesis associates the family with the Neolithic 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]
- George van Driem 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]
- Roger Blench 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]
Zhang et al. (2019) performed a computational phylogenetic analysis of 109 Sino-Tibetan languages to suggest a Sino-Tibetan homeland in northern China near the Yellow River basin. The study further suggests that there was an initial major split between the Sinitic and Tibeto-Burman languages approximately 4,200 to 7,800 years ago (with an average of 5,900 years ago), associated with the Yangshao and/or Majiayao cultures.[63] Sagart et al. (2019) performed another phylogenetic analysis based on different data and methods to arrive at the same conclusions with respect to the homeland and divergence model but proposed an earlier root age of approximately 7,200 years ago, associating its origin with millet farmers of the late Cishan culture and early Yangshao culture.[70]
Classification
Several low-level branches of the family, particularly Lolo-Burmese, have been securely reconstructed, but in the absence of a secure reconstruction of a Sino-Tibetan proto-language, the higher-level structure of the family remains unclear.[74][75] 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.[citation needed]
Li (1937)
In a survey in the 1937 Chinese Yearbook, Li Fang-Kuei described the family as consisting of four branches:[76][77]
Tai and Miao–Yao were included because they shared
Many Chinese linguists continue to follow Li's classification.[d][77] However, this arrangement remains problematic. For example, there is disagreement over whether to include the entire Kra–Dai 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 Kra–Dai.
Benedict (1942)
Benedict overtly excluded Vietnamese (placing it in Mon–Khmer) as well as
- Sino-Tibetan
- Chinese
- Tibeto-Karen
- Karen
- Tibeto-Burman
Shafer (1955)
Shafer criticized the division of the family into
- Sino-Tibetan
- Sinitic
- Daic
- Bodic
- Burmic
- Baric
- Karenic
Shafer was sceptical of the inclusion of Daic, but after meeting Maspero in Paris decided to retain it pending a definitive resolution of the question.[84][85]
Matisoff (1978, 2015)
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)"[f] and that "it no longer seems justified to treat Chinese as the first branching of the Sino-Tibetan family,"[g] because the morphological divide between Chinese and Tibeto-Burman has been bridged by recent reconstructions of Old Chinese.
The internal structure of Sino-Tibetan has been tentatively revised as the following
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)
George 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,[88] but other linguists who reject a privileged position for Chinese nevertheless continue to call the resulting family "Sino-Tibetan".
Like Matisoff, van Driem acknowledges that the relationships of the
, 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 Kachin–Luic
- Eastern
- Northern (Sino-Bodic)
- Northwestern (Bodic): Bodish, Kirantic, West Himalayish, Tamangic and several isolates
- Northeastern (Sinitic)
- Southern
- Southwestern: Karenic
- Southeastern: Jiarongic
- Southwestern:
- Northern (Sino-Bodic)
- a number of other small families and isolates as primary branches (Newar, Nungish, Magaric, etc.)
- Western (Baric, Brahmaputran, or
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 a body of lexical cognates between the Chinese and Bodic languages, represented by the Kirantic language Limbu.[89]
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.[90]
Van Driem's "fallen leaves" model (2001, 2014)
Van Driem has also proposed a "fallen leaves" model that lists dozens of well-established low-level groups while remaining agnostic about intermediate groupings of these.[91] In the most recent version (van Driem 2014), 42 groups are identified (with individual languages highlighted in italics):[92]
- Bodish
- Tshangla
- West Himalayish
- Tamangic
- Newaric
- Kiranti
- Lepcha
- Magaric
- Chepangic
- Raji–Raute
- Dura
- 'Ole
- Gongduk
- Lhokpu
- Siangic
- Kho-Bwa
- Hrusish
- Digarish
- Midžuish
- Tani
- Dhimalish
- Brahmaputran(Sal)
- Pyu
- Ao
- Angami–Pochuri
- Tangkhul
- Zeme
- Meithei
- Kukish
- Karbi
- Mru
- Sinitic
- Bai
- Tujia
- Lolo-Burmese
- Qiangic
- Ersuish
- Naic
- Rgyalrongic
- Kachinic
- Nungish
- Karenic
He also suggested (van Driem 2007) that the Sino-Tibetan language family be renamed "Trans-Himalayan", which he considers to be more neutral.[93]
Orlandi (2021) also considers the van Driem's Trans-Himalayan fallen leaves model to be more plausible than the bifurcate classification of Sino-Tibetan being split into Sinitic and Tibeto-Burman.[94]
Blench and Post (2014)
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 (2014), 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
-
-
- Tani
- Nagish: Zeme, Angami–Pochuri and Meitei
-
- Western:
- Karenic
- Jingpho–Konyak–Bodo
- Eastern
-
Following that, 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" are inappropriate names for a family whose earliest divergences led to different languages altogether. They support the proposed name "Trans-Himalayan".
Menghan Zhang, Shi Yan, et al. (2019)
A team of researchers led by Pan Wuyun and Jin Li proposed the following phylogenetic tree in 2019, based on lexical items:[95]
- Sino-Tibetan
- Sinitic
- Tibeto-Burman
-
- Karenic
- Kuki-Chin–Naga
-
- Sal
-
-
- Digarish
- Tani
-
-
- Himalayish
- Nungish
-
- Kinauri
-
-
- Gurung-Tamang
- Bodish
-
-
- Naic
- Ersuish, Qiangic, Rgyalrongic
- Lolo-Burmese
-
-
-
-
-
Typology
Word order
Except for the Chinese,
Phonology
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]
Morphology
The structure of words
Sino-Tibetan is structurally one of the most diverse language families in the world, including all of the gradation of morphological complexity from isolating (Lolo-Burmese, Tujia) to polysynthetic (Gyalrongic, Kiranti) languages.[70] While Sinitic languages are normally taken to be a prototypical example of the isolating morphological type, southern Chinese languages express this trait far more strongly than northern Chinese languages do.[104]
Voice and Voicing alternation
Initial consonant
Ergativity
In
Person indexation
Many Sino-Tibetan languages exhibit a system of person indexation.[109] Notably, Gyalrongic and Kiranti have an inverse marker prefixed to a transitive verb when the agent is lower than the patient in a certain person hierarchy.[110]
Hodgson had in 1849 noted a dichotomy between "pronominalized" (
Evidentiality, mirativity, and egophoricity
Although not very common in some families and linguistic areas like Standard Average European, fairly complex systems of evidentiality (grammatical marking of information source) are found in many Tibeto-Burman languages.[113] The family has also contributed to the study of mirativity[114][115] and egophoricity,[116] which are relatively new concepts in linguistic typology.
Vocabulary
gloss | Old Chinese[117] | Old Tibetan[118] | Old Burmese[118] | Jingpho[119]
|
Garo[119] | Limbu[120] | Kanauri[121]
|
Tujia[122] |
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
"one" | 一 *ʔjit | – | ac | – | sa | – | id | – |
隻 *tjek "single" | gcig | tac | – | thik | – | – | ||
"two" | 二 *njijs | gnyis | nhac | – | gini | nɛtchi | niš | ne⁵⁵ |
"three" | 三 *sum | gsum | sumḥ | mə̀sūm | gittam | sumsi | sum | so⁵⁵ |
"four" | 四 *sjijs | bzhi | liy | mə̀lī | bri | lisi | pə: | ze⁵⁵ |
"five" | 五 *ŋaʔ | lnga | ṅāḥ | mə̀ŋā | boŋa | nasi | ṅa | ũ⁵⁵ |
"six" | 六 *C-rjuk | drug | khrok | krúʔ | dok | tuksi | țuk | wo²¹ |
"seven" | 七 *tsʰjit | – | khu-nac | sə̀nìt | sini | nusi | štiš | ne²¹ |
"eight" | 八 *pret | brgyad | rhac | mə̀tshát | chet | yɛtchi | rəy | je²¹ |
"nine" | 九 *kjuʔ | dgu | kuiḥ | cə̀khù | sku[123] | sku | sgui | kɨe⁵⁵ |
"ten" | 十 *gjəp | – | kip[124] | – | – | gip | – | – |
– | bcu | chay | shī | chikuŋ | – | səy | – |
Proposed external relationships
Beyond the traditionally recognized families of Southeast Asia, a number of
Austronesian
Laurent Sagart proposes a "Sino-Austronesian" family with Sino-Tibetan and Austronesian (including Kra–Dai as a subbranch) as primary branches. Stanley Starosta has extended this proposal with a further branch called "Yangzian" joining Hmong–Mien and Austroasiatic. The proposal has been largely rejected by other linguists who argue that the similarities between Austronesian and Sino-Tibetan more likely arose from contact rather than being genetic.[125][126][127]
Dené–Yeniseian
As noted by Tailleur
The "
A link between the Na–Dené languages and Sino-Tibetan languages, known as Sino–Dené had also been proposed by Edward Sapir. Around 1920 Sapir became convinced that Na-Dené was more closely related to Sino-Tibetan than to other American families.[137] Edward Vadja's Dené–Yeniseian proposal renewed interest among linguists such as Geoffrey Caveney (2014) to look into support for the Sino–Dené hypothesis. Caveney considered a link between Sino-Tibetan, Na-Dené, and Yeniseian to be plausible but did not support the hypothesis that Sino-Tibetan and Na-Dené were related to the Caucasian languages (Sino–Caucasian and Dené–Caucasian).[138]
A 2023 analysis by David Bradley using the standard techniques of comparative linguistics supports a distant genetic link between the Sino-Tibetan, Na-Dené, and Yeniseian language families. Bradley argues that any similarities Sino-Tibetan shares with other language families of the East Asia area such as Hmong-Mien, Altaic (which is actually a sprachbund), Austroasiatic, Kra–Dai, Austronesian came through contact; but as there has been no recent contact between Sino-Tibetan, Na-Dené, and Yeniseian language families then any similarities these groups share must be residual.[139]
Indo-European
August Conrad proposed the Sino-Tibetan-Indo-European language family.[citation needed] This hypothesis holds that there is a genetic relationship between the Sino-Tibetan language family and the Indo-European language family. The earliest comparative linguistic study of Chinese and Indo-European languages was the 18th century Nordic scholar Olaus Rudbeck. He compared the vocabulary of Gothic and Chinese and guessed that the two may be of the same origin. In the second half of the 19th century, Kong Haogu, Shigude, Ijosser, etc. successively proposed that Chinese and European languages are homologous. Among them, Kong Haogu, through the comparison of Chinese and Indo-European domestic animal vocabulary, first proposed an Indo-Chinese language macrofamily (including Chinese, Tibetan, Burmese and Indo-European languages).
In the 20th century, R. Shafer put forward the conjecture of a Eurasial language super-family and listed hundreds of similar words between Tibeto-Burman and Indo-European languages.[140][141]
Notes
- ^ Kuhn (1889), p. 189: "wir das Tibetisch-Barmanische einerseits, das Chinesisch-Siamesische anderseits als deutlich geschiedene und doch wieder verwandte Gruppen einer einheitlichen Sprachfamilie anzuerkennen haben." (also quoted in van Driem (2001), p. 264.)
- ^ The volumes were: 1. Introduction and bibliography, 2. Bhotish, 3. West Himalayish, 4. West Central Himalayish, 5. East Himalayish, 6. Digarish, 7. Nungish, 8. Dzorgaish, 9. Hruso, 10. Dhimalish, 11. Baric, 12. Burmish–Lolish, 13. Kachinish, 14. Kukish, 15. Mruish.[19]
- ^ Karlgren's reconstruction, with aspiration as 'h' and 'i̯' as 'j' to aid comparison.
- ^ See, for example, the "Sino-Tibetan" (汉藏语系 Hàn-Zàng yǔxì) entry in the "languages" (語言文字, Yǔyán-Wénzì) volume of the Encyclopedia of China (1988).
- ^ For Shafer, the suffix "-ic" denoted a primary division of the family, whereas the suffix "-ish" denoted a sub-division of one of those.
- ^ les travaux de comparatisme n'ont jamais pu mettre en évidence l'existence d'innovations communes à toutes les langues « tibéto-birmanes » (les langues sino-tibétaines à l'exclusion du chinois)
- ^ il ne semble plus justifié de traiter le chinois comme le premier embranchement primaire de la famille sino-tibétaine
References
Citations
- ^ van Driem (2014), p. 16.
- ^ List, Lai & Starostin (2019), p. 1.
- ^ Handel (2008), p. 422.
- ^ "Sino Tibetan Languages". Retrieved December 30, 2023.
- ^ Handel (2008), pp. 422, 434–436.
- ^ Sagart et al. (2019), p. 10317.
- ^ Logan (1856), p. 31.
- ^ Logan (1858).
- ^ a b Hale (1982), p. 4.
- ^ van Driem (2001), p. 334.
- ^ Klaproth (1823), pp. 346, 363–365.
- ^ van Driem (2001), p. 344.
- ^ Finck (1909), p. 57.
- ^ a b Przyluski (1924), p. 361.
- ^ Sapir (1925), p. 373.
- ^ Przyluski (1924), p. 380.
- ^ Przyluski & Luce (1931).
- ^ van Driem (2014), p. 15.
- ^ Miller (1974), p. 195.
- ^ Miller (1974), pp. 195–196.
- ^ Benedict (1972), p. v.
- ^ Matisoff (1991), p. 473.
- ^ a b Handel (2008), p. 434.
- ^ Benedict (1972), pp. 20–21.
- ^ Benedict (1972), pp. 17–18, 133–139, 164–171.
- ^ a b Handel (2008), pp. 425–426.
- ^ Miller (1974), p. 197.
- ^ Matisoff (2003), p. 16.
- ^ Beckwith (1996).
- ^ Beckwith (2002b).
- ^ Benedict (1972), pp. 98–123.
- ^ Matisoff (1991), pp. 471–472.
- ^ Norman (1988), p. 45.
- ^ Baxter (1992), pp. 25–26.
- ^ Bodman (1980), p. 47.
- ^ Baxter (1992), pp. 197, 199–202.
- ^ Baxter (1992), pp. 315–317.
- ^ Beckwith (2002a), pp. xiii–xiv.
- ^ Thurgood (2003), p. 17.
- ^ Hill (2015).
- ^ Gong (1980).
- ^ Handel (2008), p. 431.
- ^ Hill (2014), pp. 97–104.
- ^ Matisoff (1991), pp. 472–473.
- ^ Hale (1982), pp. 4–5.
- ^ Matisoff (1991), pp. 470, 476–478.
- ^ Handel (2008), p. 435.
- ^ Matisoff (1991), p. 482.
- ^ a b Eberhard, Simons & Fennig (2019).
- ^ Eberhard, Simons & Fennig (2019), "Chinese".
- ^ Norman (1988), p. 4.
- ^ Norman (1988), pp. 187–188.
- ^ Eberhard, Simons & Fennig (2019), "Burmese".
- ^ a b Taylor (1992), p. 165.
- ^ a b Wheatley (2003), p. 195.
- ^ Thurgood (2003), pp. 8–9.
- ^ Tournadre (2014), p. 117.
- ^ Tournadre (2014), p. 107.
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General
- Bauman, James (1974), "Pronominal Verb Morphology in Tibeto-Burman" (PDF), Linguistics of the Tibeto-Burman Area, 1 (1): 108–155.
- JSTOR 23826142.
- JSTOR 599822.
- Blench, Roger; Post, Mark (2011), (De)classifying Arunachal languages: Reconstructing the evidence (PDF).
- ISBN 978-3-87787-208-6.
- van Driem, George (1995), "Black Mountain Conjugational Morphology, Proto-Tibeto-Burman Morphosyntax, and the Linguistic Position of Chinese" (PDF), Senri Ethnological Studies, 41: 229–259.
- ——— (2003), "Tibeto-Burman vs. Sino-Tibetan", in Winter, Werner; Bauer, Brigitte L. M.; Pinault, Georges-Jean (eds.), Language in time and space: a Festschrift for Werner Winter on the occasion of his 80th birthday, Walter de Gruyter, pp. 101–119, ISBN 978-3-11-017648-3.
- ISBN 978-957-671-872-4.
- Jacques, Guillaume (2006), "La morphologie du sino-tibétain", La Linguistique Comparative en France Aujourd'hui.
- Kuhn, Ernst (1883), Über Herkunft und Sprache der transgangetischen Völker (PDF), Munich: Verlag der Königlich Bayerischen Akademie.
- OCLC 53387435.
External links
- James Matisoff, "Tibeto-Burman languages and their subgrouping"
- Bruhn, Daniel; Lowe, John; Mortensen, David; Yu, Dominic (2015), Sino-Tibetan Etymological Dictionary and Thesaurus Database Software, Software, UC Berkeley Dash, doi:10.6078/D1159Q.
- Sino-Tibetan Branches Project (STBP)
- Behind the Sino-Tibetan Database of Lexical Cognates: Introductory remarks
- Sinotibetan Lexical Homology Database
- Guillaume Jacques, "The Genetic Position of Chinese"
- Marc Miyake (2014), "Why Sino-Tibetan reconstruction is not like Indo-European reconstruction (yet)"
- Andrew Hsiu (2018), "Linking the Sino-Tibetan fallen leaves"