Sino-Tibetan languages

The Sino-Tibetan languages form a language family that includes more than 250 languages spoken from northern India in the west to Taiwan in the southeast and from China, to the north, to the Malacca peninsula, to the south. In number of speakers, it is only surpassed by the Indo-European family. The origin of these languages, which Western linguistics has hardly studied, can be found in Tibet, Nepal, Burma, western China and the Indian state of Assam. The languages of the group are characterized by their tendency towards tonality, although it is disputed whether this is a trait that traces back to common ancestry.

History

The origin and spread of the Sino-Tibetan languages. The red oval is the last Cishan culture and the early Yangshao. The black arrow is the supposed non-synthetic expansion pathways. After applying the comparative linguistic method to the comparative linguistic data database developed by Laurent Sagart in 2019 to identify sound correspondences and establish cognados, philgenetic methods are used to infer relationships between these languages and estimate the age of their origin and homeland.

There are archaeological correlates between the Neolithic culture of Yangshao and the reconstructible prehistory of the Sino-Tibetan peoples. The Yangshao culture originated in the Yellow River Basin and the North Central Plains of China. Later these human groups would have been divided into a southern group (Tibeto-Burmans) and a northern group (Siniti or Proto-Chinese). Naturally, there are no written testimonies from this time, so all the information must be extracted from the joint data of linguistic reconstruction and archaeology.

Recognition of the Sino-Tibetan family in its current extent only occurred in the early 20th century. Benedict (1942) created the term Sino-Tibetan for a group similar to what had previously been called Indo-Chinese (Benedict himself excluded Tai languages and Austroasiatic languages, which some previously included in the Indo-Chinese group). Shafer (1946, 1955, 1974), while adopting the term Sino-Tibetan, continued to consider within the family languages not currently considered Sino-Tibetan, although some of the first-level groups used by Shafer were Sinitic, Daico (Kadai), Bodic, Burmese, Baric and Karenic were correctly identified by Shafer.

Classification

Family languages

Proposed grouping of the Sino-tibetan languages.

Syno-tibetan branches: Tibetan-birth languages (green) and Sinitic languages (red).

Specific groups of syno-tibetan languages.

The group formed by the Tibeto-Burman languages (TB) and the Karenic languages (Kr) is generally recognized as a phylogenetically valid group, to which most authors add the Chinese languages (Ch). Many Tibeto-Burmese languages are insufficiently known, and their exact number in certain regions is unknown. For example, for some regions there are no complete lists of all the languages, but in many cases it is unknown if two linguistic forms are separate languages or should be considered dialects of the same language, due to the scarce existing documentation of the languages of certain regions, particularly in the NE. from India.

As for the classification of the Sino-Tibetan languages, there is also no agreement on the details of the internal relationships of the family, for example, although the Chinese languages constitute a valid phylogenetic unit, it is more difficult to ascertain whether the Tibeto-Burman languages constitute a valid phylogenetic unit. Nor is it clear whether the Sino-Tibetan family is part of a larger family, so some authors broaden the macrofamily to include the Miao-Yao languages or even the Tai-Kadai languages, while others reduce it considerably, even suggesting that the Chinese languages are not related to the rest of the Tibeto-Burman languages, citing the absence of regular phonetic correspondences and the paucity of clearly reconstructible common morphology.

Even considering only the three usual groups (TB, Kr, Ch), to date there is no uncontested tree model showing the internal interrelationships. Benedict proposed nine coordinated groups:

There is no general agreement on the phylogenetic relationship within the Sino-Tibetan languages, so different authors propose different groupings, only in the lower level groupings marked with an (F) is there broad agreement that they constitute phylogenetic units:

Discovery of kinship

The existence of the Tibeto-Burmese subfamily was proposed in the early 1850s, when it was found that many words in "written Tibetan" (Classical Tibetan), documented as early as the VII century, appeared to be cognates of words from "written Burmese" (Classical Burmese), attested from the 12th century. Thereafter a number of British scholars and colonial administrators in India and Burma began to study one of the dozens of 'tribal' languages in the world. little known in the region that showed some relationship with the two great literary languages, classical Tibetan and Burmese. This early work was collected in the monumental collection Linguistic Survey of India [Grierson and Konow 1903-28], in three volumes, of which "Vol. III, Parts 1,2,3" they are devoted to lists of words and texts in taken from various Tibeto-Burman languages.

Relationship with other families

Some linguists consider the Tai-Kadai languages and the Miao-Yao languages as part of the Sino-Tibetan languages, and it has even been proposed that some Paleosiberian languages such as Ket are related to the macrofamily sino-tibetan. Other linguists have gathered some comparative evidence linking Sino-Tibetan to Austroasiatic and Austronesian languages, suggesting the name Sino-Austrian for the hypothetical macrofamily of which both Sino-Tibetan, Austronesian, and Sino-Tibetan languages would be a part. austroasiatic Another attempt is to relate the Sino-Tibetan languages to other Eurasian languages in the Dené-Caucasian macrofamily.

Until the reconstruction work of Proto-Sino-Tibetan and other proto-languages is further advanced, however, it is difficult to judge the plausibility of these and similar proposals.

Common features

Although a certain amount of comparative vocabulary currently exists, very few reconstructed grammatical morphemes exist, and the reconstruction of hypothetical Proto-Sino-Tibetan is surprisingly little advanced. Not even the regular phonetic correspondences, which constitute one of the first steps of the comparative method, prior to rigorous reconstruction, have been worked out in detail. What can be said with certainty about Proto-Sino-Tibetan is so little that it is not even clear. that it was a tonal language. Which would explain the existence of non-tonal Sino-Tibetan languages, and the clearly derived origin of several of the tones of Chinese and other languages.

Not much can be said about grammar either, because the Tibeto-Burman languages have typological characteristics almost the opposite of Chinese languages. The Tibeto-Burman languages are of the SOV order, generally rigid, with postpositions, and tend to be agglutinative languages with fairly developed nominal and verbal inflection. On the other hand, Chinese languages often have prepositions, admit SVO order, and are strongly insulating. Proto-Tibeto-Burmese suggests that the oldest stage is that of the Tibeto-Burmese languages, and that the Chinese languages innovated by acquiring typological features present in other Southeast Asian languages.

Comparative vocabulary

The reconstruction of Proto-Sino-Tibetan is hampered by the lack of an adequate classification of the languages of the family. If a better classification were available, one could begin by reconstructing the proto-languages associated with each primary division (Proto-Sinitic, Proto-Burmanic, Proto-Himalayan, Proto-Karenic,...) and to the higher order groupings, to find which features They are archaic and what innovations. A good example of morphological archaism is certain fossil prefixes in numerals. Frequently these prefixes appear in some languages and not in others in an apparently random way. This type of semantically unmotivated and fossilized prefixes, therefore, cannot be the result of innovations or parallel developments and, therefore, must be interpreted as remains of the ancient morphology of Proto-Sino-Tibetan.

There are many difficulties in the reconstruction of Proto-Sino-Tibetan and there are discrepancies among specialists about the phonological inventory itself. Some of the difficulties are due to the Chinese writing system, such as the poor morphology of these languages and other problems. However, reasonable lists of cognates have been identified, a sample of which is presented below:

The following table reproduces the reconstructed numerals for the Sino-Tibetan branches:

Finally another list that includes reconstructions is the following: