Family Tree: Tibeto-Burman Languages (original) (raw)
Related papers
The Tibeto-Burman languages of Northeast India
2017. In Graham Thurgood and Randy J. LaPolla, Eds. The Sino-Tibetan Languages [Second Edition]. London, Routledge: 213-242.
Northeast India is the epicentre of phylogenetic diversity in the Sino-Tibetan family, with perhaps 20 independent Tibeto-Burman subgroups and as many as 300 languages spoken there. Politically, Northeast India is divided into the states of Arunachal Pradesh, Assam, Meghalaya, Nagaland, Manipur, Mizoram and Tripura. Linguistically, it can be divided into Northern, Central and Eastern Border areas. The languages of this region remain relatively little-known and underdescribed. This chapter reviews the state of current knowledge concerning Northeast Indian Tibeto-Burman languages, and urges further research on individual languages and low-level subgroups in the area.
2018
This is a preliminary report on a Tibetan Khams dialect spoken in Mingyong village (明永 Míngyǒng in Chinese; མེ་ལོང་ Me long in Tibetan) in the Dêqên County (德钦 县 Déqīn xiàn; བདེ་ཆེན་རོང་ bDe chen rdzong) under the Diqing Tibetan Autonomous Prefecture (迪庆藏族自治州 Díqìng Zàngzú Zìzhìzhōu; བདེ་ཆེན་བོད་རིགས་རང་སྐོང་ཁུལ་ bDe chen Bod rigs rang skyong khul), in the northwestern part of Yunnan province, in southwest China. This is the southeastern-most area where Tibetan Khams dialects are spoken. Several other nationalities, e.g. Naxi and Lisu, who speak Tibeto-Burman languages, also inhabit this district. Recently a Japanese Scholar SUZUKI Hiroyuki has been carrying out active research on the Khams dialects distributed from the Diqing to the Shangri-La district where is a county-level city as an administrative unit. He classifies the Khams dialects of this area into two big groups: Shanggri-La and DerongDeqing. The Mingyong village belongs to the dialect subgroup spoken on the west side of ...
Journal of the Southeast Asian Linguistic Society, 11 (2): xcviii-cx., 2018
It has been fourteen years since the appearance of the first edition of this compendium of Trans-Himalayan languages. In its second edition, the volume has swollen to encompass 53 chapters. As Simon and Hill (2015: 381) noted, the language family "is known by names including 'Tibeto-Burman', 'Sino-Tibetan' and 'Trans-Himalayan', of which the last is the most neutral and accurate". McColl et al. (2018: 362) put it more succinctly in their Science article, stating simply: "Trans-Himalayan (formerly Sino-Tibetan)". In the very title to this volume, the two editors, Graham Ward Thurgood and Randy John LaPolla, loudly proclaim their adherence to the obsolete and empirically unsupported "Sino-Tibetan" phylogeny, but many of the contributors to this Routledge volume do not themselves subscribe to the same antiquated Indo-Chinese understanding of the language family. Outside of this volume, a good number of the contributing scholars openly abjure this family tree model. Later, we shall examine how the outspoken bias of the two editors pervades the volume in a thorough and more insidious manner than in the first edition. The anthology comprises 44 grammatical sketches, two of which are devoted to dead Trans-Himalayan languages, five survey articles, two editorial pieces, a piece on the Chinese writing system and a discussion of word order. Editorial misrepresentations, the state of the art and Gerber's Law This volume contains many valuable, some truly wonderful and a few problematic instalments, but the Routledge compendium is truly marred by the two editorial pieces authored by Thurgood and LaPolla and positioned at the very beginning of the book. In addition to the two large editorial pieces, the first section also contains a brief study of word order in Trans-Himalayan languages by Matthew Synge Dryer. A volume that purports to present a general overview of the field should dispassionately present different positions held by specialists in that field, and the failure even just once to mention that alternative views exist that are quite at variance with Thurgood and LaPolla's own particular view characterises an unfair comportment on the part of the two editors that is not just unsportsmanlike, but unscholarly and unworthy of our field. For well over a century, the phylogeny of the language family has been a matter of considerable controversy. Yet both editors are careful to cite and quote only such sources as happen to agree with their own model. The empirically unsupported Indo-Chinese taxonomy relentlessly propounded by an ever dwindling number of "true believer" Sino-Tibetanists permeates the very arrangement of the book, and the two editors have even wilfully skewed the contents of the volume in order to fit their obsolete Indo-Chinese family tree. In keeping with this "Sino-Tibetan" conceit, the editors have included six instalments on Sinitic, though the sheer brevity of Dah-an Ho's instalment on Mandarin could reflect a reluctance on the part of its contributor to indulge the paradigm championed by the two editors. Indeed, as already noted, many of the scholars who have contributed to this volume reject the language family tree model touted by the editors. Moreover, the editorial twosome surreptitiously sneak their own "Rung" subgroup into the table of contents, thereby falsely suggesting that this fiction represents a valid taxon within the family. To exacerbate matters, their table of contents incompetently groups Tshangla and Newar as "Bodish" languages.
2003
There are more native speakers of Sino-Tibetan languages than of any other language family in the world. Our records of these languages are among the oldest for any human language, and the amount of active research on them, both diachronic and synchronic, has multiplied in the last decades. This volume covers the better-described languages, but with comments on the subgroups in which they occur. Ine addition to a number of modern languages, there ares on the descriptions of several ancient languages.
Gser-Rdo: A New Tibetic Language Across the Rngaba-Dkarmdzes Border
Gserskad and Rdoskad are two recently uncovered Tibetic dialect chains spoken on the northern border of Rngaba (Aba) and Dkarmdzes (Ganzi) Prefectures in northwestern Sichuan. Despite their many points of difference and only partial intelligibility, Gserskad and Rdoskad show a special affinity to each other, as suggested in Sun 2006. The further idiosyncratic common lexical, phonological, and particularly morphological evidence highlighted in this article vindicate the close ties shared by Gserskad and Rdoskad as a distinct Tibetic language on a par with Amdo.