Rethinking Sino-Tibetan phylogeny from the perspective of North East Indian languages (original) (raw)
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2008: What is Sino-Tibetan? Snapshot of a Field and a Language Family in Flux
Language and Linguistics Compass, 2008
Sino-Tibetan is one of the great language families of the world, containing hundreds of languages spoken by over 1 billion people, from Northeast India to the Southeast Asian peninsula. The best-known languages in the family are Chinese, Tibetan, and Burmese. Although the existence of the family has been recognized for nearly 200 years, significant progress in reconstructing the history of the family was not achieved until the latter half of the twentieth century. In recent decades, this progress has accelerated, thanks to an explosion of new data and new approaches. At the same time, a number of interesting controversies have emerged in the field, centered on such issues as subgrouping and reconstruction methodology.
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.
Subgrouping of the Sino-Tibetan languages
Evolang 10, 2018
The Sino-Tibetan (ST) languages, including Chinese, are the major family of languages in China and many areas surrounding China in Southeast and South Asia. There have been many proposals about the phylogeny of Proto-Sino-Tibetan (PST) and the possible connections between specific ancient cultures of China and specific subgroups of PST; the basic modern subgrouping followed here is set out in more detail in Bradley (1997, 2002). It has recently been proposed (van Driem 2014) that the entire family should be renamed Trans-Himalayan (TH); others have suggested that the entire family should be called TB, with Sinitic as just one subgroup of TB (DeLancey 2013); both proposals aim to question the central historical position of Sinitic within TB. The general consensus (van Driem 1999, LaPolla 2001) is that PST was spoken during the 仰韶 Yangshao Culture in northwestern China circa 7,000 to 5,000 years before present (7-5K YBP). The Sinitic branch (Chinese) remained in northern central China during the 龙山 Longshan Culture (5-3.9K YBP), then later spread east during the 夏 Xia Dynasty (4.1-3.6K YBP) and 商 Shang Dynasty (3.6-3K YBP) and southeast in later times. Meanwhile, most of the rest of the family probably moved southwest from the Yangshao area and became Proto-Tibeto-Burman (PTB) during the 马家窑 Majiayao Culture (5.3-4K YBP); PTB then gradually subdivided into various branches as groups of speakers moved further south and west. In addition to comparative linguistic evidence, there are five types of external evidence. One is paleoclimate: where in the area would it have been ecologically desirable or at least possible for Neolithic hunters, early pastoralists and early agriculturalists to live at various times in the past? A second is archaeology: where and from when are traces of human settlement found, and what level of material culture is present at each period: what domestic and hunted animals, cultivated crops and other collected plants, artefacts and human remains are found? A third is paleobiology: where were the relevant plants and animals indigenous, when did they start to be associated with human management, and how did they spread? A fourth is genetics; though of course not all speakers of a given language are descendants of earlier speakers of that language, and evidence of male (X chromosome) and female (mitochondrial DNA) genetic descent is sometimes contradictory. Lastly, there is much more recent traditional human evidence: oral traditions concerning origins and migration as embodied in oral history, psychopompic and other funeral-related traditions, and so on, as well as written history. Of course sometimes oral and early written history is unclear or partly mythologized, and so may be less reliable than hard evidence from paleoclimate, archaeology, paleobiology and genetics, but it is still suggestive. Where all of these agree, we can begin to build a picture of early civilization in China and surrounding areas, and attempt to connect particular linguistically-reconstructed subgroups with particular locations and periods. For some efforts in these areas, see Bradley (2011) on crops, Bradley (2016) on animals, and Bradley (2017a, 2017b) on correlating crop and domestic animal information with archaeology and PST subgrouping. Those scholars who wish to rename ST as TH prefer to place the point of origin in what is now the area where northeastern India, northwestern Southeast Asia and southwestern China meet. This proposal is most unlikely on geographical grounds (the area is extremely mountainous and divided by major non-navigable rivers in deep valleys which separate rather than link); on climate grounds (this area has never been a particularly favourable location for pastoral or agricultural activity, and at colder periods much of it has been almost
Sino-Tibetan archaeolinguistics
Oxford Handbook of Archaeology and Language, 2024
This chapter summarises the linguistic phylogeny of the Sino-Tibetan (ST) languages and how this phylogeny relates to archaeological and genetic information. In forthcoming Oxford Handbook edited by Martine Robbeets and Mark Hudson Co-authors Liu Li Stanford U Ning Chao, Peking University Rita dal Martello, Università ca' Foscari, Venezia
pp. 363-397 in Gray Tuttle, Kunsang Gya, Karma Dare and Johnathan Wilber, eds., The Third International Conference on Tibetan Language, Volume 1: Proceedings of the Panels on Domains of Use and Linguistic Interactions. New York: Trace Foundation., 2013
Tibeto-Burman replaces Indo-Chinese in the 1990s: Review of a decade of a scholarship
Lingua, 112 (2): 79-102., 2002
Tibeto-Burman is one of the world's greatest language families, second only to lndo-European in terms of populations of speakers. Advances made in the course of the decade have led to a major paradigm shift in Tibeto-Burman historical linguistics and phylogeny. The numerous contributions to the field in the 1990s are reviewed in a statement on the current state of the art.
Archiv Orientální, 2017
Hill, Nathan W. (2017) 'The State of Sino-Tibetan.' Archiv Orientální, 85 (2) : 305-315. A review article of Thurgood, Graham, and Randy J. LaPolla, eds. The Sino-Tibetan Languages. Second Edition. London and New York: Routledge, 2017. xxx + 1018 pp. ISBN 978-1-138-78332-4. Price 300 GBP.
Dated phylogeny suggests early Neolithic origin of Sino-Tibetan languages
Scientific Reports, 2020
An accurate reconstruction of Sino-Tibetan language evolution would greatly advance our understanding of East Asian population history. Two recent phylogenetic studies attempted to do so but several of their conclusions are different from each other. Here we reconstruct the phylogeny of the Sino-Tibetan language family, using Bayesian computational methods applied to a larger and linguistically more diverse sample. Our results confirm previous work in finding that the ancestral Sino-Tibetans first split into Sinitic and Tibeto-Burman clades, and support the existence of key internal relationships. But we find that the initial divergence of this group occurred earlier than previously suggested, at approximately 8000 years before the present, coinciding with the onset of millet-based agriculture and significant environmental changes in the Yellow River region. Our findings illustrate that key aspects of phylogenetic history can be replicated in this complex language family, and calls ...
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.