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Linguistics Development Team Development Team Principal Investigator: Prof. Pramod Pandey Centre for Linguistics / SLL&CS Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi Email: [email protected] Paper Coordinator: Prof. K. S. Nagaraja Department of Linguistics, Deccan College Post-Graduate Research Institute, Pune- 411006, [email protected] Content Writer: Prof. K. S. Nagaraja Prof H. S. Ananthanarayana Content Reviewer: Retd Prof, Department of Linguistics Osmania University, Hyderabad 500007 Paper : Historical and Comparative Linguistics Linguistics Module : The Tibeto-Burman Languages Description of Module Subject Name Linguistics Paper Name Historical and Comparative Linguistics Module Title The Tibeto-Burman Languages Module ID Lings_P7_M27 Quadrant 1 E-Text Paper : Historical and Comparative Linguistics Linguistics Module : The Tibeto-Burman Languages THE TIBETO-BURMAN LANGUAGES Sino-Tibetan family of languages includes the Sinitic branch and Tibeto-Burman languages spoken in almost the whole of China, western Himalayas and in the highlands of Northeast India. This is the second largest family in terms of number of speakers after Indo-European family. The Sino-Tibetan family is mainly composed of two sub-branches, Sinitic (Chinese and related languages) and the rest, Tibeto-Burman. In this lecture attention is mainly focused on the Tibeto-Burman branch. In India Tibeto-Burman languages are spoken along the great Himalayan mountain ranges right from Ladakh in the north to the north-eastern states up to Tripura, Burma, Bangladesh. Sino-Tibetan languages were known for a long time by the name Indo-Chinese, which is now restricted to the languages of Indo-China. The Tibeto-Burman languages numbering more than 400 are spoken throughout the highlands of Southeast Asia as well as certain parts of East Asia and South Asia. The name derives from the most widely spoken of these languages, namely Burmese (over 32 million speakers) and the Tibetan languages (over 8 million). These languages also have extensive literary traditions, dating from the 12th and 7th centuries respectively. Most of the other languages are spoken by much smaller communities, and many of them have not been described in detail. During the 18th century, several scholars noticed parallels between Tibetan and Burmese, both languages with extensive literary traditions. In the following century, Brian Houghton Hodgson collected a wealth of data on the non-literary languages of the Himalayas and northeast India, noting that many of these were related to Tibetan and Burmese. Others identified related languages in the highlands of southeast Asia and southwest China. The name "Tibeto-Burman" was first applied to this group in 1856 by James Logan, who added Karen in 1858. Charles Forbes viewed the family as uniting the Gangetic and Lohitic branches of Max Müller's Turanian, a huge family consisting of all the Eurasian languages except the Semitic, "Aryan" (Indo-European) and Chinese languages. The third volume of Grierson’s Linguistic Survey of India was devoted to the Tibeto-Burman languages of British India. Julius Klaproth had noted in 1823 that Burmese, Tibetan and Chinese all shared common basic vocabulary, but that Thai, Mon and Vietnamese were quite different. Several authors, including Ernst Kuhn in 1883 and August Conrady in 1896, described an "Indo-Chinese" family consisting of two branches, Tibeto-Burman and Chinese-Siamese. Jean Przyluski introduced the term sino-tibétain (Sino-Tibetan). The link to Chinese is now accepted by most linguists, with a few exceptions such as Roy Andrew Miller and Christopher Beckwith. More recent controversy has centred on the proposed primary branching of Sino-Tibetan into Chinese and Tibeto-Burman subgroups. In spite of the popularity of this classification, first proposed by Kuhn and Conrady, Paper : Historical and Comparative Linguistics Linguistics Module : The Tibeto-Burman Languages and also promoted by Paul Benedict (1972) and later James Matisoff, Tibeto-Burman has not been demonstrated to be a valid family in its own right. Overview The TB languages have evolved from the ancestral language, Proto-Tibeto-Burman, in vastly different ways and at their own pace, in accordance with the geographical and social factors that have determined the fate of Central and South Asian people. Some tribes have been stationary; others have swept over huge areas. As a result, conservative or archaic features do not occur in only one contiguous part of the language area and innovations in another. The nearest genetic relations are often not identical with the closest typological ones. Most of the Tibeto-Burman languages are spoken in inaccessible mountain areas and many are unwritten, which has greatly hampered their study. It is generally much easier to identify a language as Tibeto-Burman than to determine its precise relationship with other languages of the group. These subgroups are here surveyed on a geographical basis. The most widely spoken Tibeto-Burman language is Burmese, the national language of Myanmar, with over 32 million speakers and a literary tradition dating from the early 12th century. It is one of the Lolo-Burmese languages, an intensively studied and well-defined group comprising approximately 100 languages spoken in Myanmar and the highlands of Thailand, Laos, Vietnam and Southwest China. Major languages include the Loloish languages, with two million speakers in western Sichuan and northern Yunnan, the Akha language and Hani languages, with two million speakers in southern Yunnan, eastern Myanmar, Laos and Vietnam, and Lisu and Lahu in Yunnan, northern Myanmar and northern Thailand. All languages of the Loloish subgroup show significant Austroasiatic influence. The Pai-lang songs, transcribed in Chinese characters in the 1st century, appear to record words from a Lolo-Burmese language, but arranged in Chinese order. Modern Standard Burmese has undergone a set of radical changes. Initial ts- and tsh- have become s- and sh-; s has become th; y- and r- have coalesced as y-, and ky- and kr- as a palatal c. Furthermore, all final consonants except nasals have coalesced as glottal stops, and all nasals have resulted in nasalization of the preceding vowel. In addition, the quality of vowels has been greatly altered. As was the case in Tibetan, in spite of great phonetic changes, grammatical categories are close to those scholars envisage for Proto-T-B. Cases of nouns and aspects of verbs are expressed through postposed particles. Study of the Burmese writing system, in combination with comparative work, makes possible the reconstruction of Old Burmese. The language of the Myazedi inscription of 1113 is close in its sound system to written Burmese in its present form, which dates back to at least 15th century. The writing system was taken over from the Mon people, who had developed their writing from Pyu, a Sino-Tibetan language known in Burma from c.AD 500. It is alphabetic of an Indian type but represents a separate Southern line of development. Paper : Historical and Comparative Linguistics Linguistics Module : The Tibeto-Burman Languages Old Burmese is phonetically further from Proto-Tibeto-Burman than is Tibetan. Initial clusters are mostly lost but are felt in the development of initial consonants. Some clusters with –w- and liquid sounds were retained. The tonal system of Burmese (unlike that of Tibetan) developed to compensate for the loss of final features. Over eight million people in the Tibetan Plateau and neighbouring areas in Baltistan, Ladakh, Nepal, Sikkim and Bhutan speak one of the several related Tibetic languages. There is an extensive literature in Classical Tibetan dating from the 8th century. The Tibetic languages are usually grouped with the smaller East Bodish languages of Bhutan and Arunachal Pradesh as the Bodish group. Tibetan: Of the modern Tibetan languages and dialects, the Western ones have preserved initial consonant clusters and final stops most faithfully and have had the least compensational development of tones. Most Central languages and dialects, including Lhasa, have lost all consonant clusters and final stops and in the process have acquired a larger inventory of single consonants and a system of tones. These changes and reductions are linked to a similar reshaping of certain grammatical processes of word formation that now operate only through suprasegmental and syllabic elements. To a surprising degree, however, Modern Central Tibetan possesses grammatical categories identical with or very similar in content, though not in form, to those of Classical Tibetan (a similar relationship as that of Modern St. Chinese to Old Chinese). The relationship of nouns to the main verb is indicated through postposed particles, the agent of a transitive verb indicated as the one by whom the action is performed, and the subject of an intransitive verb expressed as the object or goal of the action. Nominal modifiers precede the nouns, and verbal modifiers follow them. The main verb, always placed after all nouns, is followed by particles expressing aspect and tense. Old Tibetan pronunciation can be reconstructed by comparison of modern dialects and through the very conservative alphabetic script of Indian origin that goes back to the 7th century AD and found its present form in the 9th century. The orthography is far removed from present-day Standard Tibetan pronunciation. Old Tibetan is one of the most archaic of the T-B languages. It retained T-B final stops and final –r, -l, -s and also the initial voiced consonants.
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    BIBLIOGRAPHY Allan, Keith. 1977. ‘Classifiers’, Language 53: 285–311. Benedict, Paul King (Contributing Editor: James Alan Matisoff ). 1972. Sino-Tibetan: A Conspectus. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Bhattacharya, Promod Chandra. 1977. A Descriptive Analysis of Boro. Gauhati: Guwahati University, Department of Publication. Bauer, Laurie. 1983. English Word-formation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Bhat, D.N. Shankara. 1968. Boro Vocabulary (With a Grammatical Sketch). Poona: Deccan College Post-Graduate and Research Institute. Blake, Barry J. 1994. Case. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Bradley, David. 1994. ‘The subgrouping of Tibeto-Burman’, pp. 59–78 in Hajime Kitamura, Tatsuo Nishida and Yasuhiko Nagano (eds.) Current Issues in Sino-Tibetan Linguistics. Osaka: The organizing Committee, The 26th International Conference on Sino-Tibetan Languages and Linguistics. Breton, Roland J.-L. 1977. Atlas of the Languages and Ethnic Communities of South Asia. New Delhi: Sage Publications. Burling, Robbins. 1959. ‘Proto-Bodo’, Language ( Journal of the Linguistic Society of America) 35: 433–453. ——. 1961. A Garo Grammar. Poona: Deccan College Post-Graduate and Research Institute. ——. 1981. ‘Garo spelling and Garo phonology’, Linguistics of the Tibeto-Burman Area 6 (1): 61–81. ——. 1983. ‘The Sal languages’, Linguistics of the Tibeto-Burman Area 7 (2): 1–31. ——. 1984. ‘Noun compounding in Garo’, Linguistics of the Tibeto-Burman Area 8 (1): 14–42. ——. 1992. ‘Garo as a minimal tone language’, Linguistics of the Tibeto-Burman Area 15 (2): 33–51. Burton-Page, J. 1955. ‘An analysis of the syllable in Boro’, Indian Linguistics ( Journal of the Linguistic Society of India, incorporating the Indian Philological Association) 16: 334–344. Comrie, Bernard. 1985. Tense.
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