Sino-Tibetan languages Huba Bartos http://budling.nytud.hu/~bartos/kurzus/kinai.html The Sino-Tibetan language family 2nd largest lg. family (number of native speakers; 2nd only to Indo-European) cca. 350–400 lg’s (9 has >1 million speakers) longer written tradition: Chinese ( >3000 yrs), Tibetan (cca. 1300 yrs), Burmese (cca. 900 yrs) many uncertainties in classification (← few of these lg’s have script, and even those are often not phonetic + a mix of genetic vs. areal relations) Geographical distribution Source: WALS Geographical distribution Source: G. Jacques Language families in East Asia Sino-Tibetan Austroasiatic Austronesian Tai-Kadai Hmong-Mien Source: G. Jacques … and the Altaic languages Source: G. Jacques Speakers of ST languages The largest ST languages : – Chinese: 1.3 billion – Burmese: 42 million – Lolo / Yi ( 彝): 7 million – Tibetan: 6 million – Karen: 5 million – Dzongkha (Bhutanese): 1.5 million – Bodo: 1.5 million – Naga: 1.2 million – Jingphaw: 1 million A little bit of history of science The development of the Sino-Tibetan hypothesis Early errors John C. Leyden (1808): Indo-Chinese family – lg’s of the region spanning from India to China, as well as lg’s of the ‘Eastern Seas’ Max Müller (1855): Turanic theory (Ural-Altaic + Dravidian ( + Caucasian?) lg’s ( + Chinese?) ( + Japanese?)) – mostly relying on typological features (rather than a comparative basis) – (Turanic = ’the rest’: Eurasian lg’s = Semitic (Afroasiatic) + Aryan (Indo-European) + Turanic ) Early moves in the right direction Julius Heinrich Klaproth (1823): Tibetan and Chinese are close relatives, but Vietnamese and Thai do not belong to the same family key difficulty: Chinese writing has never been consistently phonetic therefore: it tells us next to nothing about Old and Proto-Chinese morphology, and its potential complexity → difficult to support any genealogical hypotheses Early moves in the right direction And yet: C.R. Lepsius (1861): Old Chinese could have certain morphological traits (affixes) that have disappeared by now (and may, e.g., be the predecessors of tones) Wilhelm Grube (1881): Old Chinese probably had affixal elements Tibeto-Burman Nathan Brown (1854): the Karen lg. is genetically related to Tibetan, Burmese, Jinghpaw, and other Himalayan lg’s James R. Logan (1859): Tibeto-Burman lg family (including Karen) Indo-Chinese → Sino- Tibetan August Conrady (1896): Indo-Chinese = Tibeto-Burman + Chinese + Kadai – attempted to prove this hypothesis on grounds of grammar similarities Jean Przyluski (1924): „sino-tibétain” (the French translation of the term „Indo-Chinese” ) – Hmong-Mien lg’s also included (on the Kadai (’Sino-Daic’) branch) Indo-Chinese → Sino- Tibetan → „Sino-Tibetan” = rebranded and corrected „Indo-Chinese” (?) Indo-Chinese = Sino-Tibetan Sino-Thai Tibeto-Burman Or (without Karen) Sino-Daic Tai-Kadai Chinese (incl.: Hmong-Mien) Robert Shafer (1893-1973?) worked in the Sino-Tibetan philology project at UC Berkeley Shafer was NOT a trained comparative linguist, but spent enormous efforts on classifying a vast body of data from/on ST-languages Robert Shafer Shafer (1966–1974): hesitations concerning the primary branches, as well as the status of the Kadai langauges Sino-Tibetan Chinese Daic Bodic Burmese Baric Karen Robert Shafer Shafer (1966–1974): hesitations concerning the primary branches, as well as the status of the Kadai langauges Sino-Tibetan Chinese Tibeto-Burman Daic Robert Shafer Old Chinese Written Tib. Written Brm. meaning *ngag 我 nga Na ‘I' *s´m 三 gsum su^m ‘three' *ngag 五 lnga Na^ ‘five' *mj´k 目 mig mjak ‘eye' *ngjag 鱼 nya Na^ ‘fish' *khwin 犬 khyi khwe ‘dog' *srat 杀 bsat sat ‘kill' *sjin 薪 shing sac ‘firewood' *mjing 名 ming ´-man) ‘name’ *khag 苦 kha kha^ ‘bitter' Beyond cognate words: structural similarities – many of these lg’s are tonal (e.g., Chinese, Lhasa Tibetan, Burmese) – typically monosyllabic and morphologically analitic (isolating) – frequent use of classsifiers – SVO (Chin., Karen, Bai) vs. SOV (all other TB) BUT: how much of this is due to areal influences? AND: whence the lack of systematic sound correspondences? Indosphere ~ Sinosphere division of the TB-branch by typological and cultural traits: Indosphere vs. Sinosphere (acc. to the dominance of Indo-Aryan vs. Chinese languages) Indosphere Sinosphere synthetic/agglutinative analytic/isolating polisyllabicity monosyllabicity non-tonal tonal Shafer’s ”heritage” Paul K. Benedict (1941/1972, 1976): Sino-Tibetan ST = Chinese + Tibeto- Burman/Tibeto-Karen – expels the Kadai lg’s from Tibeto-Karen Chinese ST; problems of the family tree (Stammbaum) representation – basis of the currently Tibeto-Burman Karen most widely known and accepted hypothesis Shafer’s ”heritage” Paul K. Benedict (1941/1972, 1976): Sino-Tibetan ST = Chinese + Tibeto- Burman/Tibeto-Karen – expels the Kadai lg’s from Tibeto-Burman Chinese ST; problems of the family tree (Stammbaum) representation – basis of the currently most widely known and accepted hypothesis But what do the Chinese say? (Li Fang-Kuei (李方桂), Luo Changpei (罗常培)) The great summary of the ST- hypothesis: Matisoff / STEDT James A. Matisoff (2003) Proto-Sino-Tibetan homeland: on the Himalayan Plateau, in the source region of the great rivers (Huanghe, Yangtze, Mekong, Brahmaputra, Salween, Irrawaddy), up to cca. 4000 STEDT project: http://stedt.berkeley.edu/index.html The great summary of the ST- hypothesis: Matisoff / STEDT homeland ? The great summary of the ST- hypothesis: Matisoff / STEDT STEDT and the age of great changes reconstruction of Old Chinese: a revision of Karlgren’s system (Pulleyblank, Jaxontov, Li Fang-Kuei, Coblin, Baxter, …) exploration of Proto-ST morphology (Sagart, Baxter) on the TB side: fieldwork → significant body of new data, new lg descriptions STEDT and the age of great changes → Benedict’s system can and must be thoroughly revised ° results from other fields and disciplines must be added / taken into consideration: archeology, genetics → a whole new interdisciplinary approach Some recent proposals Nicholas Bodman (1980): Tibetan is a closer relative of Chinese than of other Himalayan and Burman languages → Sino-Himalayan hypothesis Sino-Himalayan Tibeto-Burman Sino-Tibetan (Himalayan) Chinese Tibetan Some recent proposals Sergei A. Starostin (1994): the closest relatives of Chinese within TB are Kiranti (Bodic etc.) lg’s → Sino-Kiranti hypothesis Sino-Tibetan Sino-Kiranti Tibeto-Burman Chinese Kiranti Some recent proposals Starostin redux (2005): under the influence of Nostratic theory – Sino-Dené-Caucasian Variations on the Sino-Bodic theme: Van Driem primary basis: newly reconstructed OC and well described TB morphological patterns (Van Driem 1997) lexicostatistic, archeological and genetic evidence is sought to support/complement the linguistic model (Van Driem 1999) Variations on the Sino-Bodic theme: Van Driem Proto-TB homeland: in Sichuan, up to about 10.000 B.C. PTB Western TB Eastern TB NorthernTB Southern TB Eastern neolithic c. of India NW-TB NE-TB Lolo-Burmese, Majiayao neolithic c. Yangshao neol. c. Karen, Qiangic Bodic Sinitic Variations on the Sino-Bodic theme: Van Driem Van Driem v2.0 (2011): Trans- Himalayan ”fallen leaves” Sino-Austronesian: Sagart Laurent Sagart (1993, 1995, 2005): seeks genetic relation with Austronesian langauges – v1.0: Sino-Austronesian + remote/ questioned link b/w Chinese and TB – v1.5: Sino – Tibeto-Burman – Austronesian – v2.0: ‘Tibeto-Burmo – Austronesian’ (?) Sino-Austronesian: Sagart Proto- Old Chinese Tibeto-Burman meaning Austronesian *punuq *nuk 脑 (s-)nuk ‘brain’ *qiCeluR *c ´-lo(r?) 卵 twiy ‘egg’ *-kut *m-khut 掘 kot (Jingphaw ) ‘dig’ *nunux *nok 乳 nuw ‘breast’ *uRung *k-rok 角 rung ‘horn’ *kurung *k ´-rong 笼 krungH ‘cage’ Sino-Austronesian: Sagart And a denial… Ch. Beckwith: – Chinese is NOT related to Tibeto-Burman at all – absence of regular sound correspondences – no reconstructible common morphology – shared lexical items: not cognates but borrowings (Chinese → TB) Literature Beckwith, Ch. 2002. The Sino-Tibetan problem, in: Beckwith, Ch. Medieval Tibeto- Burman languages , Brill, Leiden, pp. 113–158 Benedict, P.K. 1972. Sino-Tibetan: A Conspectus (Cambridge UP, Cambridge, UK) van Driem, G. 1997. Sino-Bodic. Bulletin of the SOAS 60: 455-488. van Driem, G. 1999. A new theory on the origin of Chinese. Indo-Pacific Prehistory Association Bulletin 18: 43-58. van Driem, G. 2011. The Trans-Himalayan Phylum and its Implications for Population Prehistory. Communication on Contemporary Anthropology, 2011, 5, 135-142/ e20 Li Fang-Kuei 1973. 'Languages and Dialects of China'. Journal of Chinese Linguistics 1: 1-13 Ma Xueliang 1991. A General Introduction to Sino-Tibetan Languages . (Beijing University Press, Beijing) Matisoff, J.A. 2003. Handbook of Proto-Tibeto-Burman (Univ. of California Press, L.A.) Shafer, R. 1966-1974. Introduction to Sino-Tibetan I-IV. (Harrassowitz, Wiesbaden) Sagart, L. 1993. Chinese and Austronesian: Evidence for a genetic relationship. Journal of Chinese Linguistics , 21(1): 1–62. Sagart, L. 2005. Sino-Tibetan-Austronesian: an updated and improved argument. In: L. Sagart, R.M. Blench and A. Sanchez-Mazas (szerk.) The Peopling of East Asia:Putting Together Archaeology, Linguistics and Genetics (RoutledgeCurzon, London) Thurgood, G. & R. LaPolla (eds.) 2006. The Sino-Tibetan Languages. (Routledge, London).