Sino-Tibetan languages?

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Sino-Tibetan languages form a language family of about 250 languages of East Asia, second only to Indo-European in terms of the number of speakers. Many of the languages are tonal, which however is usually considered to be an areal feature rather than evidence of a genealogical relationship. Chinese and Tibetan, for example, were not tonal in their earlier stages. As another example, some word pairs that can only be distinguished by tone in mainstream Mandarin have different vowels or consonants in some of the Mandarin "dialects", suggesting that tone is needed, or at least its role is reinforced, because words that might have been pronounced differently in a parent language now require tone to differentiate.

A few scholars such as Christopher I. Beckwith, Roy A. Miller, and W. S. Coblin question whether the Sinitic languages are related to Tibeto-Burman. However, similar arguments can be made for all branches of the family. No regular sound laws relating the Sino-Tibetan (or Tibeto-Burman) languages have been found. Thus, although the Sino-Tibetan hypothesis enjoys widespread support, it is not as well demonstrated as the Indo-European family. Other linguists, especially in China, believe the Tai-Kadai and Hmong-Mien languages belong in Sino-Tibetan, though this view has fallen out of favor in the West, with the similarities being cred to borrowings and areal features.

James Matisoff's widely accepted classification is as follows:

Sino-Tibetan (Matisoff)

• Chinese
• Tibeto-Burman
  • Kamarupan
    • Kuki-Chin-Naga
    • Abor-Miri-Dafla
    • Bodoa href="Garo_03tribe04.html" title="Garo (tribe)">Garo
  • Himalayish
    • Maha-Kiranti (includes Newari, Magar, Rai))
    • Tibeto-Kinauri (includes Tibetan, Lepcha)
  • Qiangic
  • Jingpho-Nungish-Luish
    • Kachinic (Jingpho)
    • Nungish
    • Luish
  • Loloa href="Burmese_language.html" title="Burmese language">Burmesea href="Nakhi.html" title="Nakhi">Naxi
  • Karenic
  • Baic

It may be that Chinese owes its traditional priviledged place in this classification to cultural rather than linguitic criteria, much as Semitic was once considered a primary branch of a "Hamito-Semitic" family; and just as Semitic was later demoted to a sub-branch of Afro-Asiatic, several recent classifications have demoted Chinese to a sub-branch of Tibeto-Burman. The following classification by George van Driem is one. The essential part of this is called the Sino-Bodic hypothesis, for it proposes that the closest relatives of Chinese are the Bodic languages such as Tibetan.

Tibeto-Burman (van Driem)

• Brahmaputran
  • Dhimal
  • Bodooch (includes Tripuri, Garo)
  • Konyak (includes Nocte)
  • Kachinic (includes Jingpo)
• Southern Tibeto-Burman
  • Loloa href="Burmese_language.html" title="Burmese language">Burmese
  • Karenic
• Sino-Bodic
  • Sinitic (Chinese)
  • Bodish-Himalayish (includes Tibetan)
  • Kirantic
  • Tamangic
  • (several isolates within Sino-Bodic)
• A number of other small families and isolates as primary branches of Tibeto-Burman
  (Newari, Qiang, Nung, Magar, etc.)

The relationships of the "Kuki-Naga" languages (Kuki, Mizo, Manipuri, etc.), both amongst each other and to the other Tibeto-Burman languages, remain unclear, so the van Driem classification does not support Matisoff's Kamarupan hypothesis above.

Roger Blench comments that

it is hard not to suspect that Chinese does not have the distinct status accorded it by the Matisoffian model, but whatever evidence exists for other schemas has failed to win significant assent from the scholarly community. The second major issue is the status of the problematic ‘remnant’ languages of the Himalaya, Gongduk, Magaric and others. Either these are early branchings from the Sino-Tibetan tree or they are ‘Kusundic’, remnants of earlier language phyla that have been Sino-Tibetanised.

The Kusunda language of western Nepal is often thought to a remnant of the pre-Tibeto-Burman indigenous languages of the southern Himalayas. Kusunda is thought to be on the verge of extinction, if not extinct.

External links

• Tibeto-Burman languages and their subgrouping - James Matisoff
• Sino-Bodic - George van Driem
• Mother Tongue newsletter description of van Driem's proposed reordering of the Sino-Tibetan language group into a new Tibeto-Burman classification.

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