Sino-Tibetan languages
| Sino-Tibetan | |||
|---|---|---|---|
| Trans-Himalayan | |||
| Geographic distribution | South Asia, East Asia, North Asia, Southeast Asia | ||
| Linguistic classification | One of the world's primary language families | ||
| Proto-language | Proto-Sino-Tibetan | ||
| Subdivisions | Some 40 well-known subgroups, of which those with the most speakers are: | ||
| Language codes | |||
| ISO 639-2 / 5 | sit | ||
| Linguasphere | 79- (phylozone) | ||
| Glottolog | sino1245 | ||
 Major branches of Sino-Tibetan:
| |||
The Sino-Tibetan or Trans-Himalayan languages are a language family spoken in Asia. The family includes Chinese, the Tibeto-Burman languages, and about 250 other languages of East Asia. Kra-Dai languages and Hmong–Mien languages are also sometimes included.
The largest language group in this family is the Chinese languages, with more than 1.3 billion native speakers. It also has the oldest known writing in the family, using hanzi, going back to the Jiahu symbols in 6600 BC.[source?]
All of these languages descend from a single proto-language. Researchers are still working to understand what this language may have sounded like.
Origins
[change | change source]Some researchers think the Sino-Tibetan languages most likely came from the Huanghe region of north-central China (Zhongyuan). Others think they came from farther west, in southwest China or even Northeast India.
Zhang et al. (2019) studied 109 Sino-Tibetan languages and suggested that the Sino-Tibetan homeland was in northern China near the Huanghe basin. The study found that the Sinitic languages and the Tibeto-Burman languages split about 4,200 to 7,800 years ago, with an average estimate of about 5,900 years ago. This has been connected with the expansion of the Yangshao culture and Majiayao culture.[1] Other researchers, using different data, have reached similar conclusions. They suggest an origin about 7,200 years ago, around the time of the Cishan and early Yangshao culture.[2]
Example languages
[change | change source]- The Qiang language is spoken in Gansu. It is an agglutinative language, like other Altaic languages.
- Balti is the largest Sino-Tibetan language in Pakistan. It has about 500,000 speakers.
- Meitei (Manipuri language) is the most widely spoken Sino-Tibetan language in India. Several other Sino-Tibetan languages are also spoken in Northeast India.
- Tibetan is spoken by about 6 million people.
- Burmese is the language of Myanmar and is spoken by about 33 million people.
Evolution of language
[change | change source]Proto-Chinese and Proto-Tibeto-Burman had many different prefixes and suffixes. Proto-Chinese changed into Old Chinese around the time of the Shang Dynasty. This can be seen in the Book of Songs. Nouns, verbs, and modifiers depended on affixes at the beginnings or ends of words, such as *s-, *p-, and *-k.[3][4] After the Warring States period in China, Old Chinese started using tones.[5] The suffix *-s was also used.
The usual word order in Sino-Tibetan languages is subject-object-verb. Modern Chinese, Bai, Karenic, and Mruic are exceptions.
Subject-object-verb order was likely the original word order.[6][7] Over time, Chinese changed to subject–verb–object order.[6] However, Chinese differs from almost all other verb-object languages because it places relative clauses before the nouns they describe.[8]
Relation to other language families
[change | change source]Sino-Tibetan may be related to the Altaic languages. Mang Mulin, a Mongolian linguistics professor at Inner Mongolia Normal University, began studying the origin of Mongolian words in the late 1970s.[9]
There are possible links between Sino-Tibetan, Austroasiatic languages from South China, and Austronesian languages from Taiwan.
There may also be connections between Chinese and the native languages of the Americas (Na-Dene) and Western Eurasia (Yeniseian).
Related pages
[change | change source]References
[change | change source]- ↑ Zhang, Meng-han (张梦翰); Yan, Shi (严实); Pan, Wuyun (潘悟云); & Jin, Li (金力). (2019). Phylogenetic evidence for Sino-Tibetan origin in northern China in the Late Neolithic. Nature, 569, 112–115. doi:10.1038/s41586-019-1153-z
- ↑ Sagart, Laurent, Guillaume Jacques, Yunfan Lai, Robin Ryder, Valentin Thouzeau, Simon J. Greenhill, and Johann-Mattis List (2019): Dated language phylogenies shed light on the history of Sino-Tibetan[permanent dead link]. PNAS. doi:10.1073/pnas.1817972116
- ↑ Wu (1987).
- ↑ 吴, 安其. "汉藏语使动和完成体前缀的残存与同源的动词词根". Archived from the original on 2020-08-15. Retrieved 2019-07-24.
- ↑ Wang (1980), p. 221.
- 1 2 Dryer (2003), pp. 43–45.
- ↑ DeLancey, Scott. "On the origins of Sinitic". CiteSeerX 10.1.1.637.1357.
{{cite web}}: Cite uses deprecated parameter|citeseerx=(help); Missing or empty|url=(help) - ↑ Dryer (2003), pp. 50.
- ↑ "Han-Tibetan, Altaic Languages "Close Relatives"". [www.china.org.cn. Retrieved 2019-07-24).
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