Related Research Articles
Sino-Tibetan, also cited as Trans-Himalayan in a few sources, is a family of more than 400 languages, second only to Indo-European in number of native speakers. The vast majority of these are the 1.3 billion native speakers of Sinitic languages. Other Sino-Tibetan languages with large numbers of speakers include Burmese and the Tibetic languages. Other languages of the family are spoken in the Himalayas, the Southeast Asian Massif, and the eastern edge of the Tibetan Plateau. Most of these have small speech communities in remote mountain areas, and as such are poorly documented.
The Tangut people were a Sino-Tibetan people that founded and inhabited the Western Xia dynasty. The group initially lived under Tuyuhun authority, but later submitted to the Tang dynasty. After the collapse of Tang dynasty, the Tanguts established the Western Xia. They spoke the Tangut language, which was previously believed to be one of the Qiangic languages or Yi languages which belong to the Tibeto-Burman family." Phylogenetic and historical linguistic accounts, however, reveal that Tangut belonged instead to the Gyalrongic branch of Tibeto-Burman. Western Xia was annihilated by the Mongol Empire in 1227, most of its written records and architecture were destroyed. Today the Tangut language and its unique script are extinct, only fragments of Tangut literature remain.
The Hongshan culture was a Neolithic culture in the West Liao river basin in northeast China. Hongshan sites have been found in an area stretching from Inner Mongolia to Liaoning, and dated from about 4700 to 2900 BC.
Tangut is an extinct language in the Sino-Tibetan language family.
Qiangic is a group of related languages within the Sino-Tibetan language family. They are spoken mainly in Southwest China, including Sichuan and northern Yunnan. Most Qiangic languages are distributed in the prefectures of Ngawa, Garzê, Ya'an and Liangshan in Sichuan with some in Northern Yunnan as well.
In historical linguistics, the history of the Chinese language includes the various changes over time of the Chinese language in its various incarnations. Earliest known origins of the Chinese language date back 4,500 years. Modern day characters had not been introduced until centuries later, leaving many components of Chinese language quite obscure and unknown.
The Gyalrongic languages constitute a branch of the Qiangic languages of Sino-Tibetan, but some propose that it may be part of a larger Rung languages group and do not consider it to be particularly closely related to Qiangic but suggest that similarities between Gyalrongic and Qiangic may be from areal influence. However, other work suggests that Qiangic as a whole may in fact be paraphyletic, with the only commonalities of the supposed "branch" being shared archaisms and areal features that were encouraged by language contact. Jacques & Michaud (2011) propose that Qiangic including Gyalrongic may belong to a larger Burmo-Qiangic group based on some lexical innovations.
The Tibeto-Burman languages are the non-Sinitic members of the Sino-Tibetan language family, over 400 of which are spoken throughout the Southeast Asian Massif ("Zomia") as well as parts of East Asia and South Asia. Around 60 million people speak Tibeto-Burman languages. The name derives from the most widely spoken of these languages, Burmese and the Tibetic languages, which 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.
Laurent Sagart is a senior researcher at the Centre de recherches linguistiques sur l'Asie orientale unit of the French National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS).
Guillaume Jacques is a French linguist who specializes in the study of Sino-Tibetan languages: Old Chinese, Tangut, Tibetan, Gyalrongic and Kiranti languages. He also performs research on the Algonquian and Siouan language families, and publishes about languages of other families such as Breton. His case studies in historical phonology are set in the framework of panchronic phonology, aiming to formulate generalizations about sound change that are independent of any particular language or language group.
Proto-Tibeto-Burman is the reconstructed ancestor of the Tibeto-Burman languages, that is, the Sino-Tibetan languages, except for Chinese. An initial reconstruction was produced by Paul K. Benedict and since refined by James Matisoff. Several other researchers argue that the Tibeto-Burman languages sans Chinese do not constitute a monophyletic group within Sino-Tibetan, and therefore that Proto-Tibeto-Burman was the same language as Proto-Sino-Tibetan.
Khroskyabs is a Gyalrongic language of China. It is called Guanyinqiao in Ethnologue after a town in western Sichuan where one dialect of the language is spoken, Thugsrje Chenbo. It has been referred to as Lavrung in previous publications.
Horpa are a cluster of closely related Gyalrongic languages of China. Horpa is better understood as a cluster of closely related yet unintelligible dialect groups/languages closely related to Horpa Shangzhai or Stodsde skad. The term Stodsde skad is a Tibetan name meaning "language of the upper village".
Gyalrong or rGyalrong, also rendered Jiarong, or sometimes Gyarung, is a subbranch of the Gyalrongic languages spoken by the Gyalrong people in Western Sichuan, China. Lai et al. (2020) refer to this group of languages as East Gyalrongic.
The Burmo-Qiangic or Eastern Tibeto-Burman languages are a proposed family of Sino-Tibetan languages spoken in Southwest China and Myanmar. It consists of the Lolo-Burmese and Qiangic branches, including the extinct Tangut language.
The Rung languages are a proposed branch of Sino-Tibetan languages. The branch was proposed by Randy LaPolla on the basis of morphological evidence such as pronominal paradigms. However, Guillaume Jacques and Thomas Pellard (2021) argues that these languages do not constitute a monophyly based on recent phylogenetic studies and on a thorough investigation of shared lexical innovations.
Simon James Greenhill is a New Zealand scientist who works on the application of quantitative methods to the study of cultural evolution and human prehistory. He is well known for creating and building various linguistics databases, including the Austronesian Basic Vocabulary Database, TransNewGuinea.org, Pulotu, and many others. In addition to Austronesian, he has contributed to the study of the phylogeny of many language families, including Dravidian and Sino-Tibetan.
The farming/language dispersal hypothesis proposes that many of the largest language families in the world dispersed along with the expansion of agriculture. This hypothesis was proposed by archaeologists Peter Bellwood and Colin Renfrew. It has been widely debated and archaeologists, linguists, and geneticists often disagree with all or part of the hypothesis.
Johann-Mattis List is a German scientist. He is known for his work on quantitative comparative linguistics. List is currently professor at the University of Passau, Germany, where he leads the Chair of Multilingual Computational Linguistics.
References
- 1 2 Lai, Yunfan; Gong, Xun; Gates, Jesse P.; Jacques, Guillaume (2020-12-01). "Tangut as a West Gyalrongic language". Folia Linguistica. Walter de Gruyter GmbH. 54 (s41–s1): 171–203. doi:10.1515/flih-2020-0006. ISSN 1614-7308.
- ↑ Sagart, Laurent; Jacques, Guillaume; Lai, Yunfan; Ryder, Robin; Thouzeau, Valentin; Greenhill, Simon J.; List, Johann-Mattis (2019), "Dated language phylogenies shed light on the history of Sino-Tibetan", Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 116 (21): 10317–10322, doi: 10.1073/pnas.1817972116 , PMC 6534992 , PMID 31061123.
- "Origin of Sino-Tibetan language family revealed by new research". ScienceDaily (Press release). May 6, 2019.
- Guillaume Jacques; Yunfan Lai; Anton Antonov; Lobsang Nima. 2017. "Stau (Ergong, Horpa)." In Graham Thurgood and Randy J. LaPolla (eds.), The Sino-Tibetan Languages, 597–613. London & New York: Routledge.
Sino-Tibetan branches | |||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Western Himalayas (Himachal, Uttarakhand, Nepal, Sikkim) |
|  | |||
| Eastern Himalayas (Tibet, Bhutan, Arunachal) | |||||
| Myanmar and Indo-Burmese border |
| ||||
| East and Southeast Asia |
| ||||
| Dubious (possible isolates) (Arunachal) |
| ||||
| Proposed groupings | |||||
| Proto-languages | |||||
Italics indicates single languages that are also considered to be separate branches. | |||||
 | This Sino-Tibetan languages-related article is a stub. You can help Wikipedia by expanding it. |