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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. Around 1.4 billion people speak a Sino-Tibetan language. 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 Kra–Dai languages, are a language family in mainland Southeast Asia, southern China, and northeastern India. All languages in the family are tonal, including Thai and Lao, the national languages of Thailand and Laos, respectively. Around 93 million people speak Kra–Dai languages; 60% of those speak Thai. Ethnologue lists 95 languages in the family, with 62 of these being in the Tai branch.
The Bai language is a language spoken in China, primarily in Yunnan Province, by the Bai people. The language has over a million speakers and is divided into three or four main dialects. Bai syllables are always open, with a rich set of vowels and eight tones. The tones are divided into two groups with modal and non-modal phonation. There is a small amount of traditional literature written with Chinese characters, Bowen (僰文), as well as a number of recent publications printed with a recently standardized system of romanisation using the Latin alphabet.
The Nung or Nungish languages are a poorly described family of uncertain affiliation within the Sino-Tibetan languages spoken in Yunnan, China and Burma. They include:
The Burmish languages are a subgroup of the Sino-Tibetan languages consisting of Burmese as well as non-literary languages spoken across Myanmar and South China such as Achang, Lhao Vo, Lashi, and Zaiwa.
Gong Hwang-cherng (1934–2010) was a Taiwanese linguist who specialized in Sino-Tibetan comparative linguistics and the phonetic reconstruction of Tangut and Old Chinese.
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.
Sino-Austronesian or Sino-Tibetan-Austronesian is a proposed language family suggested by Laurent Sagart in 1990. Using reconstructions of Old Chinese, Sagart argued that the Austronesian languages are related to the Sinitic languages phonologically, lexically and morphologically. Sagart later accepted the Sino-Tibetan languages as a valid group and extended his proposal to include the rest of Sino-Tibetan. He also placed the Tai–Kadai languages within the Austronesian family as a sister branch of Malayo-Polynesian. The proposal has been largely rejected by other linguists who argue that the similarities between Austronesian and Sino-Tibetan more likely arose from contact rather than being genetic.
Proto-Hmong–Mien (PHM), also known as Proto-Miao–Yao, is the reconstructed ancestor of the Hmong–Mien languages. Lower-level reconstructions include Proto-Hmongic and Proto-Mienic.
Scholars have attempted to reconstruct the phonology of Old Chinese from documentary evidence. Although the writing system does not describe sounds directly, shared phonetic components of the most ancient Chinese characters are believed to link words that were pronounced similarly at that time. The oldest surviving Chinese verse, in the Classic of Poetry (Shijing), shows which words rhymed in that period. Scholars have compared these bodies of contemporary evidence with the much later Middle Chinese reading pronunciations listed in the Qieyun rime dictionary published in 601 AD, though this falls short of a phonemic analysis. Supplementary evidence has been drawn from cognates in other Sino-Tibetan languages and in Min Chinese, which split off before the Middle Chinese period, Chinese transcriptions of foreign names, and early borrowings from and by neighbouring languages such as Hmong–Mien, Tai and Tocharian languages.
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.
Caijia is an endangered Sino-Tibetan language spoken in an area centred on Bijie, in the west of the Chinese province of Guizhou. It was first documented by Chinese researchers in the 1980s. It has been described by different authors as a relative of Bai or an early split from Old Chinese. The autonym is. According to Lu (2022), Caijia speakers in Xingfa 兴发乡, Hezhang County refer to their language as.
Although Old Chinese is known from written records beginning around 1200 BC, the logographic script provides much more indirect and partial information about the pronunciation of the language than alphabetic systems used elsewhere. Several authors have produced reconstructions of Old Chinese phonology, beginning with the Swedish sinologist Bernhard Karlgren in the 1940s and continuing to the present day. The method introduced by Karlgren is unique, comparing categories implied by ancient rhyming practice and the structure of Chinese characters with descriptions in medieval rhyme dictionaries, though more recent approaches have also incorporated other kinds of evidence.
The Greater Bai, Macro-Bai or simply Bai languages are a putative group of Sino-Tibetan languages proposed in 2010 by the linguist Zhengzhang, who argued that Bai and Caijia are sister languages. In contrast, Sagart (2011) argues that Caijia and the Waxiang language of northwestern Hunan constitute an early split off from Old Chinese. Additionally, Longjia and Luren are two extinct languages of western Guizhou closely related to Caijia.
Longjia is a Sino-Tibetan language of Guizhou, China related to Caijia and Luren. Longjia may already be extinct.
Lu, or Luren (卢人), is an extinct Sino-Tibetan language of Guizhou, China. The Luren language may have been extinct since the 1960s.
Proto-Sino-Tibetan (PST) is the hypothetical linguistic reconstruction of the Sino-Tibetan proto-language and the common ancestor of all languages in it, including the Sinitic languages, the Tibetic languages, Yi, Bai, Burmese, Karen, Tangut, and Naga. Paul K. Benedict (1972) placed a particular emphasis on Old Chinese, Classical Tibetan, Jingpho, Written Burmese, Garo, and Mizo in his discussion of Proto-Sino-Tibetan.
Jackson T.-S. Sun, also known as Jackson Tianshin Sun, is a Taiwanese linguist working on languages of the Sino-Tibetan and Austroasiatic families. He is best known for his pioneering documentation and historical-comparative work in Tani, Rgyalrongic, and Tibetic languages. Sun is a research fellow at Academia Sinica in Taipei, Taiwan.
Yu Min was an influential Chinese linguist, a 1940 graduate of the Fu Jen Catholic University, Chinese Department, a former professor of Yenching University, and professor of Beijing Normal University. His primary research areas were Chinese historical linguistics, Sino-Tibetan comparison, the study of Sanskrit in Chinese transcription. His collected writings were published posthumously in 1999.
References
- ↑ Curriculum Vitae [ dead link ], William H. Baxter.
- ↑ Baxter, William H. (1992), A Handbook of Old Chinese Phonology, Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, ISBN 978-3-11-012324-1.
- ↑ Baxter, William; Sagart, Laurent (2014). Old Chinese: A New Reconstruction. Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0-19-994537-5.
- ↑ Baxter, William H.; Sagart, Lauent. "The Baxter–Sagart reconstruction of Old Chinese (version 1.1, 20 September 2014)" . Retrieved 2015-02-04.
- ↑ "Leonard Bloomfield Book Award Previous Holders" . Retrieved 8 March 2017.
