内容摘要：Sino-Tibetan(ST)is one of the largest language families in the world, with more first-language speakers than even Indo-European.The more than 1.1 billion speakers of Sinitic(the Chinese dialects)constitute the world's largest speech community.
关键词：Language;Family;Chinese;speakers;Karenic
作者简介：
Sino-Tibetan (ST) is one of the largest language families in the world, with more first-language speakers than even Indo-European. The more than 1.1 billion speakers of Sinitic (the Chinese dialects) constitute the world's largest speech community. ST includes both the Sinitic and the Tibeto-Burman languages. Most scholars in China today take an even broader view of ST (calledHàn-Zàngin Mandarin), including not only these two branches, but Tai (= "Daic") and Hmong-Mien (= Miao-Yao) as well. Even taking ST in its narrower sense, we are dealing with a highly differentiated language family of formidable scope, complexity, and time-depth. Tibeto-Burman (TB) comprises hundreds of languages besides Tibetan and Burmese, spread over a vast geographical area (China, India, the Himalayan region, peninsular SE Asia).
Homeland and time-depth of Sino-Tibetan
About Sino-Tibetan linguistics
The components of Sino-Tibetan
The Chinese Component
The Tibeto-Burman Component
Tibeto-Burman languages and their subgrouping
Language names
Subgrouping of Tibeto-Burman
Kamarupan
Himalayish
Qiangic
Kachinic
Lolo-Burmese
Karenic
Homeland and time-depth of Sino-Tibetan
The Proto-Sino-Tibetan (PST) homeland seems to have been somewhere on the Himalayan plateau, where the great rivers of East and Southeast Asia (including the Yellow, Yangtze, Mekong, Brahmaputra, Salween, and Irrawaddy) have their source. The time of hypothetical ST unity, when the Proto-Han (= Proto-Chinese) and Proto-Tibeto-Burman (PTB) peoples formed a relatively undifferentiated linguistic community, must have been at least as remote as the Proto-Indo-European period, perhaps around 4000 B.C.
The TB peoples slowly fanned outward along these river valleys, but only in the middle of the first millennium A.D. did they penetrate into peninsular Southeast Asia, where speakers of Austronesian (=Malayo-Polynesian) and Mon-Khmer (Austroasiatic) languages had already established themselves by prehistoric times. The Tai peoples began filtering down from the north at about the same time as the TB's. The most recent arrivals to the area south of China have been the Hmong-Mien (Miao-Yao), most of whom still live in China itself.
About Sino-Tibetan linguistics
The field of ST linguistics is only about 50 years old, and has been a flourishing object of inquiry for only the past 25. Scholars have been trying since the mid-19th century to situate Chinese in a wider genetic context. As the relationships between Chinese and Tibetan on the one hand, and Tibetan and Burmese on the other became obvious, vague notions of an "Indo-Chinese" family (Hodgson 1853, Conrady 1896) began to crystallize. The termSino-Tibetanseems to have been used first by R. Shafer (1939-41, 1966/67), who conceived of it as a tripartite linguistic stock comprising Chinese, Tibeto-Burman (TB), and Tai (= "Daic"). Much of the area in which TB languages are spoken is still virtually inaccessible for linguistic fieldwork, at least by foreign scholars (NE India, Burma, Yunnan, Sichuan, Tibet, Laos, Vietnam). Only in Thailand and Nepal has vigorous international fieldwork been carried on since the 1960's.
