| Tibeto-Burman | |
|---|---|
| Geographic distribution: |
Southeast Asia, East Asia, South Asia |
| Linguistic classification: | Sino-Tibetan
|
| Proto-language: | Proto-Tibeto-Burman |
| Subdivisions: |
Tujia (unclassified)
|
| ISO 639-5: | tbq |
The Tibeto-Burman languages are the non-Chinese members of the Sino-Tibetan language family, over 400 of which are spoken thoughout the highlands of southeast Asia, as well as lowland areas in Burma (Myanmar). The group is named after its most widely spoken members, Burmese (over 32 million speakers) and the Tibetan languages (over 8 million). Most of the other languages are spoken by much smaller communities, and many of them have not been described in detail. A widely cited taxonomy divides Sino-Tibetan into Sinitic and Tibeto-Burman branches, but other scholars deny that Tibeto-Burman comprises a monophyletic group.
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During the 18th century, several scholars had noticed parallels between Tibetan and Burmese, both languages with extensive literary traditions. Early in the following century, Brian Houghton Hodgson collected a wealth of data on the non-literary languages of the Himalayas and northeast India, noting that many of these were related to Tibetan and Burmese. Others identified related languages in the highlands of Southeast Asia and southwest China. The name "Tibeto-Burman" was first applied to this group in 1856 by James Richardson Logan, who added Karen in 1858.[1][2] Logan viewed the family as uniting the Gangetic and Lohitic branches of Max Müller's Turanian, a huge family consisting of all the Eurasian languages except the Semitic, Aryan (Indo-European) and Chinese languages. (Later writers would include Chinese within Turanian.) The third volume of the Linguistic Survey of India was devoted to the Tibeto-Burman languages of British India.
A larger family including Tibetan, Burmese and Chinese, but not Thai, Vietnamese or Mon, had been proposed by Julius Klaproth in 1823 on the basis of shared vocabulary.[3] In the late 19th century, a link between Tibeto-Burman and Chinese was recognized by several authors, including Ernst Kuhn in 1883 and August Conrady in 1896. The Tai languages were usually included, as they had vocabulary and typological features in common with Chinese. Jean Przyluski introduced the term sino-tibétain (Sino-Tibetan) as the title of his chapter on the group in Meillet and Cohen's Les Langues du Monde in 1924.[4]
The Tai languages have not been included in most Western accounts of Sino-Tibetan since the Second World War, though many Chinese linguists still include them. The link to Chinese is now accepted by most linguists, with a few exceptions such as Roy Andrew Miller and Christopher Beckwith.[5][6][7] More recent controversy has centred on the proposed primary branching of Sino-Tibetan into Chinese and Tibeto-Burman subgroups. In spite of the popularity of this classification, first proposed by Kuhn and Conrady, and also promoted by Paul Benedict (1972) and later James Matisoff, Tibeto-Burman has never been demonstrated to be a valid family in its own right:
The Sino-Tibetan [...] hypothesis entails that all Tibeto-Burman languages can be shown to have constituted a unity after Chinese split off, and that this must be demonstrable in the form of shared isoglosses, sound laws or morphological developments which define all of Tibeto-Burman as a unity as opposed to Sinitic. The innovations purportedly shared by all Tibeto-Burman subgroups except Chinese have never been demonstrated. In other words, no evidence has ever been adduced to support the rump ’Tibeto-Burman’ subgroup explicitly assumed in the Sino-Tibetan phylogenetic model propagated by Paul Benedict.—Van Driem 2001:316
George van Driem proposes, as did Robert Shafer in 1966, that Chinese not have a privileged position within the family. He further argues that the larger family ought to be called Tibeto-Burman.[8] He has not, however, been followed in this usage, and most linguists continue to use the term "Sino-Tibetan" regardless of the position they assume for Chinese within the family. Most treatments, moreover, continue to follow the Sinitic–Tibeto-Burman dichotomy of Benedict and Matisoff.
Most of the Tibeto-Burman languages are spoken in inaccessible mountain areas and many are unwritten, which has greatly hampered their study. It is generally much easier to identify a language as Tibeto-Burman than to determine its precise relationship with other languages of the group. The subgroupings that have been established with certainty number several dozen, ranging from well-studied groups of dozens of languages with millions of speakers to several isolates, some only newly discovered but in danger of extinction.[9] These subgroups are here surveyed on a geographical basis.
The southernmost group are the Karen languages, spoken by three million people on both sides of the Burma–Thailand border. They differ from all other Tibeto-Burman languages (except Bai) in having a subject–verb–object word order, attributed to contact with Tai–Kadai and Mon-Khmer languages.[10]
The most widely spoken Tibeto-Burman language is Burmese, the national language of Burma, with over 32 million speakers and a literary tradition dating from the 11th century. It is one of the Lolo–Burmese languages, an intensively studied and well-defined group comprising approximately 100 languages spoken in Burma and the highlands of Thailand, Laos, Vietnam and southwest China. Major languages include the Yi languages (or Lolo), with two million speakers in western Sichuan and northern Yunnan, the Akha–Hani languages, with two million speakers in southern Yunnan, eastern Burma, Laos and Vietnam, and Lisu and Lahu in Yunnan, northern Burma and northern Thailand. All languages of the Loloish subgroup show significant Mon–Khmer influence.[11]
The Tibeto-Burman languages of southwest China have been heavily influenced by Chinese over a long period, leaving their affiliations difficult to determine. The grouping of the Bai language, with one million speakers in Yunnan, is particularly controversial, with some workers suggesting that it is a sister language to Chinese. The Naxi language of northern Yunnan is usually included within Lolo–Burmese, though other scholars prefer to leave it unclassified.[12] The hills of northwest Sichuan are home to the small Qiangic and rGyal-rongic (or Jiarongic) groups of languages, which preserve many archaic features. The most easterly Tibeto-Burman language is Tujia, spoken in the Wuling Mountains on the borders of Hunan, Hubei, Guizhou and Chongqing.
Two historical languages are believed to be Tibeto-Burman, but their precise affiliation is uncertain. The Pyu language of central Burma in the first centuries CE is known from inscriptions using a variant of the Gupta script. The Tangut language of the 12th century Western Xia dynasty of northern China is preserved in numerous texts written in the Chinese-inspired Tangut script.[13]
Over eight million people in the Tibetan Plateau and neighbouring areas in Baltistan, Ladakh, Nepal, Sikkim and Bhutan speak one of several related Tibetan languages. There is an extensive literature in Classical Tibetan dating from the 8th century. The Tibetan languages are usually grouped with the smaller East Bodish languages of Bhutan and Arunachal Pradesh as the Bodish group.
A wide variety of Tibeto-Burman languages are spoken on the southern slopes of the Himalayas. Sizable groups that have been identified are the West Himalayish languages of Himachal Pradesh and western Nepal, the Tamangic languages of western Nepal, including Tamang with one million speakers, and the Kiranti languages of eastern Nepal. The remaining groups are small, with several isolates. The Newari language (Nepal Bhasa) of central Nepal has a million speakers and a literature dating from the 12th century, and nearly a million people speak Magaric languages, but the rest have small speech communities. Other isolates and small groups in Nepal are Dura, Raji–Raute, Chepangic and Dhimalish. Lepcha is spoken from eastern Nepal to western Bhutan. Most of the languages of Bhutan are Bodish, but it also has three small isolates, Black Mountain Monpa, Lhokpu and Gongduk and a larger community of speakers of Tshangla. The languages of Arunachal Pradesh and adjacent areas of Tibet include the small Siangic, Kho-Bwa, Hrusish, Midzuish, Tani and Digarish groups.
The greatest variety of languages and subgroups is found in the highlands stretching from northern Burma to northeast India. Northern Burma is home to the small Nungish group, as well as the Kachin–Luic languages, including Jingpho with nearly a million speakers. The Brahmaputran or Sal languages include at least the Bodo–Koch and Konyak languages, spoken in an area stretching from northern Burma through the Indian states of Nagaland, Meghalaya and Tripura, and are often considered to include the Kachin–Luic group.[14]
The border highlands of Nagaland, Manipur and western Burma are home to the small Ao, Angami–Pochuri, Tangkhul and Zeme groups of languages, as well as the Karbi language. Meitei, the main language of Manipur with 1.4 million speakers, is sometimes linked with the 50 or so Kukish or Kuki-Chin languages spoken in Mizoram and the Chin State of Burma. The Mru language is spoken by a small group in the Chittagong Hills between Bangladesh and Burma.[15]
There have been two milestones in the classification of Sino-Tibetan and Tibeto-Burman languages, Shafer (1966) and Benedict (1972), which were actually produced in the 1930s and 1940s respectively.
Shafer's tentative classification took an agnostic position and did not recognize Tibeto-Burman as a primary branch, but placed Chinese (Sinitic) is placed on the same level as the other branches. He retained Daic within the family, allegedly at the insistence of colleagues, despite his personal belief that they were not related.
A very influential, although also tentative, classification is that of Benedict (1972). This was a collaborative effort of Paul Benedict and Robert Shafer (completed around 1942–1943) that envisaged Chinese as the first family to branch off, followed by Karen.
The Tibeto-Burman family is then divided into seven primary branches:
I. Tibetan–Kanauri (aka Bodish–Himalayish)
II. Bahing–Vayu
III. Abor–Miri–Dafla
IV. Kachin
V. Burmese–Lolo
VI. Bodo–Garo (aka Barish)
VII. Kuki–Naga (aka Kukish)
Perhaps the best known is that of James Matisoff, a modification of Benedict that demoted Karen but kept the divergent position of Sinitic.[16] Of the 7 branches within Tibeto-Burman, 2 branches (Baic and Karenic) have SVO-order languages, while all the other 5 branches have SOV-order languages.
Tibeto-Burman is then divided into several branches, some of them geographic conveniences rather than linguistic proposals:
Matisoff makes no claim that the families in the Kamarupan or Himalayish branches have a special relationship to one another other than a geographic one. They are intended rather as categories of convenience pending more detailed comparative work.
Matisoff also notes that the Jingpho–Nungish–Luish is central to the family in that in contains features of many of the other branches, and is also located around the center of the Tibeto-Burman-speaking area.
Since Benedict (1972), many languages previously inadequately documented have received more attention with the publication of new grammars, dictionaries, and wordlists. This new research has greatly benefited comparative work, and Bradley (1997) incorporates much of the newer data.[17]
I. Western (= Bodic)
II. Sal
III. Central (perhaps a residual group, not actually related to each other. Lepcha may also fit here.)
IV. North-Eastern
V. South-Eastern
Like Matisoff, George van Driem (2001) acknowledges that the relationships of the "Kuki–Naga" languages (Kuki, Mizo, Meitei, etc.), both amongst each other and to the other Tibeto-Burman languages, remain unclear. However, rather than placing them in a geographic grouping, as Matisoff does, van Driem leaves them unclassified.
Van Driem proposes that Chinese owes its traditional privileged place in Sino-Tibetan to historical, typological, and cultural rather than linguistic criteria. For example, he notes that Lepcha is as difficult to reconcile with Tibeto-Burman reconstructions as Chinese is, but that no-one has proposed a "Lepcha–Tibetan" family with Lepcha as one of two primary branches. He compares the situation to the Indo-Hittite hypothesis in Indo-European studies.
Van Driem's classification goes further than simply demoting Chinese to a branch of Tibeto-Burman: he proposes that the closest relatives of Chinese are Bodic languages such as Tibetan, a hypothesis called Sino-Bodic. Critics counter that Van Driem hasn't produced any evidence that Chinese and Bodic share innovations that set them apart as a group. (Note also that most other linguists who merge Chinese into Tibeto-Burman continue to call the resulting family Sino-Tibetan.)
Tibeto-Burman (Van Driem)
There are in addition poorly known languages, such as Ayi, which may be closely related to others but remain unclassified.