The higherorder subgrouping of tibetoburman has been recently up for debate. The tb languages are the only proven relatives of chinese, with which they form the great sino tibetan. Haudricourt asserted that the socalled departing tone, with a falling pitch in modern standard chinese, ultimately corresponds to an earlier lost s suffix. This chapter discusses two lost protosinotibetan morphological markers that are detectable only through comparative studies. Pdf on jan 1, 2017, randy j lapolla faha and others published an overview of. Sinotibetan etymological dictionary and thesaurus project berkeley. University of california, berkeley the present study had several beginnings. On sinobodic and other symptoms of neosubgroupitis1. The tibetic languages are a cluster of tibetoburman languages descended from old tibetan, spoken across a wide area of eastern central asia bordering the indian subcontinent, including the tibetan plateau and the himalayas in baltistan, ladakh, nepal, sikkim, bhutan, assam and arunachal pradesh. Dated language phylogenies shed light on the ancestry of. The tibetan and himalayan library is a publisher of websites, information services, and networking facilities relating to the tibetan plateau and southern himalayan regions. The sino tibetan language with the most native speakers is mandarin chinese 920 million, although since not all forms of mandarin are mutuallyintelligible, it may be regarded as a complex series of dialect continua. In sino tibetan historical linguistics, much has been done in reconstructing the sound system of proto sino tibetan and in reconstructing a large number of cognate lexical items assumed to have been part of proto sino tibetan, and there has been.
Proto tibetoburman ptb is the reconstructed ancestor of the tibetoburman languages, that is, the sino tibetan languages except for chinese. Pdf on feb 1, 1994, randy j lapolla and others published variable finals in protosinotibetan find, read and cite all the research you need on researchgate. Sandberg, graham, 1 895, manual of the sikkim bhutia language or denjongke. There has been some interesting work on proto circassian, the forebear of all circassian dialects, and even a dictionary was published. Note that these versions are not identical to published versions and may contain errors. This 800page volume is a clear and readable presentation of the current state of research on the history of the tibetoburman tb language family, a typologically diverse group of over 250 languages spoken in southern china, the himalayas, ne india, and peninsular southeast asia.
Presented at the 42nd conference on sino tibetan language and linguistics and subsequently revised chiang mai, november 24, 2009 draft circulated for comment roger blench kay williamson educational foundation 8, guest road cambridge cb1 2al. Proto austroasiatic is the reconstructed ancestor of the austroasiatic languages. System and philosophy of sino tibetan reconstruction. Fundamental all languages proto sino tibetan lemmas. Free englishtibetan dictionary and translator freelang.
Proto sino tibetan terms that give attributes to nouns, extending their definitions category. Prototibetoburman ptb is the reconstructed ancestor of the tibetoburman languages, that is, the sinotibetan languages except for chinese. Given its size and geographical extension, sino tibetan is of the highest importance for understanding the prehistory of east asia, and of neighboring language families. Correspondences of the basic words between old chinese. The stedt publications page has been updated with downloadable pdfs. The medial systems of old chinese and proto sino tibetan doctoral dissertation, uc berkeley, 1998 abstract front matter text 1,430k back matter corrigenda. This chapter introduces the phonological structure of qieyun segmenting rhymes, a rhyme dictionary of middle chinese mc, its relationship with old and middle chinese phonologies, and its impact on the study of the history of chinese phonology. Wolfenden, concerning the variation of final consonants in the word families of tibetan, kachin and chinese, journal of the royal asiatic society 4, 1937, 625655. Protosinotibetan morphology and its modern chinese. Proto sino tibetan lemmas, categorized by their part of speech category. Variable finals in proto sino tibetan some words over others that do not fit his pattern. I found a counter example after looking through a tibetan dictionary for. Linguistics and multilingual studies nanyang technological. Sino tibetan, in a few sources also known as transhimalayan, is a family of more than 400 languages, second only to indoeuropean in number of native speakers.
The position of proto sino tibetan can be defined in terms of a chain of interrelated languages and language groups. The sinotibetan etymological dictionary and thesaurus. Proto sino tibetan terms that modify clauses, sentences and phrases directly. The modern era of tb sino tibetan subgrouping began with benedict 1972 henceforth stc, where that great comparativist refrained from offering a stammbaum of the conventional type, leaving several individual languages and language groups unclassified, and placing jingpho at. Abc etymological dictionary of old chinese by axel. Lapolla in many tibetoburman languages we find that there are a number of forms that are clearly related though differ in one segment. An english tibetan dictionary, zlababsamgrub, kazi pdf, 52,7 mb english tibetan colloquial dictionary, sir charles alfred bell pdf, 31,7. Pdf an overview of sinotibetan morphosyntax researchgate. Sino tibetan languages by yourdictionary burmese dictionaries burmeseenglish words and phrases useful phrases in burmese chinese dictionaries learn chinese learn cantonese learn mandarin hakka phrases mandarin chinese pinyin chart with audio chinese character dictionary dmitry chirkins englishchinese dictionary chinese character dictionary web learn with oliver. There was presumably a proto sino tibetan, but i can. A read is counted each time someone views a publication summary such as the title, abstract, and list of authors, clicks on a figure, or views or downloads the fulltext. Definition of proto sino tibetan in the dictionary. Classical tibetan is a major regional literary language, particularly for its. The original language, or rather, cluster of dialects, from which descend the sino tibetan family of languages, to include tibetoburman group and the various chinese languages.
The medial systems of old chinese and protosinotibetan. Information and translations of proto sino tibetan in the most comprehensive dictionary definitions resource on the web. Most of the european dictionary goes back to proto indoeuropean, i was wondering if there was such a root for the many asian languages, or whether they too borrowed from pie, and i was also wondering what other language cultures refer to as their roots. Sinotibetan languages dictionary definitions you can. Our goal is the publication of an etymological dictionary of proto sino tibetan pst, the ancestor language of the large sino tibetan language family.
Sino tibetan is not my area of specialization, but it is immediately obvious that all these papers violate the very first and most basic rule of historical reconstruction. It belongs to the tibetoburman group, which itself belongs to the sino tibetan or sino thai family. The medial systems of old chinese and proto sino tibetan by zev joseph handel b. These ancient languages were further ramified into divergent dialects. They drove out the original inhabitants, the sino yeniseians, who were a branch of the denecaucasians.
Pdf on jan 1, 2017, nathan w hill and others published the state of. Thl promotes the integration of knowledge and community across the divides of academic disciplines, the historical and the contemporary, the religious and the secular, the global and. Several other researchers argue that the tibetoburman languages sans chinese do not constitute a monophyletic group within sino tibetan, and therefore that. I found a counter example after looking through a tibetan dictionary for less than two minutes. In 10,000 bc, a proto altaic people who were ancestors of the mongolotungusics left the altai mountains and invaded the steppes of mongolia. Spoken tibetan includes dozens of regional dialects and subdialects which, in many cases, are not mutually intelligible. Scientific advances do not always happen over night, and so it may be no surprise that success in this colossal endeavor should require the protracted concentration of hundreds of linguists over such a long period of time. Qieyun depicts the literary pronunciation system in luoyang and nanjing around the 7th century. Rinchen dorji tibetan sentences and the translations and translated some of the sentences from english to tibetan. One school of thought is that the ancestral language proto sino tibetan from which all the sino tibetan languages evolved originated in. Background the sinotibetanaustronesian stan hypothesis claims that the. Shortos monkhmer comparative dictionary, while a new proto austroasiatic reconstruction is currently being undertaken by paul sidwell.
Zhou jixu, correspondences of the basic words between old chinese and proto indoeuropean, sino platonic papers, 115 april, 2002 old chinese, proto tibetoburman, proto northcaucasian, proto yenisseian, proto indoeuropean, and proto austronesian so as to estimate the relationship between oc and other proto languages in the. The publication of a second edition of the sinotibetan languages testi es to. It first began with a preliminary treatment of the historical development of what is commonly. University of california, berkeley 1992 a dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree of doctor of philosophy in chinese language in the graduate division of the university of california, berkeley. In some cases these variations may be due to regular or common alternations, such as in tibetan, where you have. In other words, stc admits prefixal protovariation for two numerals, five and eight. Its words and roots are not directly attested in any written works, but have been reconstructed through the comparative method, which finds regular similarities between languages that cannot be explained by coincidence or wordborrowing, and extrapolates ancient forms from these similarities.
Middle chinese phonology and qieyun oxford handbooks. Stedt is a longterm linguistics research project at the university of california at berkeley. Sinitic is connected with tibetic through a body of shared vocabulary and typological features, similarly tibetic with baric, baric with burmic, and burmic with karenic. Tibetan is a language spoken by approximately 6 million people across the tibetan plateau. Based on a dataset of 50 sino tibetan languages, we infer phylogenies that date the origin of the language family to around 7200 b. Variable finals in protosinotibetan some words over others that do not fit his pattern. The origin and spread of the sinotibetan language family. Starostin s comparative vocabulary of five sino tibetan languages, which is a very serious piece of work, but, with only five languages involved, is obviously not enough. Evidence is given to demonstrate its function as a nominalizer to turn a verb into a noun. Abc etymological dictionary of old chinese bulgariistoria. Randy j lapolla, variable finals in proto sino tibetan, bulletin of the institute of history and philology 65, 1, 1994, 1173. On the structure of the clause in proto sino tibetan and its development in the daughter languages randy j.