Talk:Sino-Tibetan languages

Agglutinative vs analytic

This article says Sino-Tibetan languages tend to be agglutinative languages, and that page says this is opposite to analytic languages, and that page in turn says Mandarin Chinese is the best example of analytic. I am very confused. --Kaihsu Tai 09:53, 10 Oct 2003 (UTC)

I think there was a mistake; now I am changing agglutinative to analytic. --Kaihsu Tai 09:57, 10 Oct 2003 (UTC)

I think there was mistake too. Mandarin Chinese is a typical analytic language, while Japanese is a typical agglutinative language, but the family of Japanese is not clear yet. --ILovEJPPitoC 11:10, 10 Oct 2003 (UTC)

While the Chinese languages are often isolating (analytic), many Tibeto-Burman languages, such as Meithei, are polysynthetic. It is just a super large family. You may not be able to generalize on this aspect. — ishwar  (SPEAK) 18:59, 2005 Apr 8 (UTC)

hypothetical ?

How can language families be "hypothetical" or "proposed". They either exist or they don't. It doesn't look like they dont exist now and will exist tomorrow. --Jiang 04:45, 6 Apr 2004 (UTC)

Language families can be hypothetical or proposed in the sense that somebody proposes that such and such languages are related and not everybody agrees. A case in point would be the Hopi-Tibetan mirror which claims that the Tibetan word for "sun" is the Hopi word for "moon" and the Tibetan word for "love" is the Hopi word for "hate" (and incredibly enough, the visa versa cases also) thus proving the two languages must somehow be related. See my comments on Talk:Hopi where I do my part to question the this proposed relationship (mainly by asking "show me the money", or in this case "show me the words"). On a more serious note, linguists sometimes disagree as to the membership of various language families. As ILovEJPPitoC points out above, the classification of Japanese is not certain -- is it an Altaic language or a language isolate?

That said, some core language families are recognized by virtually all linguists. Nobody questions the existence of a Indo-European language family, for example, or the Chinese language family, as the evidence is just too strong. The question at hand is — do the vast majority of linguists agree the Sino-Tibetan language family makes sense? As far as I know I think so — it's certainly easy to find plenty of unbiased references that make use of this classification (SIL, etc) — but maybe somebody can dig up credible sources that disagree. In the meantime I'd vote for dropping the proposed adjective. technopilgrim 23:50, 7 Apr 2004 (UTC)

I remember reading in abook on Tibet that the "sino-tibetan language group" was a politically motivated - to contribute in justifying Chinese domination of Tibet. I don't have any sources on that, but considering the impact of ideology on intellectual life in XXth century china, and possibly the blindness of a lot of occidental academia to this, it seems believable. On the other hand, it also seems entirely believeable that some tibetans or pro-tibetan activists just made that up. I'll have to do a bit of research on this.

Everyone agrees there are a large number of cognate words between the two languages. The question is how this happened. Did the two languages share a common root or is this the result of cross-language borrowing? According to the comparative method of linguist study, questions of this type are resolved by looking at the words used to name the most quotidian objects ("sun", "water", "finger", "dog", "three", "sleep", "son", etc.). Per this theory, these basic words are more resistant to foreign language borrowing than words used for more exotic and abstract concepts. If linguists find a strong correspondence in these simple words, then two languages are assumed to share a common heritage language. This is the case with Tibetan and Chinese. (Which isn't to say that the People's Republic of China is above using this finding for sinister purposes.) technopilgrim 21:42, 21 Sep 2004 (UTC)

Yes, the connection of Chinese languages to Tibeto-Burman languages is not uncontroversial. — ishwar  (SPEAK) 19:03, 2005 Apr 8 (UTC)

Saying that the Sino-Tibetan laanguage family is "Chinese propaganda" is absolutely absurd. Thousands of sino-Tibetan root words have been constructed. Their is a 99.9% chance that these languages are related. [anon.]

Actually, the special place of Chinese within Sino-Tibetan (two branches, Chinese vs. all of Tibeto-Burman) may also be politically motivated: the idea that big, important languages should have important placement withing the classification. You see this over and over: Semitic within "Hamo-Semitic" (two branches, Semitic vs everything else), the special prominence given to Bantu, to Polynesian within Malayo-Polynesian, etc, even though these are (cladistically) minor sub-sub-branches of their families. Indeed, just as Semitic, Bantu, and Polynesian were eventually "demoted", despite vociferous opposition from specialists of those languages, several recent classifications have concluded that the Chinese languages form just another sub-branch of Tibeto-Burman, no more important linguistically than the Tibetan, Newari, or Kiranti languages. Rather like English within Indo-European: a large number of speakers doesn't give it a "privileged" place within the classification. Such ideas are not popular among Chinese linguists, however; how much of the opposition is justified by good linguistics and how much is due to pride I don't know. — kwami 04:22, 9 Apr 2005 (UTC)

So, in other words, you're stating that you dispute the Anglo-Indic language family? What cheek! --Ryanaxp 04:10, Jun 12, 2005 (UTC)

This argument for Sino-Bodic sounds plausible, but that's not enough. I have added a link to Matisoff's (2003) opus magnum, and I have read the pdf: Tibeto-Burman does have innovations that Sinitic lacks.

After reading that book, incidentally, I am forced to consider doubts about the existence of Sino-Tibetan ridiculous. That's why I removed the "putative" in the first sentence. Someone with more spare time should add things like cognate lists… the article is currently very short. David Marjanović 00:17, 28 May 2007 (UTC)

actually the tibetan and burmese languages had alot of borrowings and cognates with indian language due to indian influence, so the similarities between chinese tibetan and burmese show a common ancestor in language —Preceding unsigned comment added by 141.155.146.29 (talk) 02:01, 26 July 2008 (UTC)

A new stub category has been created

A new stub category has been created specifically for Sino-Tibetan languages: {{st-lang-stub}} . Use {{st-lang-stub}} rather than {{stub}} or {{lang-stub}} to label stubs on Sino-Tibetan languages as such.

Stub categorizing is a convenient way to keep track of Sino-Tibetan-related stubs and additionally helps in keeping the category of language stubs usable. Whoever feels like it, is invited to browse Category:Language stubs to sift out any Sino-Tibetan language stubs... Thanks!

For discussion see: WP:WSS/Stub types#Language and literature and WP:WSS/Criteria#Split of lang-stub. — mark ✎ 23:20, 4 Jun 2005 (UTC)

number of speakers

it seems that sino-tibetan langauges have the largest number of speakers and not the indo-european languages, as is said in the entry "Sino-Tibetan languages".

here's a list from SIL on the most commonly spoken languages in the world: http://www2.ignatius.edu/faculty/turner/languages.htm -- while Mandarin holds the #1 slot it is the only Sino-Tibetan language in the top 11. Various Indo-European languages hold all the other slots except for Arabic (#6) and Japanese (#9). If you add up the numbers you can see that Indo-European language speakers outnumber Sino-Tibetan speakers by a fair margin. technopilgrim 18:53, 17 Jun 2005 (UTC)

It's not just that there are no other ST languages in the top-ten list. The closest thing there is to another major ST language in terms of population is Burmese, listed variously listed with 22-32 million, which is a middling language by IE standards. The 70 languages called 'Tibetan' total somewhere around 5 million, and I don't believe there is a single other ST language with more than a million speakers. As far as second-language speakers, only Chinese and Burmese are used to a significant extent. kwami 21:41, 2005 Jun 17 (UTC)

Maha-kiranti

Since the publication of his Handbook, van Driem has rethought the validity of Mahakiranti. I beleive he discusses this both in his essay in the proceedings of the 9th Himalayan Language Symposium (published by de Gruyter last year, Anju Saxena Ed.) and in the proceedings of the fifth published in Nepal.

Tibetan Citations

All of the Tibetan citations in the "Common Roots" section are wrong for Written Tibetan. The numbers are gcig, gnyis, gsum, bzhi, lnga, drug, bdun, bgryad, dgu, bcu.

Common Sino-Tibetan Roots

This list is far from helpful for determining genetic relationship. By this same list, mostly consisting of numbers, one could presume that Japanese, Korean, and several other unrelated (or relationship undeterminable) languages are genetically related to Chinese. For a better list please see the list on the page for Germanic Languages, it is very thorough.

the similarities between japanese to chinese, and korean to chinese, are only due to borrowing and language contact, which did NOT happen between tibetans and chinese, or burmese and chinese, due to the fact that they were more influenced by india, proving that this list is correct and you are not...... tibetan and chinese trace back to a common origin —Preceding unsigned comment added by 141.155.146.29 (talk) 01:57, 26 July 2008 (UTC)

the writing system of Tibetan is totally different from Chinese, but the sound of numbers from 1-10 is almost the same between the two languages. Analytical feature is also common among the language familiy. Chinese madarin "was" more agglutinative in the past, remember the chinese language had developed for thousands of year and the modern form of the language is very much different than the language spoken in the Tang dynasty. in general, Sino-Tibetan are more analytical, although Tibetan and Burma language sometimes show some agglutinative suffix, that doesn't change the nature of the language. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 123.113.191.118 (talk) 15:02, 31 December 2010 (UTC)

Inconsistency

Contradictory statements have been made about membership of Sino-Tibetan. This applies to Thai.

Childish imitations of the discovery of the Indo-European group began to appear after about 1850.

Also, contradictory statements have been made about Chinese

and its membership of the alleged group.

Phrases like "not related" and "controversial" appear in the main article. They refer to all four branches in the alleged Sino-Tibetan group.

Jespersen, in the 1920's, said Thai was "certainly" in the group.

Population Genetics Perspective

Recent studies on the genetics of East Asian populations have suggested that the hypothesis of a Sino-Tibetan language family has a good chance of being correct. All populations that speak a language classified as Sino-Tibetan display high frequencies of Y-chromosomes belonging to Haplogroup O3-M122 and especially its subclade, O3a5-M134. Haplogroup O3-M122 is also typical of many populations that speak Hmong-Mien languages, Austronesian languages, or Tai-Kadai languages, which suggests that all these language families might ultimately be related. Haplogroup O1a-M119 is also rather common among people who speak an Austronesian or a Tai-Kadai language, however, so it is possible that the connection between Austronesian/Tai-Kadai and Sino-Tibetan might be more ancient than the connection between Sino-Tibetan and Hmong-Mien.

Do you have any sources I can read. It seems unlikely that Austronesian might be related to Chinese or Hmong, giving that it have a completely different structures. There are however some who think Tai and Austronesian are related, with basic words like mata and ta for eye. It might just be one big spectrum, because eye in Austroasiatic is similar to Austronesian, muoi, met, pamet. CanCanDuo 20:50, 6 April 2007 (UTC)

Don't confuse genes and languages. They don't always spread in the same way. David Marjanović 23:15, 27 May 2007 (UTC)

nobody said they spread the same wat, he only said the genes SUPPORT the language theory, and somewhrer on wikipedia it says chinese and tibetans came from same origin

If they don't spread the same way, they can't SUPPORT (or not support) it.85.241.124.173 (talk) 02:11, 30 October 2009 (UTC)

Comparative

I know the articles says comparative method is hard for this language family; however, can we at least get a table up showing similarities of confirmed languages? --Voidvector (talk) 09:37, 31 August 2008 (UTC)

merged

Since there is no such thing as a "Sino-Tibetan people", I moved that article here. kwami (talk) 00:50, 27 January 2009 (UTC)

Language template

There are way too much hypothetical guesses in the template and not enough references to support such break-down of lists. The mainstream view of Sino-Tibetan language is definitely not listed as such, see Encyclopædia Britannica [1] and Ethnologue [2].--TheLeopard (talk) 21:29, 4 February 2009 (UTC)

Agreed. kwami (talk) 22:01, 4 February 2009 (UTC)

Agreed with me? Then why did you list these names in such [hypothetical] fashion? Did you not click on the Ethnologue classifications [3]? Sino-Tibetan languages consist of Chinese and Tibeto-Burman. Chinese is directly classified under Sino-Tibetan and Bai language is classified under Tibeto-Burman, not "Sinitic".--TheLeopard (talk) 22:07, 4 February 2009 (UTC)

Yes, agreed. After you pointed it out, I saw how silly it was to have the same breakdown both here and on TB. I just needed s.o. to point out the obvious. BTW, you shouldn't rely on Ethnologue. It isn't a reliable source. (For instance, check out their "Bodish".[4] Absolutely ridiculous.) But Bai is widely thought to be a Sinitic language, and Chinese has been argued to be a TB language—just read the article. kwami (talk) 22:40, 4 February 2009 (UTC)

Those are your personal assumptions bud, whether you think Ethnologue is realiable. You need to show legitimate sources to prove otherwise. You need to present reputable sources to show that "Sinitic Language" is indeed a mainstream designation of this language family [Chinese], and the classification of Sino-Tibetan languages is classified as Sinitic and Tibeto-Burman as oppose to Chinese and Tibeto-Burman. Wikipedia does not tolerate original research, and minor point of view should not presented like this.--TheLeopard (talk) 22:57, 4 February 2009 (UTC)

No, "buddy", Sinitic is common knowledge to anyone who knows anything about Sino-Tibetan, and the unreliability of Ethnologue is common knowledge to all of us here who work with language classification articles, which is why it's only used as a last resort. Wikipedia should not be reduced to your level of ignorance. I've already told you twice that I will add sources, and I will. I would appreciate the courtesy of a reasonable amount of time to do so—I've put a word search in one source, and haven't even had time to go back and check it yet. kwami (talk) 23:32, 4 February 2009 (UTC)

You are the one who has been saying Ethnologue is unreliable, that is your opinion and is fine. However considering Ethnologue is among the most commonly known and used source for linguistics, it holds considerable weight.--TheLeopard (talk) 00:36, 5 February 2009 (UTC)

No, it does not. It is only used as a one-stop convenience because it covers all of the world's languages. If you don't believe me, ask other Wikipedia editors who work on language classification. kwami (talk) 00:57, 5 February 2009 (UTC)

I must concur. Ethnologue is not entirely reliable. That's not to say it's totally wrong either but when there's a conflict between something Ethnologue says and what an expert of language (family/classification) X says, the expert is probably more likely right then Ethnologue. You just have to do a cursory survey of their language names to see that they get things spectacularly wrong sometimes and - even worse - are apparently unwilling to consider correcting errors when someone with a better understanding of a topic approaches them. Let's face it, of there was a conflict between the X's Guide to All of Africa stating fact Z about Kinshasa and the Lonely Planet Guide to Kinshasa and Central Congo saying otherwise, who would you believe? Akerbeltz (talk) 10:24, 6 February 2009 (UTC)

Just to concur: Ethnologue is NOT generally considered reliable by linguists. It is just another information repository, and that information is not put there by experts, nor even neutral robots; it's selectively collected by SIL, which neither follows academic standards nor has scientific objectives or guidelines. That said, of course not even Ethnologue can get everything wrong; but it would be A Good Thing if Wikipedia guidelines specifically mentioned that whenever it's only-Ethnologue vs. Anything-Else, Anything-Else should prevail. Simply put, Ethnologue is not a primary source and is full of OR; that makes it worse than Wikipedia itself as a source, and of course Wikipedia can't be a source, so much less Ethnologue.85.241.124.173 (talk) 02:20, 30 October 2009 (UTC)

Gallery

Does anyone else agree that the gallery featuring pictures of people of the different ethnic groups is unnecessary? This article is about the languages they speak, not the people themselves, and the pictures don't seem too relevant. The article even mentions that Sino-Tibetan is only a linguistic construct anyway. 66.71.70.66 (talk) 13:27, 26 March 2009 (UTC)

The gallery was merged from 'Sino-Tibetan peoples', since that article had no meaning apart from a reification of the language family. But I didn't want to just discard it. You can also argue that it is a very narrow conception of linguistics that considers only languages, without the people that speak them, since of course languages do not exist without people. Linguistics is in its essence a sub-discipline of anthropology. kwami (talk) 00:11, 27 March 2009 (UTC)

So should 'Indo-European Peoples' include photographs from almost everyone in the planet? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 85.241.124.173 (talk) 02:22, 30 October 2009 (UTC)

One new Tibeto-Burman language discovered

Koro : http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-11479563 Cdrk (talk) 19:11, 5 October 2010 (UTC)

It's a "distant sister" to Hruso, but Hruso is unclassified within TB.

Ah, shows similarities to Tani. — kwami (talk) 20:24, 5 October 2010 (UTC)

I looked in these articles and don't see where either Tani or Hruso is mentioned. --Taivo (talk) 21:23, 5 October 2010 (UTC)

Aka is a synonym for Hruso. Schmid at AP paraphrased the team as saying "While Koro differs from Aka, it does share some things with another language, Tani, which is spoken farther to the east." Certainly not enough to say it's a new branch of TB.

Since I like to keep every language article linked from some higher level of classification, so that none of them are orphaned, I put a mention in at Tani languages. — kwami (talk) 22:40, 5 October 2010 (UTC)

Flux

We are now told that the internal classification of the Sino-Tibetan languages is "in flux". —Preceding unsigned comment added by 94.30.71.244 (talk) 13:51, 7 May 2011 (UTC)

The vague phrase "at least" is used about membership. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 94.30.71.244 (talk) 13:56, 7 May 2011 (UTC)

Family tree diagram

The diagram File:SinoTibetanTree.svg seems not to match the named source, and its contents are dubious.

The diagram is described as "largely following" or "primarily based on" The Sino-Tibetan languages, by Graham Thurgood and Randy J. LaPolla (2003), ISBN 0700711295. The first chapter of that book contains an outline classification of ST languages by Thurgood, but it seems very different from this tree. For example, Thurgood subdivides Chinese as Northern (Mandarin), Central (Wu, Xiang, Gan and Hakka) and Southern (Yue and Min), while this diagram has a very odd structure, e.g. claiming that only Yue and Mandarin are descended from Middle Chinese, that there is a Wu-Min subgroup, that Gan is some sort of mixture of Wu and Xiang, and so on. The Tibeto-Burman subgrouping also differs from Thurgood's (Lolo-Burmese, Bodic, Sal, Kuki-Chin-Naga, Rung and Karenic), and seems to contain a number of high-level nodes of uncertain provenance. Kanguole 09:34, 10 May 2011 (UTC)

The Sino-Tibetan language family, largely following Thurgood and La Polla (2003).[Image moved here as suspect in its fidelity to the source]

Yeah, its not my area of expertise, but the internal classification of sinitic seemed odd. I'm taking your description of the source on good faith and putting the image here and seeing if I can get any relevant material from interlibrary loan. μηδείς (talk) 19:35, 10 May 2011 (UTC)