1,721,119 research outputs found
Recommended from our members
Tibeto-Burman subgroups and historical grammar
Full text linkSeveral distinct strains of thought on subgrouping, presented in memory of David Watters and Michael Noonan, are united by a golden thread. Tamangic consists of Tamangish and maybe something else, just as Shafer would have wanted it. Tamangic may represent a wave of peopling which washed over the Himalayas after Magaric and Kiranti but before Bodish. There is no such language family as Sino-Tibetan. The term ‘trans-Himalayan’ for the phylum merits consideration. A residue of Tibeto-Burman conjugational morphology shared between Kiranti and Tibetan does not go unnoticed, at least twice. Black Mountain Mönpa is not an East Bodish language, and this too does not go unnoticed
The ancestry of Tibetan
No full textThe Tibeto-Burman linguistic phylum was identified in 1823. However, the term “Tibeto-Burman” was later used with two different mean- ings, one by scholars following Klaproth’s polyphyletic framework and another by scholars operating within the Indo-Chinese paradigm. Yet the enduring failure of Sino-Tibetanists to produce any evidence for the Indo-Chinese phylogenetic model compels us to conclude that there is no such language family as Sino-Tibetan. Instead, Tibetan forms part of the Trans-Himalayan linguistic phylum, or Tibeto-Burman in Klaproth’s sense. Robert Shafer coined the terms “Bodic” and “Bodish” for subgroups including Tibetan and languages with varying degrees of linguistic propin- quity to Tibetan, and Nicolas Tournadre has also recently coined the term “Tibetic.” What are Tibetic, Bodish, and Bodic? Which languages are the closest relatives of Tibetan? What do we know about the structure of the Trans-Himalayan linguistic phylum as a whole? Based on the phylogeny of the language family, which inferences can be made about the ethnolinguis- tic prehistory of the Tibetan Plateau and surrounding regions
- …
