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Standard Tibetan and most other Tibetic languages are written in the Tibetan script with a historically conservative orthography (see below) that helps unify the Tibetan-language area. Some other Tibetan languages (in India and Nepal) are written in the related Devanagari script, which is also used to write Hindi, Nepali and
Old Tibetan refers to the earliest attested form of Tibetan language, reflected in documents from the adoption of writing by the Tibetan Empire in the mid-7th century to the early 9th century. In 816 CE, during the reign of Tibetan King Sadnalegs , literary Tibetan underwent comprehensive standardization, resulting in Classical Tibetan .
Uray Géza (16 August 1921 - 17 July 1991) was a 20th-century Hungarian tibetologist.He studied under Louis Ligeti, writing his dissertation on Tibetan dialects. Early in his career, he focused on linguistic issues, but gradually his work focused more on early Tibetan history and the analysis of the Dunhuang texts that serve as the primary sources for such study.
The existence of such elaborate system of inflectional changes in Proto-Sino-Tibetan makes the language distinctive from some of its modern descendants, such as the Sinitic languages, which have mostly or completely become analytic. Proto-Sino-Tibetan, like Old Chinese, also included numerous consonant clusters, and was not a tonal language.
Though the division of Sino-Tibetan into Sinitic and Tibeto-Burman branches (e.g. Benedict, Matisoff) is widely used, some historical linguists criticize this classification, as the non-Sinitic Sino-Tibetan languages lack any shared innovations in phonology or morphology [2] to show that they comprise a clade of the phylogenetic tree. [3] [4] [5]
Contrary to other hypotheses suggesting a Proto-Sino-Tibetan homeland in the Yellow River valley of northern China, [6] Matisoff (1991, [7] 2015) suggests that the Proto-Sino-Tibetan (PST) homeland was located "somewhere on the Himalayan plateau," and gives Proto-Tibeto-Burman a date of approximately 4000 B.C., which is roughly on a par with the age of Proto-Indo-European.
Sino-Tibetan (sometimes referred to as Trans-Himalayan) [1] [2] is a family of more than 400 languages, second only to Indo-European in number of native speakers. [3] Around 1.4 billion people speak a Sino-Tibetan language. [4] The vast majority of these are the 1.3 billion native speakers of Sinitic languages.
Tibetan and Bhutan written scripts that use the Tibetan language, have been grouped into two categories. The first category being the Uchen script. The word Uchen translates to 'with a head', this refers to the elongated letters of the alphabet, that are tall and block like with linear strokes. [ 5 ]