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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.
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]
Proto-Sino-Tibetan (PST) is the linguistic reconstruction of the Sino-Tibetan proto-language and the common ancestor of all languages in it, including the Sinitic languages, the Tibetic languages, Yi, Bai, Burmese, Karen, Tangut, and Naga.
The ethnic roots of Tibetans can be traced back to a deep Eastern Asian lineage representing the indigenous population of the Tibetan plateau since c. 40,000 to 30,000 years ago, and arriving Neolithic farmers from the Yellow River within the last 10,000 years, and which can be associated with having introduced the Sino-Tibetan languages. [28] [29]
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.
Tibetan grammar describes the morphology, syntax and other grammatical features of Lhasa Tibetan, a Sino-Tibetan language. Lhasa Tibetan is typologically an ergative–absolutive language. Nouns are generally unmarked for grammatical number, but are marked for case. Adjectives are never marked and appear after the noun. Demonstratives also come ...
The Sino-Tibetan Etymological Dictionary and Thesaurus (commonly abbreviated STEDT) was a linguistics research project hosted at the University of California at Berkeley. The project, which focused on Sino-Tibetan historical linguistics, started in 1987 and lasted until 2015. James Matisoff was the director of STEDT for nearly three decades. [1]
L1 speakers of Chinese and other Sino-Tibetan languages according to Ethnologue. Dialectologist Jerry Norman estimated that there are hundreds of mutually unintelligible Sinitic languages. [11] They form a dialect continuum in which differences generally become more pronounced as distances increase, though there are also some sharp boundaries. [12]