is tibetan language similar to chinese

[45] "The diversity of the Tibeto-Burman language family and the linguistic ancestry of Chinese", "What is Sino-Tibetan? Difficulties have included the great diversity of the languages, the lack of inflection in many of them, and the effects of language contact. While the service had been running constantly for decades, experts said China keeps jamming radio signals for both the Tibetan and the Chinese services. [17][34] He found that Tibetic and Burmese /a/ correspond to two Old Chinese vowels, *a and *ə. [22] The project was supervised by Robert Shafer until late 1938, and then by Paul K. Benedict. [16] Instead of building the entire family tree, he set out to reconstruct a Proto-Tibeto-Burman language by comparing five major languages, with occasional comparisons with other languages. [17] He reconstructed a two-way distinction on initial consonants based on voicing, with aspiration conditioned by pre-initial consonants that had been retained in Tibetic but lost in many other languages. In polysyllabic words, tone is not important except in the first syllable. A Tibetan businessman has been released from prison in China after completing a five-year sentence for “inciting separatism” by campaigning for Tibetan language education, including in interviews with The New York Times, his lawyer said on Friday. 'This directly harms the culture of Tibetans,' said Mr. Tashi, 30, a shopkeeper who is trying to file a lawsuit to compel the authorities to provide more Tibetan education. The result was eight copies of a 15-volume typescript entitled Sino-Tibetan Linguistics. [30] A growing number of scholars believe that Old Chinese did not use tones, and that the tones of Middle Chinese developed from final consonants. ", This page was last edited on 2 March 2021, at 16:51. While the Uyghurs have been moved to "re-education camps", the Tibetan farmers have been moved to modern housing in or near towns and cities. And in places like Tibet and Xinjiang, ethnic language, culture and religion have come under increasing restrictions. Some 40 well-established subgroups, of which those with the most speakers are: a number of other small families and isolates as primary branches (, Families with more than 30 languages are in, This page was last edited on 24 January 2021, at 12:30. However, in monosyllabic words, each tone can occur with two distinct contours. Mruish. Tibetan Language Advocate Freed. However, the reconstruction of the family is much less developed than for families such as Indo-European or Austroasiatic. A Tibetan activist sentenced to five years in prison by Chinese authorities for "inciting separatism" after appearing in a New York Times documentary has been released from jail, … Snapshot of a Field and a Language Family in Flux", "The six vowel hypothesis of Old Chinese in comparative context", "Cognates of Old Chinese *-n, *-r, and *-j in Tibetan and Burmese", "Beiträge zur Sprachenkunde Hinterindiens", "The West-Himalaic or Tibetan tribes of Asam, Burma and Pegu", "Sino-Tibetan–Austronesian: an updated and improved argument", "Pronominal Verb Morphology in Tibeto-Burman", "Black Mountain Conjugational Morphology, Proto-Tibeto-Burman Morphosyntax, and the Linguistic Position of Chinese", "Tibeto-Burman languages and their subgrouping", Behind the Sino-Tibetan Database of Lexical Cognates: Introductory remarks, "Why Sino-Tibetan reconstruction is not like Indo-European reconstruction (yet)", https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Sino-Tibetan_languages&oldid=1002432338, Short description is different from Wikidata, Language articles with unsupported infobox fields, Wikipedia articles with SUDOC identifiers, Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License. [5][b] [20] First, there are a number of parallels between the morphology of Old Chinese and the modern Bodic languages. A genetic relationship between Chinese, Tibetan, Burmese and other languages was first proposed in the early 19th century and is now broadly accepted. [1] The vast majority of these are the 1.3 billion native speakers of Chinese languages. "[15], Recently, the Yushul Tibetan Autonomous Prefecture Intermediate People's Court sentenced Tashi Wangchuk to five years in prison on 22 May 2018. Phonemic vowel length exists in Lhasa Tibetan but in a restricted set of circumstances. We all know the theory that Native Americans came from Siberia. "School as a site of Tibetan ethnic identity construction in India". For Shafer, the suffix "-ic" denoted a primary division of the family, whereas the suffix "-ish" denoted a sub-division of one of those. Tibetan is a Sino-Tibetan language, i.e. Of particular interest was the discovery of a new branch of the family, the Qiangic languages of western Sichuan and adjacent areas.[40][41]. [3][4] Kukish, 15. From Amy Adams to Vivian Richards, celebs raise awareness about Freedom for Tibet movement. James Matisoff (1991) places it in the eastern part of the Tibetan plateau around 4000 BC, with the various groups migrating out down the Yellow, Yangtze, Mekong, Salween and Brahmaputra rivers. [citation needed], In February 2008, Norman Baker, a UK MP, released a statement to mark International Mother Language Day claiming, "The Chinese government are following a deliberate policy of extinguishing all that is Tibetan, including their own language in their own country" and he asserted a right for Tibetans to express themselves "in their mother tongue". Schiefner of St Petersburg in 1849 his series of translations and researches. In 1959, after years of Chinese oppression, there was a Tibetan uprising where residents of the region demanded their autonomy and freedom from their oppressors. The following summarizes the sound system of the dialect of Tibetan spoken in Lhasa, the most influential variety of the spoken language. Like Matisoff, van Driem acknowledges that the relationships of the "Kuki–Naga" languages (Kuki, Mizo, Meitei, etc. Ant. similar-sounding words … "Foundational Questions of Tibetan Morphology. In Hong Kong, the official languages are English and Chinese, according to the Basic Law of Hong Kong. [71][72] Matisoff (2015: xxxi) acknowledges that the position of Chinese as either a sister branch of Tibeto-Burman or a branch within Tibeto-Burman remains an open question. Konow (1909) explained the pronominalized languages as due to a Munda substratum, with the idea that Indo-Chinese languages were essentially isolating as well as tonal. “We must continue to shine a light on the grave assaults against the Tibetan people’s religion, culture, and language by the Chinese Communist government, both inside Tibet and outside the PRC. [47] [81] Most scholars believe SOV to be the original order, with Chinese, Karen and Bai having acquired SVO order due to the influence of neighbouring languages in the Mainland Southeast Asia linguistic area. This irregularity was attacked by Roy Andrew Miller,[21] though Benedict's supporters attribute it to the effects of prefixes that have been lost and are often unrecoverable. Furthermore, although Korean language (Altaic) and Japanese language (Japonic) are highly similar to each other (e.g. a language related to Chinese (and Burmese, and a good many other languages of the Himalayas, South-East Asia and western China). "Some Reflections on the Mysterious Nature of Tibetan Language" In: Hahn, Michael. The time of hypothetical ST unity, when the Proto-Han (= Proto-Chinese) and Proto-Tibeto-Burman (PTB) peoples formed a relatively undifferentiated linguistic community, must have been at least as remote as the Proto-Indo-European period, perhaps around 400… Most of these have small speech communities in remote mountain areas, and as such are poorly documented. In a wider sense, Sino-Tibetan has been defined as also including the Tai (Daic) and Karen language families. In the Texas Journal of International Law, Barry Sautman stated that "none of the many recent studies of endangered languages deems Tibetan to be imperiled, and language maintenance among Tibetans contrasts with language loss even in the remote areas of Western states renowned for liberal policies... claims that primary schools in Tibet teach Mandarin are in error. The study further suggests that there was an initial major split between the Sinitic languages and the Tibeto-Burman languages approximately 4,200 to 7,800 years ago (with an average of 5,900 years ago), associating this expansion with the Yangshao culture and/or the later Majiayao culture. He proposed a detailed classification, with six top-level divisions:[67][68][e], Shafer was sceptical of the inclusion of Daic, but after meeting Maspero in Paris decided to retain it pending a definitive resolution of the question.[69][70]. Although some cognate sets presented by van Driem are confined to Chinese and Bodic, many others are found in Sino-Tibetan languages generally and thus do not serve as evidence for a special relationship between Chinese and Bodic. Although the family is traditionally presented as divided into Sinitic (i.e. The high tone can be pronounced with either a flat or a falling contour, and the low tone can be pronounced with either a flat or rising-falling contour, the latter being a tone that rises to a medium level before falling again. Tashi had warned that there and across many historically Tibetan areas in China, the Tibetan language was threatened by official policies to make Mandarin Chinese the … Diversity is greater in the rugged terrain of southeast China than in the North China Plain. Hruso, 10. The UN Committee called on China to preserve Tibetan language by encouraging its use in education and other fields. "[14], Some scholars also question such claims because most Tibetans continue to reside in rural areas where Chinese is rarely spoken, as opposed to Lhasa and other Tibetan cities where Chinese can often be heard. [31], Tibetic has extensive written records from the adoption of writing by the Tibetan Empire in the mid-7th century. Other Sino-Tibetan languages with large numbers of speakers include Burmese (33 million) and the Tibetic languages (six million). It was not until Benedict that the inflectional systems of these languages were recognized as (partially) native to the family. And public schools had dropped true bilingual education in Chinese and Tibetan, teaching Tibetan only in a single class, like a foreign language, if they taught it at all. The Lhasa dialect is usually described as having two tones: high and low. Sources vary on whether the [ɛ̈] phone (resulting from /e/ in a closed syllable) and the [ɛ] phone (resulting from /a/ through the i-mutation) are distinct or basically identical. Ket woman. However, in absence of any sort of systematic comparison – whether the data are thought reliable or not – such "subgroupings" are essentially vacuous. The earliest records of Burmese (such as the 12th-century Myazedi inscription) are more limited, but later an extensive literature developed. Andrew Warner examines the imprisonment of Tashi Wangchuk, an activist fighting for Tibetans’ right to use their native language. In normal spoken pronunciation, a lengthening of the vowel is also frequently substituted for the sounds [r] and [l] when they occur at the end of a syllable. Officials had also ordered other monasteries and a private school in the area not to teach the language to laypeople. [99], In contrast, Laurent Sagart proposes a Sino-Austronesian family with Sino-Tibetan and Austronesian (including Kra–Dai as a subbranch) as primary branches. Difficulties have included the great diversity of the langu… [28] For example, recent reconstructions of Old Chinese have reduced Karlgren's 15 vowels to a six-vowel system originally suggested by Nicholas Bodman. [18] Thus, Benedict reconstructed the following initials:[19], Although the initial consonants of cognates tend to have the same place and manner of articulation, voicing and aspiration is often unpredictable. West Himalayish, 4. Conrady's terminology was widely used, but there was uncertainty regarding his exclusion of Vietnamese. In April 2020, classroom instruction was switched from Tibetan to Mandarin Chinese in Ngaba, Sichuan. [50] Tibetan School in Tibet Autonomous Region (TAR) 1st February 2021. They support the proposed name "Trans-Himalayan". [4], The three moods may all occur with all three grammatical persons, though early descriptions associated the personal modal category with European first-person agreement.[5]. [10] Students who continue on to tertiary education have the option of studying humanistic disciplines in Tibetan at a number of minority colleges in China. Cantonese is from the Sino-Tibetan family of languages. In the 18th and 19th centuries several Western linguists arrived in Tibet: Indian indologist and linguist Rahul Sankrityayan wrote a Tibetan grammar in Hindi. [57] Sagart et al. The exclusions of Vietnamese by Kuhn and of Tai and Miao–Yao by Benedict were vindicated in 1954 when André-Georges Haudricourt demonstrated that the tones of Vietnamese were reflexes of final consonants from Proto-Mon–Khmer.[63]. However, Jacques (2006) notes, "comparative work has never been able to put forth evidence for common innovations to all the Tibeto-Burman languages (the Sino-Tibetan languages to the exclusion of Chinese)"[f] and that "it no longer seems justified to treat Chinese as the first branching of the Sino-Tibetan family,"[g] because the morphological divide between Chinese and Tibeto-Burman has been bridged by recent reconstructions of Old Chinese. Much of the adult population in Tibet remains illiterate, and despite compulsory education policies, many parents in rural areas are unable to send their children to school. [5], Studies of the "Indo-Chinese" languages of Southeast Asia from the mid-19th century by Logan and others revealed that they comprised four families: Tibeto-Burman, Tai, Mon–Khmer and Malayo-Polynesian. It is also helpful in reconstructing Proto Sino-Tibetan and Old Chinese. You don’t have to write Chinese languages (Mandarin, Cantonese, Shanghainese, Hokkien, etc.) Standard Tibetan[note 2] is a widely spoken form of the Tibetic languages that has many commonalities with the speech of Lhasa, an Ü-Tsang (Central Tibetan) dialect. [46] Tangut is recorded in a Chinese-inspired logographic script, whose interpretation presents many difficulties, even though multilingual dictionaries have been found. Tashi Wangchuk was sentenced to five years in prison after telling The New York Times that Tibetan language … Roger Blench (2009) argues that agriculture cannot be reconstructed for Proto-Sino-Tibetan, and that the earliest speakers of Sino-Tibetan were not farmers but highly diverse foragers. Most comparative work has used the conservative written forms of these languages, following the dictionaries of Jäschke (Tibetan) and Judson (Burmese), though both contain entries from a wide range of periods. Nungish, 8. In the past decade, similar policy changes first targeted Tibetan- and Uighur- language education, drastically reducing the numbers of language teachers and … [46], The Tibetic languages are spoken by some 6 million people on the Tibetan Plateau and neighbouring areas in the Himalayas and western Sichuan. Tibetan Buddhism is a religion in exile, forced from its homeland when Tibet was conquered by the Chinese. [13] However, Tibetologist Elliot Sperling has noted that "within certain limits the PRC does make efforts to accommodate Tibetan cultural expression" and "the cultural activity taking place all over the Tibetan plateau cannot be ignored. [55] [75], George van Driem (2001) has also proposed a "fallen leaves" model that lists dozens of well-established low-level groups while remaining agnostic about intermediate groupings of these. The issue remains unsolved today. In a survey in the 1937 Chinese Yearbook, Li Fang-Kuei described the family as consisting of four branches:[61][62], Tai and Miao–Yao were included because they shared isolating typology, tone systems and some vocabulary with Chinese. Tibetan pinyin, however, is the official romanization system employed by the government of the People's Republic of China. Languages of the Karen group have been greatly influenced by languages of the Tai and Austro-Asiatic families. "Tibetan schools are forced to teach students in Chinese as the primary language rather than Tibetan. At the time, tone was considered so fundamental to language that tonal typology could be used as the basis for classification. [10][11] He divided them into three groups: Tibeto-Burman, Chinese and Tai,[10] and was uncertain about the affinity of Karen and Hmong–Mien. Part of the evidence used in court was a New York Times video entitled, "Tashi Wangchuk: A Tibetan's Journey for Justice" by Jonah M. Kessel. [80] However, Chinese and Bai differ from almost all other subject–verb–object languages in the world in placing relative clauses before the nouns they modify. Although the empire collapsed in the 9th century, Classical Tibetan remained influential as the liturgical language of Tibetan Buddhism. [15], Benedict completed the manuscript of his work in 1941, but it was not published until 1972. [12] Literacy and enrollment rates continue to be the main concern of the Chinese government. Several low-level subgroups have been securely reconstructed, but reconstruction of a proto-language for the family as a whole is still at an early stage, so the higher-level structure of Sino-Tibetan remains unclear. Other Burmish languages are still spoken in Dehong Prefecture in the far west of Yunnan. Wylie transliteration is the most common system of romanization used by Western scholars in rendering written Tibetan using the Latin alphabet (such as employed on much of this page). In addition, many of the smaller languages are spoken in mountainous areas that are difficult to access, and are often also sensitive border zones. [37][38] Most of the current spread of Sino-Tibetan languages is the result of historical expansions of the three groups with the most speakers – Chinese, Burmese and Tibetic – replacing an unknown number of earlier languages. Beyond the traditionally recognized families of Southeast Asia, a number of possible broader relationships have been suggested: One of these is the "Sino-Caucasian" hypothesis of Sergei Starostin, which posits that the Yeniseian languages and North Caucasian languages form a clade with Sino-Tibetan. Many Chinese linguists continue to follow Li's classification. In addition, Kam–Tai itself no longer appears to be a valid node within Kra–Dai. Kachinish, 14. Burmish–Lolish, 13. The most important Tibetan branch of language under threat is, however, the Ladakhi language of the Western Tibetan group, in the Ladakh region of India. See, for example, the "Sino-Tibetan" (汉藏语系. Julius Klaproth had noted in 1823 that Burmese, Tibetan and Chinese all shared common basic vocabulary but that Thai, Mon, and Vietnamese were quite different. Sergei Starostin proposed that both the Kiranti languages and Chinese are divergent from a "core" Tibeto-Burman of at least Bodish, Lolo-Burmese, Tamangic, Jinghpaw, Kukish, and Karen (other families were not analysed) in a hypothesis called Sino-Kiranti. Volume 60, Number 1, February 2008, pp. Tibetan Who Spoke Out for Language Rights Is Freed From Chinese Prison. [43] Maslak, Mary Ann. Several low-level branches of the family, particularly Lolo-Burmese, have been securely reconstructed, but in the absence of a secure reconstruction of a Sino-Tibetan proto-language, the higher-level structure of the family remains unclear. [54] Roger Blench and Mark Post (2014) have proposed that the Sino-Tibetan homeland is Northeast India, the area of greatest diversity, around 7000 BC. One of these, *-s, is believed to be a suffix, with cognates in other Sino-Tibetan languages. George van Driem (2005) proposes that Sino-Tibetan originated in the Sichuan Basin before 7000 BC, with an early migration into northeast India, and a later migration north of the predecessors of Chinese and Tibetic. By the 11th century their Pagan Kingdom had expanded over the whole basin. Introduction and bibliography, 2. [27] Some proposals were based on cognates in other Sino-Tibetan languages, though workers have also found solely Chinese evidence for them. Sino-Tibetan Etymological Dictionary and Thesaurus. Scholars have sought to reconstruct the phonology of Old Chinese by comparing the obscure descriptions of the sounds of Middle Chinese in medieval dictionaries with phonetic elements in Chinese characters and the rhyming patterns of early poetry. They find that the evidence for the subclassification or even ST affiliation at all of several minor languages of northeastern India, in particular, is either poor or absent altogether. [13], In 1935, the anthropologist Alfred Kroeber started the Sino-Tibetan Philology Project, funded by the Works Project Administration and based at the University of California, Berkeley. Tibetans speak a number of languages. The result is that the first is pronounced as an open syllable but retains the vowel typical of a closed syllable. [35] While this has been considered evidence for a separate Tibeto-Burman subgroup, Hill (2014) finds that Burmese has distinct correspondences for Old Chinese rhymes -ay : *-aj and -i : *-əj, and hence argues that the development *ə > *a occurred independently in Tibetan and Burmese. The written language is based on Classical Tibetan and is highly conservative. Assimilation of Classical Tibetan's suffixes, normally ‘i (འི་), at the end of a word produces a long vowel in Lhasa Tibetan; the feature is sometimes omitted in phonetic transcriptions. Sino-Tibetan, also known as Trans-Himalayan in a few sources, is a family of more than 400 languages, second only to Indo-European in number of native speakers. The internal structure of Sino-Tibetan has been tentatively revised as the following Stammbaum by Matisoff (2015: xxxii, 1123-1127) in the final print release of the Sino-Tibetan Etymological Dictionary and Thesaurus (STEDT). Tournadre and Sangda Dorje describe eight vowels in the standard language: Three additional vowels are sometimes described as significantly distinct: [ʌ] or [ə], which is normally an allophone of /a/; [ɔ], which is normally an allophone of /o/; and [ɛ̈] (an unrounded, centralised, mid front vowel), which is normally an allophone of /e/. Lawmakers in the House approved a bill Tuesday afternoon to update the 2002 Tibetan Policy Act, the latest in a series of congressional moves to strengthen America's stance towards China. Although Chinese, Tibetan and Burmese languages sound completely different from one another, they are all derived from a common ancestral tongue. [76] It was cited together with the lack of reconstructable shared morphology, and evidence that much shared lexical material has been borrowed from Chinese into Tibeto-Burman, by Christopher Beckwith, one of the few scholars still arguing that Chinese is not related to Tibeto-Burman. ), both amongst each other and to the other languages of the family, remain unclear. The Sino-Caucasian hypothesis has been expanded by others to "Dené–Caucasian" to include the Na-Dené languages of North America, Burushaski, Basque and, occasionally, Etruscan. Benedict overtly excluded Vietnamese (placing it in Mon–Khmer) as well as Hmong–Mien and Kra–Dai (placing them in Austro-Tai). He calls the entire family "Tibeto-Burman", a name he says has historical primacy,[73] but other linguists who reject a privileged position for Chinese nevertheless continue to call the resulting family "Sino-Tibetan". In fact, Mandarin itself is only a dialect—albeit a widespread one—of the overarching language group of “Chinese,” which itself comes from the Sino-Tibetan family of languages. [26], Karlgren's reconstruction was somewhat unwieldy, with many sounds having a highly non-uniform distribution. [82][83] This has been criticized as being insufficiently corroborated by Djamouri et al 2007, who instead reconstruct a VO order for Proto-Sino-Tibetan. In the Western scholarly community, these languages are no longer included in Sino-Tibetan, with the similarities attributed to diffusion across the Mainland Southeast Asia linguistic area, especially since Benedict (1942). Leading scholars believe the Karen languages to be related to the Tibeto-Burman group of the Sino-Tibetan language family, but the relationship does not appear to be a close one. Under their direction, the staff of 30 non-linguists collated all the available documentation of Sino-Tibetan languages. ... the Tibetan language has been replaced with Mandarin similar to that in Xinjiang. [20] Certain names may also retain irregular transcriptions, such as Chomolungma for Mount Everest. Scholars disagree over the extent to which the agreement system in the various languages can be reconstructed for the proto-language. However, the reconstruction of the family is much less developed than for families such as Indo-European or Austroasiatic. (2010). The Proto-Sino-Tibetan (PST) homeland seems to have been somewhere on the Himalayan plateau, where the great rivers of East and Southeast Asia (including the Yellow, Yangtze, Mekong, Brahmaputra, Salween, and Irrawaddy) have their source.

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