Sino-Tibetan again (was: Re: Alexis on Wald ...)

[Scott DeLancey]

----------------------------Original message----------------------------
On Sun, 22 Feb 1998, Alexander Vovin wrote:
 
> Hmmm... How do you arrive to an estimate of 6,000 years? You obviously do
> not base you calculations on glottochronology (in order to avoid
> unnecessary discussion I should say I don't believe in it either), but
> then what is your *objective* method of calculating time depth for
> established or reconstructed families? I am pretty much afraid that it is
> based on a guess-work, isn't it?
 
Bravo!  This cannot be said often or loudly enough.  It is downright
scandalous, this propensity linguists have for casually attaching
dates to language families.  We have no objective, operationalizable
method for estimating time depths, and no excuse for claiming (or
even imagining) that our eyeball estimates have any validity.
 
> Therefore, we *must* first find this *objective* method of establishing
> time depths for given families.
 
This seems to be a long way off.  (Does anyone have any idea where we
could start?)
 
And, after all that, let's argue about such a suggestion:
 
> I believe that most people would *guess* that Sino-Tibetan is much older
> than 6,000, probably 8,000, and Austroasiatic would get quite the similar
> *guess-work* estimate.
 
You're no doubt right about the preponderance of opinion, and some
would certainly assert these guesses quite vehemently.  In the case of
Sino-Tibetan, however, there's lots of room for disagreement.  (A-A
indeed looks very old, but I don't know the family well enough to say
much beyond that).  Tibeto-Burman is a pretty diversified
family, in the sense that it includes a large number of quite distinct
languages, but not so distinct that it isn't fairly easy to
recognize a T-B language when you see it.  You don't get a lot of
cognate grammar across T-B, which implies significant time depth;
on the other hand, there's reason to think (from looking at languages
with substantial history, like Tibetan, and relatively shallow sub-
branches, like Lolo-Burmese) that grammatical machinery tends to
develop and be replaced pretty quickly in these languages.
     Chinese and T-B, of course, are radically divergent, in structure
as well as lexicon, and this is the primary argument for attributing
great time depth to S-T.  But there's good reason to think that
the reason for this divergence is an extended period of intimate
contact between pre-Chinese and indigenous languages in south China
(Kadai was definitely a major factor, and A-A and Austronesian
probably also involved).  Massive areal influence of this kind can
result in substantial changes in a language in a relatively short
time.  I have no basis on which to commit myself to one guess or
another, but in my opinion it is not at all outside the realm of
possibility that the time depth for S-T could be as little as 4-5,000
years.
 
Scott DeLancey
Department of Linguistics
University of Oregon
Eugene, OR 97403, USA
 
delancey at darkwing.uoregon.edu
http://www.uoregon.edu/~delancey/prohp.html