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

[Scott DeLancey]

----------------------------Original message----------------------------
On Mon, 23 Feb 1998, Miguel Carrasquer Vidal wrote:
 
> Scott DeLancey <delancey at darkwing.uoregon.edu> wrote:
> >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.
>
> Yes, for Min, Cantonese, Hakka, etc.  But how does that affect
> Mandarin?
 
Mandarin, except for a few creeping agglutinative tendencies
(which Mantaro Hashimoto always attributed to Altaic influence)
is a pretty typical Southeast Asian language, very similar in
structure to Thai or Vietnamese.
 
> >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.
>
> On the other hand, there is no reason to ignore recorded history,
> which would put the origins of the Shang dynasty c. 2,000 BC, or
> archaeology, which traces the Northern Chinese Neolithic (Yangshao) to
> c. 4,000 BC.  It doesn't seem unreasonable to think of the start of
> the Yangshao culture as a terminus ante quem for the breakup of S-T, a
> minimum time-depth of 6,000 years.
 
Good point.  Recorded history is of course inescapable, and that's why
I set the minimum time depth at 4,000 BP.  Archeology is always trickier,
but it does give us something objective to hold on to.  I agree that
linking the formation of Chinese to Yangshao is not "unreasonable",
and indeed is probably the best available hypothesis.  I would still
argue, though, that there's no compelling *linguistic* argument for
insisting that PST must necessarily be that old.
 
Scott DeLancey
Department of Linguistics
University of Oregon
Eugene, OR 97403, USA
 
delancey at darkwing.uoregon.edu
http://www.uoregon.edu/~delancey/prohp.html