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:
> >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.
>
> What I meant was that if this is so, that would imply intimate contact
> with indigenous languages already in *north* China [something which is
> of course entirely plausible, despite the fact that none of these
> indigenous languages have survived].  Unless Mandarin can somehow be
> shown to have S. Chinese roots and not to be the direct continuation
> in the North of "Shang Ur-Chinese".
 
True, the geography, and what we know of the early history, get a
little awkward here.  But there's no way around the fact that all
the Chinese languages, including Mandarin, are perfectly typical
examples of the mainland Southeast Asian Sprachbund, with phonological,
lexical and syntactic structures almost isomorphic with those of Tai
and Vietnamese.  The only plausible interpretation of this is that it
is a result of contact.  It may be relevant that Classical Chinese
looks slightly less thoroughly SEAsian--it doesn't take its classifier
system so seriously, and some people have detected what seem to be
little traces of SOV patterning in it.  And between then and now we
have the Sui and Tang eras, in which there was certainly substantial
southern influence on the national standard language.
 
Scott DeLancey
Department of Linguistics
University of Oregon
Eugene, OR 97403, USA
 
delancey at darkwing.uoregon.edu
http://www.uoregon.edu/~delancey/prohp.html