Sino-Tibetan (was: Re: Arabic and IE)

[Scott DeLancey]

----------------------------Original message----------------------------
On Mon, 1 Feb 1999, Alexis Manaster-Ramer wrote:

> > Is Sino-Tibetan controversial  (Roy A. Miller fights it ruthlessly, but he
> > seems to be the only one) ?
>
> I seem to recall Sagart attacking ST as well. Certainly the
> state of ST lx is not satisfactory.

Hmmm ... "not satisfactory"?  You could say that about any language
family, I suppose.  I won't be satisfied with Indo-European until
there's some consensus on the subgrouping of the major branches,
for example.  And the state of Altaic linguistics has been discussed
often enough here, and elsewhere ...

But if you mean to imply that there is serious room for doubt about the
genetic unity of Sino-Tibetan, I don't think that's the case.  The
older opposition to the idea stems primarily from a gross misunderstanding
of the relevance of typology.  I can't imagine that on this list we
have to go very far into the argument that Chinese and Tibeto-Burman
can't be related because they are so typologically dissimilar, or
the converse (often held by exactly the same people) that Chinese
must be related to Tai because they are so typologically congruent.

More legitimately, I've heard the argument made (by Chris Beckwith,
I think, among others, though he shouldn't be held hostage to my
imperfect memory) that ST can't be considered *proven* because the
lack of morphology in Chinese makes it impossible to find the kind
of nice syntagmatic and paradigmatic morphological correspondences
that make us so confident of Indo-European or Semitic or Algic.
This of course isn't really an argument *against* ST unity, only
a healthy cautionary note.  But let us remember that at least
certain morphological *processes* can be reconstructed for pre-Old
Chinese which are strikingly parallel to attested TB morphology,
most strikingly an *-s suffix with a range of functions, especially
derivation of nouns.  Since this morphology is derivational, and
was already somewhat decayed and hence unsystematic at the earliest
stage of Chinese which we can reconstruct, no one has been able
to find much in the way of paradigmatic sets of cognates, but
there are lots of cognate sets where a one form in Chinese corresponds
to one of a set in Tibetan, or vice versa.

As for Sagart, he is indeed convinced that the Chinese-TB link is
a chimaera, but as far as I know he is the only working Sino-Tibetan
linguist who takes that view, and I cannot for the life of me see
what his argument is.  (And I'm far from alone in that).  On the
one hand, he has identified some significant Austronesian elements
in the Chinese vocabulary, but this is hardly surprising (or new;
Tsu-lin Mei and Jerry Norman pointed some of that out 30 years ago).
And he would like to build a case for a special genetic relationship
between Chinese and Austronesian, which would indeed require splitting
Chinese off from TB.  But I have to say that the few arguments I've
seen of his *against* ST are not impressive, to put it diplomatically.

Scott DeLancey
Department of Linguistics
University of Oregon
Eugene, OR 97403, USA

delancey at darkwing.uoregon.edu
http://www.uoregon.edu/~delancey/prohp.html