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

[WB (in Frankfurt today)]

----------------------------Original message----------------------------
I will not get into the various comments on the quality
of Laurent Sagart's work on SIno-Austronesian which have
been floating around on this list during the last few days,
since most of them were so superficial and based upon 
hearsay and faint recollections to such an astonishing 
degree, that I do not consider it worthwhile. Instead, I 
have forwarded the exchange on ST and AN to Sagart, who, 
I am sure, is qualified much better than me to reply to 
the issues raised in the various postings by Alexis, Scott
et al. Let me just stress, however, since it is _very_ easy
on a general discussion list like HISTLING, which deals 
with so many different language families and genetic theories,
to generate wrong, and possibly, longlived impressions to 
the effect that the work of Sagart belongs into the cate-
gory of "weird speculations", that he is somehow involun-
tarily stuck with a "dead-wrong" idea which he fears to 
withdraw, that he does not know the langugaes he is working
on etc. etc., that nothing could be further from the truth
(see Sagart's own posting on Sino-Austronesian).

As far as the Old Chinese side of the comparison is con-
cerned, it should be pointed out that Sagart has written 
the _only_ serious comment on Baxter's _Handbook_ (_Dia-
chronica_ X [1993] 2: 237-260; with the exception of EG
Pulleyblank, who does not accept the six-vowel system
at all and argues from a totally different perspective),
that he is now certainly the most active scholar working
on Old Chinese morphology and root-theory (watch out for
his forthcoming book, J. Benjamins), and that he has pu-
blished widely on a variety of crucial issues in Old Chinese
reconstruction (for a list of his publications cf. http://
www.ehess.fr/centres/crlao/crlao.html), which are extremely
important, irrespective of what your favorite position on
the external relationships of OC might be. I believe to 
be entitled to say this, since I among the very few people
who have ever tried to take Sagart's criticisms of some of
the details of Baxter's reconstruction seriously by testing
them against a corpus of uncorrupted bronze inscriptional
sources, rather than edited texts (for an online-abstract
of my dissertation see <http://linguistlist.org/diss/diss-
html/17534.html>, for a more extended version cf. _Cahiers
de Linguistique — Asie Orientale_ 26 [1997] 1), and since 
Sagart's observations have been by and large corroborated
by these data. My own views on ST and ST-AN notwithstanding
(for which see my review of the volume by WSY Wang, quoted
by Alexis, in one of the last issues of _Language_), I would
appreciate it if those who think that Sagart's AN -- ST com-
parisons are wrong, or who criticize his reassinging certain
"classical" ST reconstructions to the layer of TB -- OC  
borrowings, should present some evidence to substantiate 
their criticisms. 

This said, here are a few more impressionistic comments 
(sorry if this is in a wrong chronological order --- HISTLING 
messages have reached me in a totally chaotic succession
recently):


At 16:58 04.02.99 EST, Alexis wrote

AMR| [...] so too I think
AMR| that the few critics of ST are really reaction to the
AMR| unsatisfactory state of the actual work on ST (and
AMR| again just as in Altaic to some extent I suspect that
AMR| Miller is reacting to ST as it was some decades ago
AMR| esp. to Benedict's work much as the anti-Altaicists
AMR| are still really responding to the errors of Ramstedt
AMR| in the 50s and Poppe in the 60s).

True up to a certain degree (Miller's reviews of Benedicts's 
_Conspectus_, Shafer's _Introduction to Sino-Tibetan_, and 
Sedlaachek's _Das Gemein-Sino-Tibetische_ etc. are certainly
among the harshest specimens of that genre in the whole post-
war sinological literature). But Miller's famous article on the
subject ("The Sino-Tibetan Hypothesis", _Bulletin of the Institute
of History and Philology_ 59 [1988] 2: 509-540) does _not_ refer
to the work on ST during the 60ies and 70ies, it is in fact nothing
more than an extended review article on W. South Coblin's _A Sino-
logist's Handlist of Sino-Tibetan Lexical Comparisons_ (Monumenta
Serica Monograph Series; 18, Nettetal: Steyler Verlag 1988). Notice
that Coblin, the author of many important works and articles on Old
and Medieval Chinese as well as Tibetan, has been reported by Victor
Mair recently to have joined the ranks of those who believe that 
there is no such thing as ST, or at least, it can not be recon-
structed in any meaningful sense of the word. Ditto for recent 
advances in the reconstruction of Old Chinese, which are described 
as "endless rehashing of the same old data", the hermeneutics and 
general feasability of which have been attacked by Coblin, Norman 
and some of his students all over the place, so that the climate 
within OC phonology, is, unfortunately, sometimes not quite as 
pleasant as Alexis would have it. Anyway, I wonder what a review 
of Peiros' & Starostins, _ETymological Dictionary of Five Sino-
Tibetan Languages_ (5fasc., Canberra, 1997?) would look like ...


Alexis continues:

AMR| More legitimately, I've heard the argument made (by Chris Beckwith,
AMR| I think, among others, though he shouldn't be held hostage to my
AMR| imperfect memory) that ST can't be considered *proven* because the
AMR| lack of morphology in Chinese makes it impossible to find the kind
AMR| of nice syntagmatic and paradigmatic morphological correspondences
AMR| that make us so confident of Indo-European or Semitic or Algic.

Possible, although Beckwith' position is more along the lines that 
some of the morphological parallels quoted in favour of ST are depen-
dent on seriously flawed Tibetan data (cf. i.e., contra Pulleyblank,
"The morphological argument for the existence of Sino-Tibetan", in:
_Pan-Asiatic Linguistics; Proceedings of the Fourth Int’l. Symp. on
Languages & Linguistics_, vol. 3: 812-26, Bangkok [:Mahidol UP] 1996),
that Tibetan has genetic links with IE (cf. an article, co-authored 
with M. Walter, published in the proceedings of the Graz meeting on 
Tibetology, the exact bibliographical references of which I cannot 
check here at home), and that Old Chinese might be genealogically 
related to Old Japanese (cf. his contribution at the last SIno-
Tibetan Conference in Lund, October 1998)! 

The other anti-Sino-Tibetan scholar who has been quoted widely in
the literature surrounding the Xinjiang mummy-findings is Tsung-tung
Chang (Frankfurt). Contrary to Pulleyblank, who thinks that PIE is
remotely related to OC _as part of ST_, Chang totally rejects the 
validity of ST (cf. "Indo-European Vocabulary in Old Chinese. A New
Thesis on the Emergence of Chinese Language and Civilization in the
Late Neolithic Age", _Sino-Platonic Papers_ 7 [1988]: 1-56). Since
the controversy around remote connections with IE has been covered 
in a massive (and in parts rather violent!) exchange between EG Pul-
leyblank and Victor Mair in the inaugural issue of _The Int'l. Review
of CHinese Linguistics_ (1996, pp. 1-50, including valuable comments 
by Kortlandt, Sagart, Keightley, Fitzgerald-Huber, WSY Wang; still
heavier rejoinders & surrejoinders still forthcoming in the next 
issue!), I will limit myself to say that Pulleyblank is barely 
exaggerating when he writes that "[Chang's] ... speculations are, 
if anything, less soundly based than those of Edkins (1871) and 
Schlegel (1872) in the middle of the last century. [...] He seems 
innocent of the principle of regularity of sound change and feels 
free to reconstruct Old CHinese forms to match his supposed Indo-
European cognates without any of the troublesome constraints that 
respect for that principle would impose ...".



At 11:51 06.02.99 EST, Alexis wrote about

AMR| ... Austronesian borrowings into Old Chinese.
AMR| Am I missing something?  Is the question whether anyone
AMR| BESIDES Laurent Sagart is finding such borrowings?
AMR| I would like to hear if there is.

Well, first of all, Sagart is of course not the first scholar who
has written about early AN-OC lexical contacts (be they genetical
or borrowings), cf. i.e. the early work of August COnrady (1916, 
1923) and Konrad Wulff (1942). Secondly, Zheng-Zhang Shangfang
(Chinese Academy of Social Sciences), Pan Wuyun (Shanghai) and 
some other PRC scholars who are arguing for a Sino-Austric (+- 
Hmong-Mienic) superfamily have produced & published lists of Sino-
Austric comparanda (of _very_ varying quality). There is also an 
article "A comparison of reconstructed Austronesian, Old Chinese 
and Austronesian" by Lee C. Hogan, _Linguistics of the Tibeto-Burman
Area_ 16 (1993) 2: 1-55. But these are, as far as I can see, essen-
tially lists of lookalikes without anything like a serious compara-
tive framework behind them.


Finally a short historical note re: origins of the debate that
shared morphology is crucial for the demonstration of genetical 
relatedness, Meillet's position on East Asian languages etc. ---

The discussion, as far as concerned with Old Chinese and its 
presumably "isolating" root structure, goes back much further, 
at least to the middle of the 19th century and Georg von der Gabe-
lentz', "Sur la possibilité de prouver l’existence d’une affinité
généalogique entre les langues dites indochinoises" (_Atti del IV 
congresso internazionale degli Orientalisti_, vol. 2: 283-95, 
Florence 1881). Here, the great grammarian of Classical Chinese 
tries to rebut the widespread misconception of his time (and, 
indeed, much of the 20th century as well), that the alleged _mono-
syllabism_ of Old CHinese and the general "aversion du chinois pour
les éléments formels" associated with it would somehow preclude 
the possibility of internal reconstruction and external copmpari-
sons. (On the notion of "monosyllabism", inextricably linked with 
"isolating" during this period cf.  also G. Ineichen, "Historisches
zum Begriff des Monosyllabismus im Chinesischen", _Historiographia 
Linguistica_ 14 [1987] 3: 265-282 and my forthcoming rev. article
on J. PAckard ed., _New approaches to CHinese word formation_, Am-
sterdam 1998), to be published in the _Int'l. Review for CHinese
Linguistics_ (Hong Kong) 1999). Von der Gabelentz shows, how the
Old Chinese pronoun system encapsulates certain elements of in-
flexion (an idea later inherited by Karlgren), and how these could
be possibly matched with similar systems in TB, before concluding,
categorically: "Le monosyllabisme, nous l’avons vu, ne prouve rien". 


Cheers, Wolfgang





~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
  Wolfgang Behr, Lecturer in Chinese History & Philosophy
  Dept. of East Asian Studies, Ruhr-University Bochum, FRG
  mail: OAW, Universitaetsstr. 150, UB-5, 44780 Bochum, FRG
  Fax +49-234-709-4449; <Wolfgang.Behr at ruhr-uni-bochum.de>
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~