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

[Scott DeLancey]

Prof. Sagart apparently takes exception to my very brief representation
of his views on Sino-Tibetan.  I confess I don't understand why.  Sagart
(indirectly) writes:

> That is not, and has never been, my view. I have never claimed that ST
is a
> chimera, does not exist, is an invalid construct, etc. In fact, right
from
> the beginning of my work on on Chinese and Austronesian, I have
repeatedly
> cautioned readers against that interpretation of my views. In the
conclusion
> of my first paper (titled =93Chinese and Austronesian are genetically
> related=94), presented in 1990 at a Sino-Tibetan conference in Texas, I
wrote (p. 29):
>
> our claim (i.e., of a genetic unity between Chinese and Austronesian),
it
> must be noted, should not be taken to imply that there exists no genetic
> relationship between Chinese and the TB languages (or, for that matter,
> between AN and Tai-Kadai, Austroasiatic, etc.), but simply that, if such
> relationship exists, it is in any case less close than that between AN
and
> Chinese (...).

This problem--which should be just a rhetorical one, but doesn't always
seem to be--keeps coming up in one form or another, on this list and
elsewhere.  As has just been discussed on the list, if someone asserts
that Semitic is more closely related to Indo-European than to Chadic or
Cushitic, they are denying the reality of Afro-Asiatic, and acknowledging
that all four groups may be (or, even, asserting that they certainly are)
related at some higher level doesn't change that.

Likewise, the claim that Chinese is more closely related to Austronesian
than to Tibeto-Burman denies the reality of Sino-Tibetan.  Sino-Tibetan
refers to the hypothesis that Sinitic, Tibeto-Burman, and Karen (for those
who aren't sure that Karen is T-B proper) form a genetic unit:


                               S-T
                                |
                        ------------------
                        |                |
                       T-B            Sinitic


If T-B and Sinitic are not each other's closest relative, then there
is no such genetic unit as Sino-Tibetan.  To argue that the genetic
position of Chinese is:

                                ??
                                |
                ---------------------------------
                |                               |
                |                        ----------------
                |                        |              |
               T-B                    Sinitic       Austronesian

is to deny the reality of Sino-Tibetan, pure and simple.  Surely this
must be obvious to everybody--why do we need to keep arguing about it?

Then further:

> On p. 301-302 of the same paper (Oceanic Linguitics 33, 2, 1994), I
> discussed the evidence for Sino-Tibetan, concluding p. 302 that the
> relationship, though not implausible, is less well demonstrated than is
> usually assumed, due to evidence of long-term intimate contact, and
>poorly
> understood sound correspondences, this despite evidence of shared basic
> vocabulary and limited shared morphology.

and

> Since 1994, then, my view has been that Chinese and TB *are* genetically
> related, but not as closely as most Sino-Tibetanists think (because the
> genetic layer in the lexicon is thinner than usually assumed),

That is, as of this week, Sagart's claim is a) that there is no genetic
unit corresponding to Sino-Tibetan, and b) that a significant part of
what the rest of the field regards as evidence for S-T as a genetic
unit, when correctly understood, is not evidence for it.

Obviously it was careless of me, in my first posting, to write "the
Chinese-TB link" rather than "Sino-Tibetan", though in the context of
the discussion, and with the definite article, that still does not seem
to me to admit of the interpretation which Sagart apparently wants to
put on it.  Still, I should have been more careful in my choice of words.
To be sure, Sagart has never argued that Chinese and TB are not related at
all.  But he is very explicitly arguing, in his published work and in his
communication to HISTLING, that Sino-Tibetan is a chimaera--which is in
fact the issue that we were discussing.

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

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