Sino-Tibetan

Assembled from 24 blocks · 3 evidence · 33 related

1. Story
2. The family containing the Sinitic languages — Mandarin, Cantonese, Hokkien, Wu and their relatives — together with Tibetan, Burmese and several hundred languages of the Himalayas, upland Southeast Asia and northeastern India. By first-language speakers it is second only to Indo-European, overwhelmingly because of Mandarin. It is also a family whose internal structure is far less settled than its size suggests, for reasons rooted in the languages themselves: extensive monosyllabism, heavy tonal systems and sparse inflectional morphology deprive the comparative method of exactly the material — irregular paradigms and bound affixes — that makes a demonstration hardest to explain away by borrowing. Millennia of intense contact across the region compound the problem. The very existence of a Sinitic-versus-everything-else primary split is disputed, alternative subgroupings place Sinitic well inside the tree, and even the family's name is contested by scholars who prefer Trans-Himalayan on the grounds that the traditional name encodes a bipartite structure that has not been demonstrated.
3. Knowledge
4. The comparative method
5. Sino-Tibetan
6. Connections
7. The comparative method
8. A dated phylogeny puts Sino-Tibetan at roughly seven thousand years
9. A second phylogeny puts the same family at roughly six thousand years
10. Language death
11. Contact, borrowing and the limits of resemblance
12. The regularity of sound change
13. Bayesian phylogenetic dating of language families
14. Sino-Tibetan
15. Afroasiatic
16. Proto-Indo-European
17. Sir William Jones
18. The Neogrammarian doctrine: sound laws admit no exception
19. Glottochronology proposes to date language splits arithmetically
20. Language in the Americas, and its rejection
21. Evidence
22. Supports the reported Sino-Tibetan root age of the order of seven thousand years before present and the association with northern Chinese millet agriculture. V55 verification basis: this session had no access to any source — WebFetch was egress-blocked for every host attempted and the WebSearch budget was exhausted before authoring — so the cited work was not retrieved, and no page, volume or figure quoted from it was re-checked. The age is given as an order of magnitude, not as the paper's point estimate or interval; volume from standing knowledge, page range omitted rather than guessed.
23. Supports the reported Sino-Tibetan root age of the order of six thousand years before present, roughly a millennium younger than the companion study of the same year, on the same family. V55 verification basis: this session had no access to any source — WebFetch was egress-blocked for every host attempted and the WebSearch budget was exhausted before authoring — so the cited work was not retrieved, and no page, volume or figure quoted from it was re-checked. The age is given as an order of magnitude; volume from standing knowledge, page range omitted rather than guessed.
24. Supports the description of a conservative, bibliography-linked classification policy that treats isolates as top-level families, and thereby the point that published family counts differ by policy. V55 verification basis: this session had no access to any source — WebFetch was egress-blocked for every host attempted and the WebSearch budget was exhausted before authoring — so the cited work was not retrieved, and no page, volume or figure quoted from it was re-checked. glottolog.org returned EGRESS_BLOCKED in this session, so no version, family count or language count is quoted anywhere in this pack, and the editorial and institutional attribution is given from standing knowledge.