is tibetan language similar to chinese
Grammatical constituents broadly have head-final word order: Unlike many other languages of East Asia and especially Chinese, another Sino-Tibetan language, there are no numeral auxiliaries or measure words used in counting in Tibetan although words expressive of a collective or integral are often used after the tens, sometimes after a smaller number. The Chinese government occupied Tibet in 1950 and has ever since tried to control the region. [5], Studies of the "Indo-Chinese" languages of Southeast Asia from the mid-19th century by Logan and others revealed that they comprised four families: Tibeto-Burman, Tai, Mon–Khmer and Malayo-Polynesian. The dialect of the upper social strata in Lhasa does not use voiced stops in the low tone. The highlands stretching from northeast India to northern Myanmar contain over 100 high-diverse Sino-Tibetan languages. West Himalayish, 4. The name "Tibeto-Burman" was first applied to this group in 1856 by James Richardson Logan, who added Karen in 1858. Cantonese is from the Sino-Tibetan family of languages. Some 40 well-established subgroups, of which those with the most speakers are: a number of other small families and isolates as primary branches (, Families with more than 30 languages are in, This page was last edited on 24 January 2021, at 12:30. Until the 1980s, the best-studied areas were Nepal and northern Thailand. First, there are a number of parallels between the morphology of Old Chinese and the modern Bodic languages. Bruhn, Daniel; Lowe, John; Mortensen, David; Yu, Dominic (2015). Difficulties have included the great diversity of the langu… The difference occurs only in certain words ending in the sounds [m] or [ŋ]; for instance, the word kham (Tibetan: ཁམ་, "piece") is pronounced [kʰám] with a high flat tone, whereas the word Khams (Tibetan: ཁམས་, "the Kham region") is pronounced [kʰâm] with a high falling tone. Benedict overtly excluded Vietnamese (placing it in Mon–Khmer) as well as Hmong–Mien and Kra–Dai (placing them in Austro-Tai). Sergei Starostin proposed that both the Kiranti languages and Chinese are divergent from a "core" Tibeto-Burman of at least Bodish, Lolo-Burmese, Tamangic, Jinghpaw, Kukish, and Karen (other families were not analysed) in a hypothesis called Sino-Kiranti. Hruso, 10. Scholars have sought to reconstruct the phonology of Old Chinese by comparing the obscure descriptions of the sounds of Middle Chinese in medieval dictionaries with phonetic elements in Chinese characters and the rhyming patterns of early poetry. China: An International Journal. Tashi Wangchuk was sentenced to five years in prison after telling The New York Times that Tibetan language … However, the reconstruction of the family is much less developed than for families such as Indo-European or Austroasiatic. The internal structure of Sino-Tibetan has been tentatively revised as the following Stammbaum by Matisoff (2015: xxxii, 1123-1127) in the final print release of the Sino-Tibetan Etymological Dictionary and Thesaurus (STEDT). [12] Literacy and enrollment rates continue to be the main concern of the Chinese government. At the time, tone was considered so fundamental to language that tonal typology could be used as the basis for classification. 'Our people's culture is fading and being wiped out.'"[16]. While the service had been running constantly for decades, experts said China keeps jamming radio signals for both the Tibetan and the Chinese services. "Education in Rural Tibet: Development, Problems and Adaptations". For this reason, Standard Tibetan is often called Lhasa Tibetan. The standard Tibetan verbal system distinguishes four tenses and three evidential moods. The proposal takes two forms: that Sinitic and Kiranti are themselves a valid node or that the two are not demonstrably close, so that Sino-Tibetan has three primary branches: Van Driem, like Shafer, rejects a primary split between Chinese and the rest, suggesting that Chinese owes its traditional privileged place in Sino-Tibetan to historical, typological, and cultural, rather than linguistic, criteria. The written language is based on Classical Tibetan and is highly conservative. The Proto-Sino-Tibetan (PST) homeland seems to have been somewhere on the Himalayan plateau, where the great rivers of East and Southeast Asia (including the Yellow, Yangtze, Mekong, Brahmaputra, Salween, and Irrawaddy) have their source. Certain names may also retain irregular transcriptions, such as Chomolungma for Mount Everest. Several links to other language families have been proposed, but none has broad acceptance. Of particular interest was the discovery of a new branch of the family, the Qiangic languages of western Sichuan and adjacent areas.[40][41]. [15], Benedict completed the manuscript of his work in 1941, but it was not published until 1972. Sino-Tibetan Etymological Dictionary and Thesaurus. Some of his other works on Tibetan were: In much of Tibet, primary education is conducted either primarily or entirely in the Tibetan language, and bilingual education is rarely introduced before students reach middle school. THL Tibetan to English Translation Tool - A webpage that annotates Tibetan text various English meanings and translations, with 10+ dictionaries integrated. [59][60] The project was supervised by Robert Shafer until late 1938, and then by Paul K. Benedict. The volumes were: 1. The Act, signed into law by President Donald Trump in December 2018 calls for denying access to the US for Chinese officials known to be involved in restricting visits to Tibet. Based on a dataset of 50 Sino-Tibetan languages, we infer phylogenies that date the origin of the language family to around 7200 B.P., linking the origin of the language family with the late Cishan and the early Yangshao cultures. [80] However, Chinese and Bai differ from almost all other subject–verb–object languages in the world in placing relative clauses before the nouns they modify. In a survey in the 1937 Chinese Yearbook, Li Fang-Kuei described the family as consisting of four branches:[61][62], Tai and Miao–Yao were included because they shared isolating typology, tone systems and some vocabulary with Chinese. [51], There have been a range of proposals for the Sino-Tibetan urheimat, reflecting the uncertainty about the classification of the family and its time depth. [note 3] Tibetan is an official[note 4] language of the Tibet Autonomous Region of the People's Republic of China. [48] Roger Blench and Mark W. Post have criticized the applicability of conventional Sino-Tibetan classification schemes to minor languages lacking an extensive written history (unlike Chinese, Tibetic, and Burmese). While Chinese linguists generally include Kra–Dai and Hmong–Mien languages within Sino-Tibetan, most other linguists have excluded them since the 1940s. [17][34] He found that Tibetic and Burmese /a/ correspond to two Old Chinese vowels, *a and *ə. Sources vary on whether the [ɛ̈] phone (resulting from /e/ in a closed syllable) and the [ɛ] phone (resulting from /a/ through the i-mutation) are distinct or basically identical. "The diversity of the Tibeto-Burman language family and the linguistic ancestry of Chinese", "What is Sino-Tibetan? Standard Tibetan has a base-10 counting system. [30] A growing number of scholars believe that Old Chinese did not use tones, and that the tones of Middle Chinese developed from final consonants. Second, there is an impressive body of lexical cognates between the Chinese and Bodic languages, represented by the Kirantic language Limbu. [10] Students who continue on to tertiary education have the option of studying humanistic disciplines in Tibetan at a number of minority colleges in China. For example, there is disagreement over whether to include the entire Kra–Dai family or just Kam–Tai (Zhuang–Dong excludes the Kra languages), because the Chinese cognates that form the basis of the putative relationship are not found in all branches of the family and have not been reconstructed for the family as a whole. George van Driem (2005) proposes that Sino-Tibetan originated in the Sichuan Basin before 7000 BC, with an early migration into northeast India, and a later migration north of the predecessors of Chinese and Tibetic. August Conrady called this group Indo-Chinese in his influential 1896 classification, though he had doubts about Karen. From Amy Adams to Vivian Richards, celebs raise awareness about Freedom for Tibet movement. Ernst Kuhn envisaged a group with two branches, Chinese-Siamese and Tibeto-Burman. Tibetan Buddhism is a religion in exile, forced from its homeland when Tibet was conquered by the Chinese. [20] A genetic relationship between Chinese, Tibetan, Burmese and other languages was first proposed in the early 19th century and is now broadly accepted. [39] [33], Gong Hwang-cherng has compared Old Chinese, Tibetic, Burmese and Tangut in an effort to establish sound correspondences between those languages. He calls the entire family "Tibeto-Burman", a name he says has historical primacy,[73] but other linguists who reject a privileged position for Chinese nevertheless continue to call the resulting family "Sino-Tibetan". In terms of numbers of speakers, they constitute the world’s second largest language family (after Indo-European ), including more than 300 languages and major dialects. However, Jacques (2006) notes, "comparative work has never been able to put forth evidence for common innovations to all the Tibeto-Burman languages (the Sino-Tibetan languages to the exclusion of Chinese)"[f] and that "it no longer seems justified to treat Chinese as the first branching of the Sino-Tibetan family,"[g] because the morphological divide between Chinese and Tibeto-Burman has been bridged by recent reconstructions of Old Chinese. The First Siberian Language Connected to Native American Languages. And in places like Tibet and Xinjiang, ethnic language, culture and religion have come under increasing restrictions. The remaining languages are spoken in mountainous areas, along the southern slopes of the Himalayas, the Southeast Asian Massif and the eastern edge of the Tibetan Plateau. [8][9], Jean Przyluski introduced the French term sino-tibétain as the title of his chapter on the group in Meillet and Cohen's Les langues du monde in 1924. [4], The three moods may all occur with all three grammatical persons, though early descriptions associated the personal modal category with European first-person agreement.[5]. (2019) also performed another phylogenetic analysis based on different data and methods to arrive at the same conclusions with respect to the homeland and divergence model, but proposed an earlier root age of approximately 7,200 years ago, associating its origin with the late Cishan and early Yangshao culture.[58]. However, in absence of any sort of systematic comparison – whether the data are thought reliable or not – such "subgroupings" are essentially vacuous. Tournadre and Sangda Dorje describe eight vowels in the standard language: Three additional vowels are sometimes described as significantly distinct: [ʌ] or [ə], which is normally an allophone of /a/; [ɔ], which is normally an allophone of /o/; and [ɛ̈] (an unrounded, centralised, mid front vowel), which is normally an allophone of /e/. [54] Roger Blench and Mark Post (2014) have proposed that the Sino-Tibetan homeland is Northeast India, the area of greatest diversity, around 7000 BC. In some unusual cases, the vowels /a/, /u/, and /o/ may also be nasalised. In addition, many of the smaller languages are spoken in mountainous areas that are difficult to access, and are often also sensitive border zones. In 1959, after years of Chinese oppression, there was a Tibetan uprising where residents of the region demanded their autonomy and freedom from their oppressors. [49], The remaining languages are spoken in upland areas. James Matisoff (1991) places it in the eastern part of the Tibetan plateau around 4000 BC, with the various groups migrating out down the Yellow, Yangtze, Mekong, Salween and Brahmaputra rivers. In April 2020, classroom instruction was switched from Tibetan to Mandarin Chinese in Ngaba, Sichuan. [28] For example, recent reconstructions of Old Chinese have reduced Karlgren's 15 vowels to a six-vowel system originally suggested by Nicholas Bodman. Most comparative work has used the conservative written forms of these languages, following the dictionaries of Jäschke (Tibetan) and Judson (Burmese), though both contain entries from a wide range of periods. Most of these have small speech communities in remote mountain areas, and as such are poorly documented. The Sino-Caucasian hypothesis has been expanded by others to "Dené–Caucasian" to include the Na-Dené languages of North America, Burushaski, Basque and, occasionally, Etruscan. February 22, 2021. [82][83] This has been criticized as being insufficiently corroborated by Djamouri et al 2007, who instead reconstruct a VO order for Proto-Sino-Tibetan. Students who continue on to tertiary education have the option of studying humanisticdisciplines in Tibetan at a number of minority colleges i… Proportion of first-language speakers of larger branches of Sino-Tibetan[42], By far the largest branch are the Sinitic languages, with 1.3 billion speakers, most of whom live in the eastern half of China. [29] Similarly, Karlgren's *l has been recast as *r, with a different initial interpreted as *l, matching Tibeto-Burman cognates, but also supported by Chinese transcriptions of foreign names. Much of the adult population in Tibet remains illiterate, and despite compulsory education policies, many parents in rural areas are unable to send their children to school. [71][72] Matisoff (2015: xxxi) acknowledges that the position of Chinese as either a sister branch of Tibeto-Burman or a branch within Tibeto-Burman remains an open question. For Shafer, the suffix "-ic" denoted a primary division of the family, whereas the suffix "-ish" denoted a sub-division of one of those. In normal spoken pronunciation, a lengthening of the vowel is also frequently substituted for the sounds [r] and [l] when they occur at the end of a syllable. 2003. Tibetan was the main language of instruction in 98% of TAR primary schools in 1996; today, Mandarin is introduced in early grades only in urban schools.... Because less than four out of ten TAR Tibetans reach secondary school, primary school matters most for their cultural formation. [5][b] However, rather than placing them in a geographic grouping, as Matisoff does, van Driem leaves them unclassified. [84], Hodgson had in 1849 noted a dichotomy between "pronominalized" (inflecting) languages, stretching across the Himalayas from Himachal Pradesh to eastern Nepal, and "non-pronominalized" (isolating) languages. At one time it was thought that 1 in 6 Tibetan … Wylie transliteration is the most common system of romanization used by Western scholars in rendering written Tibetan using the Latin alphabet (such as employed on much of this page). The initial focus on languages of civilizations with long literary traditions has been broadened to include less widely spoken languages, some of which have only recently, or never, been written. In the 18th and 19th centuries several Western linguists arrived in Tibet: Indian indologist and linguist Rahul Sankrityayan wrote a Tibetan grammar in Hindi. a language related to Chinese (and Burmese, and a good many other languages of the Himalayas, South-East Asia and western China). Southernmost are the Karen languages, spoken by 4 million people in the hill country along the Myanmar–Thailand border, with the greatest diversity in the Karen Hills, which are believed to be the homeland of the group. It was cited together with the lack of reconstructable shared morphology, and evidence that much shared lexical material has been borrowed from Chinese into Tibeto-Burman, by Christopher Beckwith, one of the few scholars still arguing that Chinese is not related to Tibeto-Burman. See, for example, the "Sino-Tibetan" (汉藏语系. [3][4] "[14], Some scholars also question such claims because most Tibetans continue to reside in rural areas where Chinese is rarely spoken, as opposed to Lhasa and other Tibetan cities where Chinese can often be heard. Machine translation software and applications, བོད་ཡིག་བརྡ་ཚད་ལྡན་དུ་སྒྱུར་བའི་ལས་དོན་ཨུ་ཡོན་ལྷན་ཁང་གིས་བསྒྲིགས་, Local languages such as Tibetan have official status. Tangut is recorded in a Chinese-inspired logographic script, whose interpretation presents many difficulties, even though multilingual dictionaries have been found. A Tibetan case reveals how the Chinese Communist Party coerces communities worldwide. Leading scholars believe the Karen languages to be related to the Tibeto-Burman group of the Sino-Tibetan language family, but the relationship does not appear to be a close one. "Foundational Questions of Tibetan Morphology. 2 photos. These groups also have the longest literary traditions of the family. Kachinish, 14. While the Uyghurs have been moved to "re-education camps", the Tibetan farmers have been moved to modern housing in or near towns and cities. “We must continue to shine a light on the grave assaults against the Tibetan people’s religion, culture, and language by the Chinese Communist government, both inside Tibet and outside the PRC. [17] He reconstructed a two-way distinction on initial consonants based on voicing, with aspiration conditioned by pre-initial consonants that had been retained in Tibetic but lost in many other languages. Phonemic vowel length exists in Lhasa Tibetan but in a restricted set of circumstances. Assimilation of Classical Tibetan's suffixes, normally ‘i (འི་), at the end of a word produces a long vowel in Lhasa Tibetan; the feature is sometimes omitted in phonetic transcriptions. This means that from the point of view of phonological typology, Tibetan could more accurately be described as a pitch-accent language than a true tone language, in which all syllables in a word can carry their own tone. [96][97][98], Geoffrey Caveney (2014) suggest that the Sino-Tibetan and Na-Dene languages are related but say that his analysis does not support the Sino-Caucasian or Dene-Caucasian hypothesis. The use of pseudo-genetic labels such as "Himalayish" and "Kamarupan" inevitably give an impression of coherence which is at best misleading. Both languages are recorded in alphabetic scripts ultimately derived from the Brahmi script of Ancient India. Baric, 12. Most of the smaller Sino-Tibetan languages are spoken in inaccessible mountainous areas, many of which are politically or militarily sensitive and thus closed to investigators. The result is that the first is pronounced as an open syllable but retains the vowel typical of a closed syllable. Difficulties have included the great diversity of the languages, the lack of inflection in many of them, and the effects of language contact. in Chinese characters—especially Mandarin has a workable transcription system using Roman letters with optional accent marks for the … Kukish, 15. In Leh, a slow but gradual process is underway whereby the Tibetan vernacular is being supplanted by English and Hindi, and there are signs of a gradual loss of Tibetan cultural identity in the area. However, in monosyllabic words, each tone can occur with two distinct contours. [23][24], Benedict also reconstructed, at least for Tibeto-Burman, prefixes such as the causative s-, the intransitive m-, and r-, b- g- and d- of uncertain function, as well as suffixes -s, -t and -n.[25], Old Chinese is by far the oldest recorded Sino-Tibetan language, with inscriptions dating from around 1250 BC and a huge body of literature from the first millennium BC, but the Chinese script is not alphabetic. In the Western scholarly community, these languages are no longer included in Sino-Tibetan, with the similarities attributed to diffusion across the Mainland Southeast Asia linguistic area, especially since Benedict (1942). It is normally safe to distinguish only between the two tones because there are very few minimal pairs that differ only because of contour. Tibetan School in Tibet Autonomous Region (TAR) 1st February 2021. The following summarizes the sound system of the dialect of Tibetan spoken in Lhasa, the most influential variety of the spoken language. [citation needed] The adjacent Balti language is also in severe danger, and unlike Ladakhi, it has already been replaced by Urdu as the main language of Baltistan, particularly due to settlers speaking Urdu from other areas moving to that area. [56], Zhang et al. Bhotish, 3. [100] Stanley Starosta has extended this proposal with a further branch called "Yangzian" joining Hmong–Mien and Austroasiatic.[101]. The validity of the rest of the family, however, is viewed as doubtful or rejected by nearly all historical linguists.