Talk:Sino-Tibetan languages

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1 Agglutinative vs analytic 2 hypothetical ? 3 A new stub category has been created 4 number of speakers

Agglutinative vs analytic

This article says Sino-Tibetan languages tend to be agglutinative languages, and that page says this is opposite to analytic languages, and that page in turn says Mandarin Chinese is the best example of analytic. I am very confused. --Kaihsu Tai 09:53, 10 Oct 2003 (UTC)

I think there was a mistake; now I am changing agglutinative to analytic. --Kaihsu Tai 09:57, 10 Oct 2003 (UTC)

I think there was mistake too. Mandarin Chinese is a typical analytic language, while Japanese is a typical agglutinative language, but the family of Japanese is not clear yet. --ILovEJPPitoC 11:10, 10 Oct 2003 (UTC)

While the Chinese languages are often isolating (analytic), many Tibeto-Burman languages, such as Meithei, are polysynthetic. It is just a super large family. You may not be able to generalize on this aspect. — ishwar  (SPEAK) 18:59, 2005 Apr 8 (UTC)

hypothetical ?

How can language families be "hypothetical" or "proposed". They either exist or they don't. It doesn't look like they dont exist now and will exist tomorrow. --Jiang 04:45, 6 Apr 2004 (UTC)

Language families can be hypothetical or proposed in the sense that somebody proposes that such and such languages are related and not everybody agrees. A case in point would be the Hopi-Tibetan mirror which claims that the Tibetan word for "sun" is the Hopi word for "moon" and the Tibetan word for "love" is the Hopi word for "hate" (and incredibly enough, the visa versa cases also) thus proving the two languages must somehow be related. See my comments on Talk:Hopi where I do my part to question the this proposed relationship (mainly by asking "show me the money", or in this case "show me the words"). On a more serious note, linguists sometimes disagree as to the membership of various language families. As ILovEJPPitoC points out above, the classification of Japanese is not certain -- is it an Altaic language or a language isolate?

That said, some core language families are recognized by virtually all linguists. Nobody questions the existence of a Indo-European language family, for example, or the Chinese language family, as the evidence is just too strong. The question at hand is — do the vast majority of linguists agree the Sino-Tibetan language family makes sense? As far as I know I think so — it's certainly easy to find plenty of unbiased references that make use of this classification (SIL, etc) — but maybe somebody can dig up credible sources that disagree. In the meantime I'd vote for dropping the proposed adjective. technopilgrim 23:50, 7 Apr 2004 (UTC)

I remember reading in abook on Tibet that the "sino-tibetan language group" was a politically motivated - to contribute in justifying Chinese domination of Tibet. I don't have any sources on that, but considering the impact of ideology on intellectual life in XXth century china, and possibly the blindness of a lot of occidental academia to this, it seems believable. On the other hand, it also seems entirely believeable that some tibetans or pro-tibetan activists just made that up. I'll have to do a bit of research on this.

Everyone agrees there are a large number of cognate words between the two languages. The question is how this happened. Did the two languages share a common root or is this the result of cross-language borrowing? According to the comparative method of linguist study, questions of this type are resolved by looking at the words used to name the most quotidian objects ("sun", "water", "finger", "dog", "three", "sleep", "son", etc.). Per this theory, these basic words are more resistant to foreign language borrowing than words used for more exotic and abstract concepts. If linguists find a strong correspondence in these simple words, then two languages are assumed to share a common heritage language. This is the case with Tibetan and Chinese. (Which isn't to say that the People's Republic of China is above using this finding for sinister purposes.) technopilgrim 21:42, 21 Sep 2004 (UTC)

Yes, the connection of Chinese languages to Tibeto-Burman languages is not uncontroversial. — ishwar  (SPEAK) 19:03, 2005 Apr 8 (UTC)

Actually, the special place of Chinese within Sino-Tibetan (two branches, Chinese vs. all of Tibeto-Burman) may also be politically motivated: the idea that big, important languages should have important placement withing the classification. You see this over and over: Semitic within "Hamo-Semitic" (two branches, Semitic vs everything else), the special prominence given to Bantu, to Polynesian within Malayo-Polynesian, etc, even though these are (cladistically) minor sub-sub-branches of their families. Indeed, just as Semitic, Bantu, and Polynesian were eventually "demoted", despite vociferous opposition from specialists of those languages, several recent classifications have concluded that the Chinese languages form just another sub-branch of Tibeto-Burman, no more important linguistically than the Tibetan, Newari, or Kiranti languages. Rather like English within Indo-European: a large number of speakers doesn't give it a "privileged" place within the classification. Such ideas are not popular among Chinese linguists, however; how much of the opposition is justified by good linguistics and how much is due to pride I don't know. — kwami 04:22, 9 Apr 2005 (UTC)

So, in other words, you're stating that you dispute the Anglo-Indic language family? What cheek! --Ryanaxp 04:10, Jun 12, 2005 (UTC)

A new stub category has been created

A new stub category has been created specifically for Sino-Tibetan languages: Template:Tl. Use {{st-lang-stub}} rather than {{stub}} or {{lang-stub}} to label stubs on Sino-Tibetan languages as such.

Stub categorizing is a convenient way to keep track of Sino-Tibetan-related stubs and additionally helps in keeping the category of language stubs usable. Whoever feels like it, is invited to browse Category:Language stubs to sift out any Sino-Tibetan language stubs... Thanks!

For discussion see: WP:WSS/Stub types#Language and literature and WP:WSS/Criteria#Split of lang-stub. — mark ✎ 23:20, 4 Jun 2005 (UTC)

number of speakers

it seems that sino-tibetan langauges have the largest number of speakers and not the indo-european languages, as is said in the entry "Sino-Tibetan languages".

here's a list from SIL on the most commonly spoken languages in the world: http://www2.ignatius.edu/faculty/turner/languages.htm -- while Mandarin holds the #1 slot it is the only Sino-Tibetan language in the top 11. Various Indo-European languages hold all the other slots except for Arabic (#6) and Japanese (#9). If you add up the numbers you can see that Indo-European language speakers outnumber Sino-Tibetan speakers by a fair margin. technopilgrim 18:53, 17 Jun 2005 (UTC)

It's not just that there are no other ST languages in the top-ten list. The closest thing there is to another major ST language in terms of population is Burmese, listed variously listed with 22-32 million, which is a middling language by IE standards. The 70 languages called 'Tibetan' total somewhere around 5 million, and I don't believe there is a single other ST language with more than a million speakers. As far as second-language speakers, only Chinese and Burmese are used to a significant extent. kwami 21:41, 2005 Jun 17 (UTC)