Tibeto-Burman languages

Tibeto-Burman languages

Introduction

      language group within the Sino-Tibetan family (Sino-Tibetan languages). At the end of the 20th century, Tibeto-Burman languages were spoken by approximately 57 million people; countries that had more than 1 million Tibeto-Burman speakers included Myanmar (Burma; about 29 million), China (some 17.2 million), India (about 5.5 million), Nepal (some 2.5 million), and Bhutan (about 1.2 million). Other countries with substantial numbers of Tibeto-Burman speakers included Thailand (535,000), Bangladesh (530,000), Pakistan (360,000), Laos (42,000), and Vietnam (40,000).

      The great Sino-Tibetan (ST) language family, comprising Chinese (Chinese languages) on the one hand and Tibeto-Burman (TB) on the other, is comparable in time-depth and internal diversity to the Indo-European language family (Indo-European languages) and is equally important in the context of world civilization. The cultural and numerical predominance of Chinese (more than 1.3 billion speakers) is counterbalanced by the sheer number of languages (some 250–300) in the Tibeto-Burman branch. Many scholars, especially in China, interpret “Sino-Tibetan” to include the Tai (Tai languages) and Hmong-Mien (Hmong-Mien languages) families as well, although a consensus is developing that these two families, while possibly related to each other, have only an ancient contact relationship with Chinese.

History of scholarship
      After the existence of the Tibeto-Burman family was posited in the mid-19th century, British scholars, missionaries, and colonial administrators in India and Burma (now Myanmar) began to study some of the dozens of little-known “tribal” languages of the region that seemed to be genetically related to the two major literary languages, Tibetan (Tibetan language) and Burmese (Burmese language). This early work was collected by Sir George Abraham Grierson (Grierson, Sir George Abraham) in the Linguistic Survey of India (1903–28), three sections of which (vol. 3, parts 1, 2, and 3) are devoted to word lists and brief texts from TB languages.

      Further progress in TB studies had to wait until the late 1930s, when Robert Shafer headed a project called Sino-Tibetan Linguistics at the University of California, Berkeley. This project assembled all the lexical material then available on TB languages, enabling Shafer to venture a detailed subgrouping of the family at different taxonomic (taxonomy) levels, called (from higher to lower) divisions, sections, branches, units, languages, and dialects. This work was finally published in a two-volume, five-part opus called Introduction to Sino-Tibetan (vol. 1, 1966–67; vol. 2, 1974).

      Basing his own work on the same body of material, Paul K. Benedict produced an unpublished manuscript titled Sino-Tibetan: A Conspectus (henceforth referred to as the Conspectus) in the early 1940s. In that work he adopted a more modest approach to supergrouping and subgrouping, stressing that many TB languages had so far resisted precise classification. Benedict's structural insight enabled him to formulate sound correspondences (regular phonological similarities between languages) with greater precision and thereby to identify exceptional phonological developments.

      A revised and heavily annotated version of the Conspectus was published in 1972, ushering in the modern era of Sino-Tibetan historical/comparative linguistics. In this recension nearly 700 roots of the ancestral language, Proto-Tibeto-Burman (PTB), were reconstructed, as well as some 325 comparisons of PTB roots with Old Chinese etyma, largely as reconstructed by Bernhard Karlgren in his Grammata Serica Recensa (1957). Although Benedict focused principally on five key phonologically conservative TB languages (Tibetan (Tibetan language), Burmese (Burmese language), Lushai [Mizo], Kachin [Jingpo], and Garo), he also used data from more than 100 others.

      Except for the “major literary” languages (Tibetan and Burmese) and the somewhat more numerous “minor literary” ones (Xixia [Tangut], Newar, Meithei [Manipuri], Naxi-Moso, Yi [Lolo], Bai [Minchia], and Pyu), no TB languages left written texts that predate the early 20th century. This has caused some difficulties in the reconstruction of PTB, although scholarly consensus has been reached on many of its features.

Historical distribution
 The Proto-Sino-Tibetan (PST) homeland seems to have been somewhere on the Plateau of Tibet (Tibet, Plateau of), where the great rivers of East and Southeast Asia (including the Huang He [Yellow River], Yangtze (Yangtze River) [Chang Jiang], Mekong (Mekong River), Brahmaputra (Brahmaputra River), and Salween (Salween River)) have their source. The time of hypothetical Sino-Tibetan unity, when the Proto-Han (Proto-Chinese) and PTB peoples formed a relatively undifferentiated linguistic community, must have been at least as remote as the Proto-Indo-European period, perhaps about 4000 BCE.

      The Tibeto-Burman peoples slowly fanned outward along these river valleys, but only in the middle of the first millennium of the Common Era did they penetrate into peninsular Southeast Asia, where speakers of Austronesian (Austronesian languages) and Mon-Khmer languages had already established themselves. The Tai peoples began filtering down from the north at about the same time as the Tibeto-Burmans. The most recent arrivals to the area south of China were speakers of Hmong-Mien languages, most of whom still live in China itself.

      In part because the Tibeto-Burman family extends over such an enormous geographic range, it is characterized by great typological diversity. Some of its subgroups, such as Loloish, are highly tonal (tone), monosyllabic, and analytic, with a minimum of affixational morphology (grammatical prefixes or suffixes). At the other extreme are marginally tonal or atonal languages with complex systems of verbal agreement morphology, such as those in the Kiranti group of eastern Nepal. While most Tibeto-Burman languages are verb-final, the Karenic and Baic branches have SVO (subject–verb–object) word order, like Chinese.

      Influences from Chinese (Chinese languages) on the one hand and Indo-Aryan languages on the other have contributed significantly to the diversity of the TB family. It is convenient to refer to the Chinese and Indian spheres of cultural influence as the Sinosphere and the Indosphere. Some languages and cultures are firmly in one or the other: the TB languages of Nepal and much of the Kamarupan branch of TB are Indospheric, as are the Munda and Khasi branches of Austroasiatic. The Loloish branch of TB, the Hmong-Mien family, the Kam-Sui branch of Kadai, and the Viet-Muong (Viet-Muong languages) branch of Mon-Khmer (Mon-Khmer languages) are Sinospheric. Others (such as Tibetan and Thai (Thai language)), have been influenced by both Chinese and Indian cultures. Still other linguistic communities are so geographically remote that they have escaped significant influence from either cultural tradition, as with the Aslian branch of Mon-Khmer in Malaya and the Nicobarese (Nicobarese languages) branch in the Nicobar Islands of the Indian Ocean.

      Elements of Indian culture, especially ideas of social hierarchy ( varna), religions ( Hinduism and Buddhism), and Devanagari (Devanāgarī) writing systems, began to penetrate both insular and peninsular Southeast Asia about 2000 years ago. Indic writing systems were adopted first by speakers of Austronesian (Javanese (Javanese language) and Cham) and Austroasiatic languages (Khmer (Khmer language) and Mon (Mon language)) and then by speakers of Tai (Thai and Lao (Lao language)) and TB languages (Pyu, Burmese, and Karen). The learned components of the vocabularies of Khmer, Mon, Burmese, Thai, and Lao consist of words of Pali (Pāli language) and Sanskrit (Sanskrit language) origin. Indian influence also spread north to the Himalayan region. Tibetan has used Devanagari writing since 600 CE but has preferred to create new religious and technical vocabulary from native morphemes rather than Indic ones.

      What is now China south of the Yangtze did not have a considerable Han Chinese population until the beginning of the Common Era. In early times the scattered Chinese communities of the region must have been on a numerical and cultural par with the coterritorial non-Chinese populations, and the borrowing of material culture and vocabulary must have proceeded in all directions. As late as the end of the 1st millennium CE, non-Chinese states that flourished on the periphery of the Middle Kingdom included Nanzhao and Bai in Yunnan, Xi Xia in the Gansu-Qinghai-Tibet border regions, and Yi (Lolo) chieftaincies in Sichuan. The Mongol Yuan dynasty finally consolidated Chinese power south of the Yangtze in the 13th century. Tibet also fell under Mongol influence then but did not come under Chinese suzerainty until the 18th century.

      Whatever their genetic affiliations, the languages of the Sino-Tibetan area have undergone massive convergence in all areas of their structure—phonological (phonology), grammatical (grammar), and semantic (semantics). Hundreds of words have crossed over genetic boundaries in the course of millennia of intense language contact, and it is often exceedingly difficult to distinguish ancient loans from genuine cognates.

Quantifying diversity in the Tibeto-Burman family
      Although the total number of TB speakers is only about 57 million, smaller than for Tai-Kadai or Mon-Khmer (Mon-Khmer languages)/Austroasiatic (Austroasiatic languages), the number of individual TB languages is the largest of any family in East and Southeast Asia. The most populous language, Burmese, has only about 22 million native speakers, while the number of Thai and Vietnamese (Vietnamese language) speakers increased rapidly (to more than 45 and 55 million speakers respectively) in the closing decades of the 20th century.

      A variety of reasons make it impossible to determine the exact number of TB languages. Contributory factors include the elusiveness of the distinction between languages (language) and dialects (dialect) and the fact that a number of languages remain to be discovered or described. Even more problematic is the profusion of different names for the same language and the confusion of names denoting languages with those denoting ethnic groups—of the more than 1,400 Tibeto-Burman language names, many are only multiple designations for the same language or dialect. Any given language is likely to be known by several names, including its autonym (what its speakers call it), one or more exonyms (what other groups call it), paleonyms (old names, some of which are now thought to be pejorative), and neonyms (new names) that have often replaced the old. To take a relatively simple case, the Lotha Naga of India are a scheduled (officially recognized) tribe of fewer than 100,000 people, yet the people and their language are called by at least three exonyms—Chizima, Choimi, and Miklai, by the neighbouring Angami, Sema, and Assamese peoples, respectively. The paleonyms Lolo, Lushai, Abor, Dafla, and Mikir have for the most part been replaced by Yi, Mizo, Adi, Nyishi, and Karbi, respectively.

      A more complex situation can obtain when politics enters into ethnic and linguistic nomenclature. For instance, although the country formerly known as Burma officially adopted the ethnonym Myanmar in 1989, linguistic scholars have generally retained the use of Burmese (not Myanmarese) as the name of its dominant language and Tibeto-Burman (not Tibeto-Myanmarese) as the name of the language family to which Burmese belongs. In addition, many language names are used in both a narrower and a broader sense, sometimes referring to one specific language and at other times to a whole group of linguistically or culturally related languages. Finally, small or vulnerable groups often use the name of a larger or more prestigious neighbour.

      Scholars estimate that the Tibeto-Burman family contains approximately 250–300 languages. There are 8 Tibeto-Burman languages with over 1,000,000 speakers (Burmese, Tibetan, Bai, Yi [Lolo], Karen, Meithei, Hani, Jingpo) and altogether about 50 with more than 100,000 speakers. At the other end of the scale are some 125 languages with fewer than 10,000 speakers; many of these languages are now endangered. Sometimes population figures can be linguistically misleading. The Tujia (autonym Pitsikha) people of Hunan and Hubei are officially numbered at some 3,000,000, but their language has been inundated by Chinese, so only a few thousand fluent speakers of Tujia remain.

      Political and geographic factors once rendered much of the Tibeto-Burman language area chronically inaccessible to fieldwork by scholars from outside, but a veritable explosion of new data began to become available in the late 20th and early 21st century, especially from China and Nepal.

Language groups
 The Conspectus refrained from constructing a family tree of the conventional type, presenting instead a schematic chart where the Kachin (also called Jingpo) group was conceived as the centre of geographical and linguistic diversity in the family. In this view the other language groups radiated from Kachin like the spokes of a wheel. This conceptual framework has been replaced by the genetic schema that has been used since 1987 in the Sino-Tibetan Etymological Dictionary and Thesaurus project, directed by James Matisoff (the author of this article) at the University of California, Berkeley. The Berkeley schema identifies seven major subgroups of Tibeto-Burman: Baic, Karenic, Lolo-Burmese-Naxi, Jingpo-Nungish-Luish, Qiangic, Himalayish, and Kamarupan.

      A comparison of the two frameworks is helpful in identifying developments in Tibeto-Burman scholarship. For instance, the Conspectus hardly mentions Bai (and then under the name Minchia), although it is spoken by more than a million highly Sinicized people in the Dali region of northwestern Yunnan. Benedict later hypothesized that Bai belonged with Chinese in the Sinitic branch of Sino-Tibetan, largely because, unlike most of the rest of the Tibeto-Burman family, Baic languages have SVO (subject–verb–object) word order. Most scholars now agree that Baic should be considered as just another subgroup of Tibeto-Burman, although it has undergone particularly heavy Chinese influence. Similarly, the Conspectus regarded the Karenic group as having a special status outside Tibeto-Burman proper, again largely because of its SVO word order; however, this syntactic peculiarity is plausibly to be explained in terms of prolonged contact with both Mon (Mon-Khmer family) and Tai. The Qiangic languages were virtually unknown to Western scholars until well after the publication of the Conspectus.

The Lolo-Burmese-Naxi group
      More detailed comparative-historical work has been done on Lolo-Burmese (also called Burmese-Lolo or Burmese-Yipho) than on any other branch of Tibeto-Burman. Burmese, attested since the 12th century CE, is one of the best-known Tibeto-Burman languages. The languages of the North Loloish subgroup (called Yi in China) are firmly within the Sinosphere, and many of them have been well-recorded by Chinese scholars. The Central and Southern Loloish languages are spoken as far south as Thailand and Laos, where Western and Japanese scholars have had access to them since the 1960s.

      Loloish has strictly monosyllabic morphemes, a limited number of initial clusters or final consonants, often complex tone systems, and a penchant for compounding as the chief morphological device (for example, “eye + water” for “tears,” or “foot + eye” for “ankle”). Notably, the tone systems of Karenic and Lolo-Burmese correspond more regularly than their genetic distance would warrant, bespeaking a special contact relationship between these groups.

      The Loloish language with the most speakers and greatest dialectal differentiation is Yi (also called Nosu or Northern Lolo), with some five million speakers in the Chinese provinces of Sichuan, Yunnan, and Guangxi and a syllabic writing system of considerable antiquity. The tribal TB language that has been studied in greatest detail is Lahu (Central Loloish). The Naxi, or Moso, language is close to the Loloish nucleus and is of special interest because of its complex hieroglyphic-like writing system. The recently described Jinuo language of Yunnan is also fairly close to Loloish, though it seems to have undergone an uncharacteristic merger of the two basic tones of Proto-Loloish.

The Jingpo-Nungish-Luish group
      The Jingpo (Kachin) language, spoken in northernmost Myanmar and adjacent parts of China and India, is well known and is considered to be genetically central in the TB family, just as it is geographically central. The paleonym Kachin is also used loosely for various Burmish languages of northern Myanmar, such as Atsi, Lashi, and Maru.

      A connection between Jingpo and the Northern Naga (or Konyak) languages is especially clear. The Nungish languages of northern Myanmar and Yunnan seem quite close to Kachinic, as does the obscure Luish (or Kadu-Andro-Sengmai) group, spoken by peoples that were once exiled to a remote corner of northeastern India by the raja of Manipur. Part of the importance of Jingpo lies in the fact that it preserves the Proto-Tibeto-Burman prefixes particularly well.

The Qiangic group
      The important Qiangic languages of Sichuan and Yunnan were hardly known to Western scholars at the time the Conspectus was written (c. 1942–43) or published (1972). Ersu/Tosu is perhaps an indirect descendant of the extinct Xixia (also known as Tangut) language, once spoken in a powerful empire located in the far northwestern part of the Tibet Autonomous Region of China (Tibet). Although the empire was destroyed by the Mongols (Mongol) in the 13th century, a large literature in Xixia survives. It is written in a logographic writing system invented in the 11th century, with some 6,000 intricate characters inspired by, but graphically independent of, Chinese. The decipherment of Xixia is now well advanced, mostly by Japanese, Russian, and Chinese scholars.

      The Qiangic languages, especially those of the rGyalrong (Jiarong)-Ergong subgroup, are characterized by initial consonant clusters comparable in complexity to those of Written Tibetan. Some languages of the group are tonal while others are not, providing an ideal terrain for the investigation of the mechanisms of tonogenesis (the study of how tones may evolve from the syllable-final and syllable-initial consonants).

The Himalayish group
      This group includes the Bodic languages (Tibetan (Tibetan language) and its dialects), as well as Kanauri-Manchad, Kiranti (or Rai), Lepcha (of Sikkim), and Newar. Progress has been particularly impressive in the study of the nearly 70 Tibeto-Burman languages of Nepal, especially those of the Tamang-Gurung-Thakali-Manang group, as well as Kham-Magar, Chepang, Sunwar, and the Kiranti languages of eastern Nepal. The westernmost languages in the Tibeto-Burman family, such as Pattani (or Manchad), belong to the Himalayish group.

      Himalayish languages generally preserve prefixes and initial clusters well, along with final -s, -r, and -l. Written Tibetan, attested since the early 7th century CE, is consonantally the most archaic of the attested Tibeto-Burman languages, preserving initial consonant combinations that had disappeared from Chinese a millennium before.

The Kamarupan group
      The Conspectus assigns the very numerous Tibeto-Burman languages of northeastern India and adjacent regions of Myanmar and Bangladesh to the Kuki-Chin-Naga, Abor-Miri-Dafla (what Shafer called Mirish), and Bodo-Garo (Shafer's Barish) groups. Several other important languages of this area, including Mikir (Karbi), Meithei (Manipuri), and Mru (not the same as the Burmish language Maru), were not included by the Conspectus in any larger group. Of all these languages, the Mirish ones seem to be the most lexically aberrant from the viewpoint of Tibeto-Burman in general, even in their numerals. Thus, it is hard to recognize the general Proto-Tibeto-Burman roots *s-nis ‘seven,' *b-r-gyat ‘eight,' and *d-gəw ‘nine' in Aka mulh, sikzi and sthö, respectively (the asterisk, “*,” indicates a hypothetical or reconstructed form).

      All these languages have been provisionally lumped together in the Berkeley heuristic schema under the geographical rubric of Kamarupan (from Kāmarūpa, the Sanskrit term for Assam). These Indospheric languages constitute the centre of diversification of the whole Tibeto-Burman family. The Indian state of Nagaland (Nāgāland) alone, an area of only about 6,400 square miles (about 16,600 square km), is home to some 90 TB languages and dialects.

Proto-Tibeto-Burman phonology

Syllables (syllable)
      The structure of the PTB syllable may be schematized by the formula

(P1) (P2) Ci (G) V[T](:) (Cf) (s)

      where (Ci) stands for the root-initial consonant, which could be preceded by up to two consonantal prefixes (P1 and P2) and optionally followed by a liquid or semivowel glide (G). After this came the vocalic nucleus, consisting minimally of a simple vowel (V), followed optionally by a restricted set of possible final consonants (Cf) or the suffix (s). This schema is quite similar to the syllables found in Written Tibetan, which range in complexity from simple Ci + V (e.g. k'a ‘bitter') to P1 + P2 + Ci + G + V + Cf + s (e.g., brnyoŋs ‘convenient,' bsnyigs ‘sediment').

      The prefixes, especially the stop or nasal ones (b-, d-, g-, m-), and especially when preceding a stop root-initial, were undoubtedly vocalized by an epenthetic schwa (ə) for ease of pronunciation, as in the pronunciation of the Polish city name Gdansk [gədansk]. Strictly speaking, such forms are sesquisyllabic (a syllable and a half long) rather than monosyllabic.

      The glides (especially the semivowels -w- and -y-) occupied an ambiguous position in PTB, sometimes behaving as if they belonged to the initial consonant complex but sometimes as if they were part of the syllable's vocalic nucleus. The semivowels could also occur postvocalically, forming falling diphthongs in -w and -y; in this position the semivowels are considered to belong to the inventory of Cf's. Vowel length (symbolized by a colon, “:”) is contrastive, but only in syllables closed with a final stop, nasal, liquid, or semivowel. This contrast is rather marginal at the PTB level, with many irregularities and much variation. There is no contrast between syllables that have zero-initial *Ø- (e.g. *ap) and those with initial glottal stop *ʔ- (e.g. *ʔap). Reconstructing *ʔ- when there is no other initial consonant simplifies the canon somewhat, since Ci is then an obligatory element.

      The status of contrastive tone at the PTB stage is still in doubt. Tonal languages use variations in pitch (often accompanied by other configurations of the larynx that produce “clear” versus “creaky” [glottalized] versus “breathy” [h-like] vowel qualities) to distinguish words from one another. (Nontonal languages like English use pitch variations “intonationally”—e.g., to distinguish statements from questions). Although some scholars claim that a two- or three-tone system may be reconstructed for PTB, it seems preferable to consider tone as having developed independently (though according to similar principles) at many different times and places throughout the history of TB. To reflect this uncertainty, the superscript T is enclosed in brackets in the above formula.

      Many modern TB languages (especially Sinospheric ones) have vastly simpler syllabic possibilities than those of Written Tibetan. For example, Lahu syllables lack prefixes, glides, or final consonants, but (unlike Tibetan) each Lahu syllable must carry one of seven distinctive tones, so Lahu syllable structure may be schematized as (C) VT.

      Figuring out how complex proto-syllables map into their simpler descendants is one of the most fascinating aspects of Sino-Tibetan historical phonology. Thus, PTB *b-r-gyat ‘eight' is carried over unchanged into Written Tibetan brgyad but > Lahu (the symbol > means “becomes”), while PTB *k-r-wat ‘leech' > Written Burmese krwat (with two prefixes, k- and r-), Magar ləwat (with the single prefix lə-), and Lahu vèʔ (with no prefix).

Initial consonants (consonant)
      The Conspectus reconstructed 23 simple initial consonants for PTB. Although many of its daughter languages have three or even four manners of articulation, only a simple two-way contrast in this feature (*voiced and *voiceless) is reconstructible for PTB obstruents (consonants produced by obstructing the flow of air from the vocal tract). Many factors have been involved in the proliferation of manner contrasts in the daughter languages, chiefly the intricate patterns of interaction between the prefix and the root-initial consonant. Nothing, in fact, is more unstable in diachronic TB phonology than the voicing or aspiration of initial obstruents (plosives, fricatives, and affricates). A *voiceless Ci could easily assimilate in voicing to a voiced prefix (e.g., to *m-), while a voiceless prefix (e.g., *s-) could devoice or aspirate an originally *voiced Ci. The prefix might then drop, leaving only the change in voicing of the Ci as a trace of its former presence. Of particular importance as prefix-induced types of secondary articulation are prenasalization and preglottalization, as in syllables like Luquan Yi nt'u ‘fern' (from Proto-Loloish *m-da) or Lalo (Western Loloish) ʔlà ‘trousers' (from Proto-Loloish *s-la). The voicing or voicelessness of the prevocalic consonant complex is also of key importance in the process of tonal development.

      Besides the three primary positions of articulation for PTB stops (labial, dental, and velar) and the two primary series of affricates (dental and palatal), several other positional types of obstruents occur in one or another daughter language. These can be easily shown to be secondary, as with the postvelars (found especially in Qiangic and Loloish) or the labiodentals (found in Angami Naga and Lahu). There is persuasive evidence to reconstruct a series of *labiovelars at least as far back as the Proto-Lolo-Burmese level; the best example is the etymon for ‘dog,' where Lahu ph{ibarcirc} (with labial initial) reflects the Proto-Lolo-Burmese labiovelar root *kwəy.

      No labiodental fricatives (fricative) are reconstructed for PTB, though many daughter languages have /v/ (usually developed from *w) or /f/ (deriving in Lahu, for example, from earlier *hw and *ʔw). The dental (*s, *z) and palatal (, ) fricatives are reconstructible (though was quite rare), with *z having a variety of reflexes in Lolo-Burmese, including Written Burmese s, Lahu y, Lisu r, and Mpi and Ugong l. The palatal fricatives and affricates (affricate) may be interpreted as clusters of the dentals plus medial *-y-, as in = /sy/, = /zy/, *tš = /tsy/, *dž = /dzy/. Quite a few modern TB languages have a retroflex series of affricates, fricatives, and stops, but they do not occur in Written Tibetan or Written Burmese and are not attested for Xixia; they seem to be secondarily derived from proto-clusters with medial liquids like *kr and *gr. Some languages have secondarily developed complex sibilant phonemes and clusters; the Dàyáng dialect of Pumi (Qiangic group) boasts no fewer than 32 fricatives and affricates.

Prefixes
      Prefixes are of primary importance for Sino-Tibetan reconstruction, though they have left only the most indirect traces in Chinese. Sinologists are increasingly becoming aware of the possibility that a complex system of prefixes may account for morphological alternations within Chinese word families and for apparently aberrant phonetic series.

      The first insightful treatment of Tibeto-Burman prefixes was Stuart N. Wolfenden's Outlines of Tibeto-Burman Linguistic Morphology (1929). The Conspectus reconstructs seven prefixes for PTB: *s-, *m-, *a-, *r-, *b-, *g-, and *d-. Some of these are more important and have clearer semantic functions than others. For instance, *s- before a verb signaled causativity, transitivity, or outer-directedness; a distinct but homophonous element, derived from the full noun *sya ‘animal, meat,' was frequently prefixed to names of animals. When placed before verb roots, the prefix *m- indicated stativity, intransitivity, reflexivity, or inner-directedness. The prefix *a- (better interpreted as *ʔa- or *ʔə-) had a variety of functions, including the marking of kin terms, vocatives, third-person subjects, and “bulk-providing (Tibeto-Burman languages)” extensions of both nominal and verbal roots. Both *s- and *ʔ- frequently led to the devoicing or glottalization of a following root-initial consonant, while *m- often caused a secondary voicing of the Ci.

      The historical morphophonemic effects of the prefixes has been complex. Besides affecting the voicing or aspiration of the root-initial consonant, the prefixes could metathesize (switch order) with it, palatalize it, drive it out entirely (a process known as prefix-preemption), fuse with it into a single segment, drop out altogether, or be substituted for by another prefix—and any of these activities could be accompanied by an effect on the syllable's tone. Taking a hypothetical etymon *g-ya, a wide variety of reflexes would be possible. A daughter language could reflect the simple root-initial, as in ya (a situation known as prefix loss or prefix absence); the original prefix could remain roughly the same, perhaps “protected” from the Ci by a schwa, as in gəya and kəya (prefix preservation); the root could have allowed alternative prefixations at the proto-stage, or the daughter language could have innovated by substituting a new prefix for the old one, as in pəya, təya, or məya (prefix substitution or prefix alternation); the prefix could unite with the root-initial to form a single consonantal segment incorporating phonetic features of both, as in dža, {ccurl}a, and a (prefix fusion); a new prefix could be superadded to the older one, as in səgəya (reprefixation); or the prefix could drive out the Ci altogether, as in ga or ka (prefix preemption). Examples of prefix preemption include ‘seven' (PTB *s-nis > Jingpo sənìt, but Lahu š{ibarmacr}), ‘penis' (PTB **m-ley > Lahu , but compare Written Burmese ), ‘needle' (PTB *[k/ʔ]-rap > Written Burmese ʔap), ‘lick' (PTB *m-lyak > Akha my{schwagrave}ʔ), ‘put to sleep' (PTB *s-yip > Written Burmese sip), ‘four' (PTB *b-ləy > Maru bìt), and so on.

Rhymes
      As in Chinese and English, PTB had more diphthongs (13) than pure vowels (vowel), or monophthongs (5). Except for *-a, far and away the most frequently attested vowel in the system, pure vowels in final position were relatively rare; *-a is usually preserved as such, though sometimes it becomes a back vowel /{turneda}/, /ɔ/, /o/, or even /u/, as in Luquan (LQ) Yi (for example, ‘fern' Proto-Lolo-Burmese *n-da1 > LQ nt'u and Lahu ; ‘moon' PLB *s-la3 > LQ {nhookr}u22 and Lahu ha-pa; ‘many' PLB *mra2 > LQ {nhookr}u33 and Lahu ; ‘soul, spirit' PLB *s-la1 > LQ {nhookr}u11 and Lahu {openograve}-ha). In Qiangic languages such as Pumi, Tosu, and Xixia, *-a sometimes becomes -i, as in ‘moon' (PTB *s-(g)la > Pumi Dayang [PD] í), ‘hundred' (PTB *r-gya > PD ʃí), ‘salt' (PTB *tsa > PD tshǐ), and ‘ill, hurt' (PTB *na > PD {nhookr}í).

      The Conspectus tentatively sets up a contrast between a front and a back low vowel, PTB *-a and *-â. This putative contrast, which has not been accepted by other scholars, was intended to handle vocalic alternations in Tibetan verb morphology and to multiply possible “regular” correspondences with Chinese.

      Vowel length is an inherently unstable feature in Tibeto-Burman. Contrasts in vowel length seem to have come and gone cyclically in the history of the family, with the effects of later changes largely obscuring the results of earlier developments. In any case, length contrasts are only to be found in syllables closed by a semivowel (i.e., falling diphthongs) or other final consonant.

Final consonants
      Besides the semivowels, nine final consonants (-p, -t, -k, -m, -n, , -r, -l, -s) are reconstructed for PTB. As is generally true of Southeast Asian languages, there is only a single series of (unreleased) final stops, with no voicing or manner contrast (although Tibetan orthography, like that of Thai, renders final stops with voiced letters). Unlike Mon-Khmer, Tibeto-Burman has never had final palatals (-c, ) or final -h. A secondary final occurs in many languages, deriving from *-p -t -k (as generally in Loloish and Karenic) and/or *-s (as in Lushai/Mizo). This final glottal stop is frequently reduced further, yielding a creakiness or glottalization of the syllable's vocalic nucleus. Other secondary final consonants occasionally occur, especially in Qiangic, because of the reduction of the second syllable in compounds.

      Creakiness or constriction of the vowel may also arise through the influence of one of the “glottogenic” prefixes (*s- or *ʔ-) or as an automatic concomitant of certain tones, as in Dàyáng Pumi, where some words under high tone are optionally pronounced with a noticeable final glottal stop (the symbol “Tibeto-Burman languages” indicates a variant): ‘face' zíw Tibeto-Burman languages zíwʔ; ‘soybean' {nhookr}é Tibeto-Burman languages {nhookr}éʔ; ‘invite to eat' dzyú Tibeto-Burman languages dzyúʔ; and ‘sweat' ʃtʃhí Tibeto-Burman languages ʃtʃhíʔ.

      The loss of a *nasal final consonant often leads to nasalization of the vowel (as in, for example, Burmese and Pumi) or to a change in the vowel's quality (as in Lahu, where *-am > -o, *-an > -e, and *-aŋ > ). Subphonemic vowel nasalization sometimes occurs in syllables with low vowels and Ø- (zero) or h- initials, according to a widespread phenomenon called rhinoglottophilia.

      Many TB roots show variation between final homorganic (produced in the same position of articulation) stops and nasals (-k Tibeto-Burman languages , -t Tibeto-Burman languages -n, and -p Tibeto-Burman languages -m). This alternational pattern is also frequent in Chinese. Other variational patterns to be found in closed syllables include *-u- Tibeto-Burman languages *-i- (especially in the environment of a labial initial or final) and *-ik Tibeto-Burman languages *-yak.

      Final *-r, *-l, and *-s are relatively rare but occur in a number of well-established roots, including Proto-Tibeto-Burman *skar ‘star,' *s-brul ‘snake,' and *rus ‘bone.'

Suffixes
      A number of nonsyllabic suffixes are reconstructible for PTB, most of them dental (*-s, *-t, *-n). When the suffix was -s, it could result in postvocalic sequences of stop or nasal plus -s (e.g., -ps, -ms) or (quite rarely) final liquid plus -s (-ls and -rs), which do not occur within a morpheme.

      Among the semantic functions of these suffixes was the nominalization of verbal roots, as in Qiang ( ‘sleep' > nəs ‘bed'; guə ‘wear' > guəs ‘clothes'; dzə ‘eat' > dzəs ‘grain') and Jingpo (khú ‘be smoky' > ʔwàn-khùt ‘smoke'; ləgú ‘steal' > ləgùt ‘thief'; dží ‘urinate' > džìt ‘urine'; and šá ‘eat' > šàt ‘food, rice').

Tones (tone)
      Most TB languages have contrastive (phonemic) tone. The most elaborate systems are found in the Sinospheric Northern and Central Loloish groups, where systems of six to eight tones are the norm. Baic, Karenic, and Jingpo-Nung are also highly tonal. The situation in Qiangic, Himalayish, and Kamarupan is more varied. These latter groups comprise both tonal and nontonal languages; even the tonal languages among them tend to have systems that are on the rudimentary side, often with only two or three contrasts, or with the tone-bearing unit larger than a single syllable (as, for example, in the Tamangic and Kham groups of Nepal). Some languages, such as Tibetan and Qiang, have both tonal and nontonal dialects.

      In 1954 André-Georges Haudricourt established that phonemic tonal systems evolved to make up for the loss of a voicing contrast in syllable-initial position (as when p- and b- are no longer differentiated) or the loss of a syllable-final laryngeal consonant (-h or ). However, despite attempts by Benedict (1972) and Alfons Weidert (1987), reconstructions of a single tonal system at the PTB or even the PST level have remained unconvincing. The tone systems of the various TB subgroups do not show regular correspondences; such tonal similarities that exist across subgroup divisions in TB can plausibly be attributed to universal phonetic tendencies in “tone-prone” monosyllabic languages rather than to descent from a common ancestral system. Tones seem to come and go cyclically, with the period of oscillation sometimes very rapid. Even if a hypothetical phase of Sino-Tibetan tonal uniformity did once exist, it could not have been a stable equilibrium, and it could not have left unambiguous traces thousands of years later.

      Though prefixes or root-initial consonants frequently influence a syllable's tone, occasionally the influence is in the opposite direction, as in Sani (Central Loloish), where original *voiced syllables remain voiced under Proto-Lolo-Burmese Tone *2 but become voiceless unaspirated in syllables under PLB Tone *1.

      Tone is not simply a matter of relative pitch but is also usually bound up with phonation type, as determined by the configuration of the glottis. Thus, the three nonstopped tones of modern Burmese are primarily distinguishable not by their pitch contours but rather by their voice quality (“clear” versus “breathy” versus “creaky”).

      Occasionally grammar plays a role in tone assignment. In Mpi (Southern Loloish), nouns appear only under nonstopped tones 2, 4, and 6 and stopped tones 2 and 4, while verbs occur only with nonstopped tones 1, 3, and 5 and stopped tones 1 and 3. This is probably because Mpi verbs were originally followed by a special particle that later fused with the root, causing a perturbation of the tone.

Compounding and phonological bulk
      Classical Chinese, with its relatively rich inventory of consonants, was strictly monosyllabic, with the syntactic word and the phonological syllable virtually coextensive; the same was undoubtedly true for PTB. In phonologically eroded modern languages such as Mandarin and Lahu, however, many once-distinct syllables have become homophonous, so that the vast majority of words are now disyllabic compounds, though almost all of them are still analyzable into their monosyllabic constituent morphemes. For example, Lahu has merged five distinct PTB etyma (*b-r-gya ‘hundred,' *s-gla ‘moon,' *s-lya ‘tongue,' *s-hla ‘spirit,' and *g-ya(:p) ‘winnow') into the identical syllable /ha/, all under the same mid-tone (mid-tones are left unmarked in transcription). These are kept distinct in Lahu because they are “bulked out” by additional words, prefixes, or suffixes that make their meaning clear: ha ‘hundred' is not usable by itself but must always be preceded by a numeral (e.g. tê ha ‘one hundred'); the actual Lahu word for ‘moon' is ha-pa, with the suffix -pa, ubiquitous in Tibeto-Burman (compare Written Tibetan zla-ba); the Lahu word for ‘tongue' is ha-t, where the second syllable looks like it once had an independent meaning but now occurs nowhere else in the language; the word for ‘spirit' is {openograve}-ha, with a prefix (deriving from Proto-Tibeto-Burman *aŋ-) that occurs as a bulk-provider before hundreds of Lahu roots; and the verb ha ve ‘winnow,' like all verbs cited in isolation, is accompanied by the particle ve, a nominalizer (much like English to) that serves to distinguish verbs from any homophonous nouns.

Tibeto-Burman and areal grammar
      Tibeto-Burman grammar is quite different from that of Indo-European languages, yet it shares many characteristics with the grammars of other language families of East and Southeast Asia. Tibeto-Burman languages are topic prominent, meaning that noun phrases (NPs) can be freely topicalized, or moved to initial position in the clause. Further, the NPs of a clause occur in relatively free order, especially in the verb-final languages. The Lahu sentence in the table consists of a verb phrase (VP) preceded by four NPs (several orderings other than the one given there are possible).

 The noun phrases in this sentence include a temporal NP (yàʔ-ni {openomacr} ‘today'), a subject (ŋà-h{dotlessistroke} tê qhâʔ ‘our village'), a locative NP (qh{openograve}-ph{openocirc} ‘where'), and an object (šā ‘animalvoice. Many Tibeto-Burman languages, including Tibetan, Newari, and Akha, are ergative with agents marked like instrumentals. Ergative languages treat the subject of intransitive verbs the same as the objects of transitive ones, unlike accusative languages, which treat the subjects of all verbs in the same way but as distinct from the objects of transitive verbs. Languages of the split ergative type (for example, Limbu and Sherpa) are ergative only in certain tenses and aspects (e.g., only in the past tense or completive aspect).

      Tibeto-Burman languages have a penchant for nominalizing whole sentences without embedding them into any larger unit, typically via a particle that is also used in the citation-form of verbs and that has a relative or genitive function in other constructions. (Nominalization refers to the derivation of nounlike structures from verbal ones.) The connection between nominalization and relativization is often made explicit by using the same particle for both functions, as in Jingpo ʔai and Lahu ve.

      Aspect (not tense) is the major verbal category, so notions such as completed action, change of state, irrealis, inchoative (or imminent action), and durative are encoded more readily than past, present, and future. The most satisfactory criterion for establishing that a Sino-Tibetan word is a verb is its negatability. Most words that translate as English adjectives are actually only a subclass of verbs, as in Burmese θ ‘go' > mə-θ ‘not go' and kâuN ‘be good' > mə-kâuN ‘not be good.'

      In order to express abstract grammatical relationships, the isolating languages of the Tibeto-Burman area have typically resorted to the specialization of full nouns and verbs. Verbs meaning ‘give,' ‘dwell,' ‘put,' and ‘finish' become bleached semantically until they can serve as markers of verbal categories such as causative, progressive, durative, and completive, respectively. A noun meaning ‘road' might become a locative particle while another meaning ‘top part' turns into an accusative marker (a particle indicating ‘[an action] that covers [a noun]'). Often a root morpheme that has undergone this or other forms of grammatical specialization acquires a distinctive phonological shape, usually via destressing, and sometimes assumes a special tone. In Lahu, for instance, the verb ‘come' has a low-falling tone but acquires mid-tone (la) as it becomes a particle indicating ‘motion toward' and high-falling tone () as a particle signalling ‘non-third-person beneficiary.'

      Verb concatenation is especially striking in the Loloish branch of Tibeto-Burman. Lahu may juxtapose up to five verbs in a row in a single VP, with one verb serving as semantic head while the others are grammaticalized or made more abstract to modify it, as in {modgamma}a q{openograve}ʔ yù t{openocirc}ʔ pî ‘have to take it out for him again' (literally “obtain-return-take-emerge-give”). In Chinese and Sinospheric SVO languages such as Thai, Hmong, Mien, and Vietnamese, verbs are grammatically transformed into NP markers that function like Indo-European prepositions. Thus, “He cut the sugarcane with a knife” is literally “He use knife cut sugarcane.”

      Some languages (e.g., Akha, Newar) have intricate systems of evidential particles that characterize the nature of the speaker's information, revealing if it is firsthand, hearsay, visual, or auditory. It is typical to have large repertoires of sentence-final particles that express emotional attitudes. These often occur in strings of two, three, or more and are more integrated intonationally into sentences than, for example, English interjections such as wow!. In some measure these fully syllabic emotional morphemes serve the same function as intonation does in nontonal languages.

      The lack of gender or number markers on Tibeto-Burman nouns is somewhat compensated for by numeral classifiers, which serve to individuate nouns and may be said to “agree” with particular classes of nouns, such as flat, round, or elongated objects. Another characteristic way of lending phonological and semantic substance to monosyllabic morphemes is via the morphological process of elaboration, which creates redundant (sometimes poetic) four-syllable expressions, of which the first and third, or second and fourth, syllables are often identical. This kind of elaboration is widespread, as in Lahu thī-ŋ{schwacirc}-thī-khâ ‘silver and gold altars,' Burmese cit-hrañ-lak-hrañ ‘patiently' (literally “mind-long-hand-long”), and Tibetan blo-gsal-lag-bde ‘intelligent, skillful' (“mind-bright-hand-apt”).

      Grammatical categories are generally expressed syntactically rather than by inflection in most TB languages, though both Kuki-Chin and Himalayish have considerable verbal morphology. Verbs in Chin languages such as Mizo, Lai, and Tiddim typically have two forms, with complex distribution patterns. In Lai, for instance, Form I occurs mostly in independent clauses and Form II mostly in subordinate ones, but with many complications (e.g., kaap (I) / kaʔ (II) ‘shoot'; toŋ (I) / ton (II) ‘meet'; hniim (I) / hniʔm (II) ‘smell'). Verbs in Written Tibetan may have as many as four principal parts, with at least a dozen different patterns of morphophonemic alternation, sometimes involving only the addition of prefixes and/or suffixes, as with gsig ‘shake' (present), bsigs (past), bsig (future), sig (imperative). Sometimes vowel ablaut is also used: gsod ‘kill' (present), bsad (past and future), sod (imperative).

      Most complex of all are the agreement systems found in pronominalized languages such as Jingpo, or within the Kiranti group of eastern Nepal, where the person (including first- and second-person inclusive and exclusive) and number (including dual) of subject and/or object may be marked on the verb. This produces agreement systems that are sometimes relatively simple but that sometimes rival a language family such as Algonquian (Algonquian languages) in complexity. Thus, Jingpo has conjugations such as ŋai sa na {ngrave}-ŋai ‘I will go,' naŋ sa na {ngrave}-dai ‘you will go,' and ši sa na rà-ʔai ‘he will go' (sa ‘go,' na ‘future particle'). It remains to be seen whether such systems should be posited for Proto-Tibeto-Burman or whether (as seems more likely) they have arisen independently in the various branches of the family.

      Many TB languages have a morphological distinction between plain and causative verbs, signalled either by different prefixes, as in Written Tibetan mnam ‘have a smell' and snam ‘smell something,' or by secondary differences in manner of the initial consonant and/or tone, as in Written Burmese nûi ‘awaken' (intransitive verb) and hnûi ‘wake someone' (transitive verb) or Lahu vàʔ ‘hide oneself' and ‘hide something.'

Additional Reading
Fundamental overviews of the language family are Paul K. Benedict, Sino-Tibetan: A Conspectus (1972); Austin Hale, Research on Tibeto-Burman Languages (1982); Graham Thurgood and Randy J. La Polla (eds.), The Sino-Tibetan Languages (2003); and James A. Matisoff, Handbook of Proto-Tibeto-Burman: System and Philosophy of Sino-Tibetan Reconstruction (2003)Classic studies include Linguistic Survey of India, vol. 3, Tibeto-Burman Family, compiled and ed. by G.A. Grierson (1903–09, reprinted 1967); Bernhard Karlgren, Grammata Serica Recensa (1957); and Robert Shafer, Introduction to Sino-Tibetan, 5 vol. in 2 (1966–74).The phonological characteristics of various Tibeto-Burman languages are explored in Robbins Burling, Proto-Lolo-Burmese (1967); James A. Matisoff, The Loloish Tonal Split Revisited (1972); David Bradley, Proto-Loloish (1979); G.H. Luce, Phases of Pre-Pagán Burma: Languages and History, 2 vol. (1985); Alfons Weidert, Tibeto-Burman Tonology (1987); and Ju Namkung (ed.), Phonological Inventories of Tibeto-Burman Languages (1996).Grammar, semantics, and morphology are the focus of Stuart N. Wolfenden, Outlines of Tibeto-Burman Linguistic Morphology (1929); Eugénie J.A. Henderson, Tiddim Chin: A Descriptive Analysis of Two Texts (1965); John Okell, A Reference Grammar of Colloquial Burmese, 2 vol. (1969); and James A. Matisoff, The Grammar of Lahu (1973, reissued 1982), and Variational Semantics in Tibeto-Burman: The “Organic” Approach to Linguistic Comparison (1978).Wider relationships between the language families of Southeast Asia are treated in Paul K. Benedict, Austro-Thai Language and Culture, with a Glossary of Roots (1975).

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