This
might be a good time to review, by the way, what exactly a language
family is. For those of you who have a background in linguistics,
please bear with us a minute! Basically, a language family is a
group of languages that have separately evolved from a common
ancestor. For example, both British and American English have
evolved out of Early Modern English, the language of Shakespeare and
Milton. On a larger scale, French, Spanish and Italian developed
from regional varieties of Latin, which is why we call these the
Romance languages—they rose from the ashes of the Roman Empire.
Moving
even further back, English can be demonstrably linked to the Romance
languages by a very ancient, hypothetical language that linguists
call “Proto-Indo-European” (PIE for short). While this language
was never written down, we can conclude that it must have existed,
since so many languages across western Eurasia and the Indian
subcontinent share uncannily similar elements. For example, take a
look at the words in these languages for the numbers one, two and
three:
English
|
Spanish
|
Russian
|
Greek
|
Sanskrit
|
Standard Chinese
|
One
|
Uno
|
Odin
|
Ena
|
Ekam
|
Yi1
|
Two
|
Dos
|
Dva
|
Dyo
|
Dve
|
Er2
|
Three
|
Tres
|
Tri
|
Tria
|
Treeni
|
San1
|
The
words in English, Spanish, Russian, Greek and Sanskrit all sound
similar, while those in Chinese don’t. If we can find further
similarities in vocabulary and grammar, while demonstrating that
these similarities are not simply borrowed (like “sushi” or
“burrito” in English) we can conclude that the first five
languages belong to the same “Indo-European” family. That is,
they are all daughters of the same long-ago language, while Chinese
is (almost certainly) not.
On the
other hand, the numbers in Chinese, Tibetan, and Burmese have an
uncanny similarity, especially in the ancient forms of these
languages:
Old Chinese
|
Old Tibetan
|
Old Burmese
|
|
One
|
–
*ʔjit
隻
*tjek “single”
|
*gcig
|
*ac
*tac
|
Two
|
二
*njijs
|
*gnyis
|
*nhac
|
Three
|
三
*sum
|
*gsum
|
*sumh
|
Other
lexical and grammatical similarities exist between these languages.
The regularity of these similarities make it unlikely that they are
simple borrowings(1), so we can conclude that Chinese, Tibetan, and
Burmese belong to the same language family: what linguists call
Sino-Tibetan.
The
Sino-Tibetan language family is pretty widely spread across east and
southeast Asia:
The
ancestor language was probably spoken by a community somewhere in the
densely forested eastern foothills of the Himalayas, sometime during
the early or middle neolithic(2). This ancestor language is called
Proto-Sino-Tibetan (PST) by modern linguists, although just like PIE
we can’t really be sure what these people called themselves.
Gradually,
the descendants of PST speakers, and their descendants’
descendants, migrated and spread over a wider area. Regional
dialects became distinct languages as groups lost contact with each
other and mixed with non-ST communities, until after thousands and
thousands of years we have this beautiful quilt that’s been sewn
together over the Himalayas by the thread of shared linguistic—and
cultural—origin.
When we
examine these strands of language, these barely-audible echoes of the
distant past, the long-gone world of the Proto-Sino-Tibetans comes
back to life, albeit only in glimpses. And—incredibly—through
the magic of comparative linguistics, we can actually hear the voices
of these people again. After millennia of silence, we can use the
comparative method to reconstruct the very words that they may have
uttered—indeed, must have
uttered.
So stay tuned, because next time we’ll take a quick trip
back in time and visit these PST-speaking people. Who were they?
What was life like for them? Did they play beer pong? Find out next
time!
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