Badass Historical Chinese Bros, Part II: the Duke of Zhou

 Hi everyone, welcome back to Office Hours with the Brofessor: The Show Where I Say Things. Tonight: Badass Historical Chinese Bros, Part II: The Duke of Zhou—or as I like to call him, the Duke of Bro.

The Duke of Bro lived during the 11^th century BCE in the ancient cradle of Chinese civilization: The Yellow River basin. The Duke, along with his older brother Wu, were vassal lords of the once-mighty Shang dynasty. The Shang had ruled the land for five hundred years, but their apogee had long since passed. While the first Shang kings had been wise and virtuous, the incumbent ruler was a despotic psychopath who spent his days paddling around a swimming pool filled with beer. Seriously, he had a beer pool. When he wasn’t doing laps he enjoyed coming up with increasingly inventive ways to kill people who criticized him.

Wu, the Duke, and the other vassals knew this wicked king would get around to them sooner or later, so before long they rose up in revolt. The leader of the rebel army was Wu, while his brother the Duke was his right-hand man. Having overthrown the Shang, Wu set up the Zhou dynasty as the successor state. Wu himself didn’t have much time to enjoy his victory, since he died just two years into his reign. Thus passed the throne to his young son, with my man the Duke as regent.

Now, for a lesser man, this would’ve been a great time to usurp the throne, but not the Duke of Bro. Having ruled wisely and well in the young king’s place, he was perfectly happy to hand over power when the young man came of age, and continued his career as a royal adviser. His loyalty has made him a Chinese culture hero even to this day.

One of the Duke’s greatest accomplishments as regent was to establish a doctrine that would shape the next three thousand years of eastern political thought: the Mandate of Heaven.

If the Mandate has an equivalent in Western culture, it’s the Divine Right of Kings. Essentially, the Mandate was a divine command that a particular dynasty rule “All under Heaven” (Chinese tian1xia4). Whoever held the Mandate—that is, the reigning monarch—was known as the “Son of Heaven” and seen as a living manifestation of divine will.

The Mandate, however, was not unconditional. It only applied as long as the ruling dynasty behaved itself. A decadent and corrupt ruler could expect sooner or later to lose the mandate to someone more deserving.

This doctrine of the Mandate of Heaven was put forth mainly to counter the propaganda of Shang loyalists and pretenders. They argued that, as descendents of the gods, the Shang had an innate right to rule.

Not so fast, said the Duke of Bro. He didn’t argue that the Shang had once been the Sons of Heaven, but the later Shang’s reprehensible conduct had stripped them of the title. Or had they forgotten how the Shang themselves came to power?

Well, no one could argue with that. Five hundred years previously, the Shang had overthrown the previous dynasty. A dynasty which, though founded by virtuous and exemplary rulers, had become corrupt and tyrannical.

So the Shang pretenders came half steppin’ and my man the DOB pretty much dropped the mic on their punk asses, thereby legitimizing his brother’s dynasty. The Zhou would go on to become the longest-lasting Chinese dynasty, ruling in some capacity for the next eight centuries, thanks largely to the efforts of the Duke of Bro.

Another reason the Duke of Bro rules is that he is, according to legend anyway, the one who compiled the Shi-Jing, or Classic of Poetry. It’s this collection of absolutely gorgeous Classical Chinese poetry that’s just a joy to read. I can’t recommend it highly enough if you’re into this kind of thing, which I believe everyone should be. It’s not only very beautiful poetically, but it’s also a cool look into ancient Chinese culture. We can also use the rhyme schemes in the Shi-Jing to help reconstruct Old Chinese phonology, which makes it enormously important to the field of historical linguistics. Let’s take a quick look-see, shall we?

"How the dolichos spread itself out,

Extending to the middle of the valley!
Its leaves were luxuriant;

The yellow birds flew about,

And collected on the thickly growing trees,

Their pleasant notes resounding fair."

--From Odes of Chow and the South.  II. Koh t'an.  (Legge translation)

(It’s actually about sex.)

So that’s about it for my main man the Duke of Bro, the DOB, makes Shang pretenders run and flee. I hope you enjoyed meeting him. Up next we have: Badass Historical Chinese Bros, Part III: Guan Yu. See you next time!

Badass Historical Chinese Bros, Part I: Da Yu

Hey guys, welcome back to Office Hours with the Brofessor: the show where I say things. Today: Historical Chinese Badass Bros, Part I: Da Yu.

So, Chinese history is pretty darn rich, and I for one think it’s a travesty that it’s so little-known in the West. So, in this series I’d like to do my part to fix that by talking about four of my heroes from China’s long history. In my opinion these are some of the greatest men ever to live, not just in China but in all of human history. When I’m talking with my Chinese friends, I like to call them my “big brothers”, or in Chinese, da-ge.

So, da-ge number one is Da Yu, the oldest of my four big bros:

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/d5/King_Yu_of_Xia.jpg

He was a semi-legendary emperor who lived during the 21^st century BC. We’ve already talked a little about him, but it’s worth repeating one more time how much ass this guy kicked. My man Da Yu was basically the model of an enlightened sage-king. He’s been revered throughout Chinese history for his accomplishments and the dedication with which he served the people.

According to legend, the China of Da Yu’s time was stricken by a terrible flood. Whole harvests were ruined, and the people were starving to death. When the floods struck, Da Yu had just gotten married. Regardless, he left his wife behind and got right to work.

For the next thirteen years Da Yu worked without a break to control the floodwaters. Legend has it that three times he walked by his house’s doorstep, but refused to go inside and rest while his people needed him. Even though he was the emperor, no task was beneath him. He worked, ate and even slept alongside the workers. By the end of his thirteen years of work, his hands and feet were covered in rough calluses.

Finally it became apparent that no amount of ditch-digging or dikebuilding could stem the raging flood: the very course of the river Yangtze would have to be changed. So Da Yu traveled up the river, took his magic battle ax, and split the very mountains asunder, forming a new course for the river and saving countless lives.

But his work wasn’t over yet. Da Yu also had to kill a terrible nine-headed serpent that was causing the floods in the first place.

Having tamed the floodwaters and slain the dragon, Da Yu went on to prove a capable ruler, founding a dynasty that would rule China for the next five centuries. He had two major accomplishments during his reign: first, he divided the land into nine provinces and appointed vassals to govern them. Second, he cast the Nine Dings, or ceremonial cauldrons. He gave one to each of his vassals to symbolize royal authority. Since then, even to this day, the ding cauldron has been a symbol of power, prestige and ambition in Chinese culture.

So that’s about it for Da Yu. Up next we have my man the Duke of Zhou; or as I like to call him, the Duke of Bro. See you next time.

Lord of the Dings

Hi guys, welcome back to Office Hours with the Brofessor: the Show where I Say Things. Today I have something cool to show you. It’s really a cultural treasure, and I’m super excited to become a participant in this ancient tradition. Ladies and gentlemen, presenting: the one ding, to rule them all.

(title)

So as I say, this is what’s called a ding. It might just look like an extremely ornate thing to eat cereal out of, but bear with me, because it’s a lot more than that. I got it a few weeks ago in Taiwan and it’s probably the most awesome souvenir that I’ve ever picked up from a trip. So today I’d like to talk about the ding and its enormous significance in Chinese culture.

Dings are ceremonial cauldrons that were used in ancient times to hold offerings of food and alcohol. The offerings were made either to one’s ancestors or to nature deities. Dings are present from the very earliest stages of Chinese cultural development. The very earliest ceramic dings date from the neolithic Cishan and Yangshao cultures that existed between eight and five thousand years ago:

http://www.humanjourney.us/images/YangshaoPottery.jpg 

This culture appears, by way of the related Longshan culture, to be ancestral to the second-millennium-BC Erlitou culture, which is a strong candidate for in fact being the legendary Xia, the first royal dynasty mentioned in ancient Chinese histories. The ding, therefore, is a symbol of a staggering seven thousand years of continuous cultural, and very possibly linguistic, heritage. The language of the Shang dynasty, which succeeded the Xia, was unquestionably Chinese. The Shang dynasty was the heir of the Erlitou culture, which followed Longshan, which followed Yangshao. It seems not entirely unreasonable, therefore, to hypothesize that the language of the Yangshao people—makers of the first Dings—may be ancestral, or at least related, to modern Chinese!

It gives me chills to look at these very early Yangshao or Erlitou dings and think about the people who made them. I like to imagine their voices, and the words they might have used. It’s a heritage that I’ve become a part of, too, and I think a symbol of that continuity is this beautiful ding!

So, dings were a big deal in ancient China. So much so that as soon as bronze began to be used, huge amounts of the stuff were cast into dings—very telling, considering how valuable bronze would have been at this time.

Gradually, dings outgrew a purely ceremonial role and came to be symbols of power, wealth and prestige. How much of a badass you were in ancient China was directly proportional to the number—and size—of your dings.

The textbook example of dings being serious business is that of Da Yu, one of the biggest badasses in all of Chinese history. He’s a kind of Chinese King Arthur figure. He’s so badass that he, in an effort to control the flooded Yangtze, took a magic battle ax and cleaved open the mountains to form the famous Three Gorges. Or so the legend goes. My man Yu would also go on to found the Xia, which, remember, is the first Chinese dynasty mentioned by ancient sources.

So Yu was what you’d call an honest to goodness badass...and consequently, he was very well-endowed in the ding department. He had not one, not two, but nine big, beautiful bronze dings! Knowing that nine was just too much ding for one man to handle, he distributed them among his vassal lords. From that day on, the dings became the Dragon Balls of ancient China. It was every badass’s quest to bring all nine back together. Two thousand years later, the wicked emperor Qin Shi Huang actually managed to do it—but before he could wish Goku back from the dead the nine great dings mysteriously vanished. No one knows for sure what happened. Some say they were stolen by loyalists to the previous dynasty. Others say they fell into the Yangtze river and were swept away by the current. I prefer the latter—the dings were retaken by the very river that Da Yu had tamed. Perhaps even Da Yu’s vengeful spirit was involved—reclaiming the dings as a sign of his displeasure with the tyrannical Qin Shi Huang.

All this, of course, is probably just a story...but part of me wants to believe that somewhere in the vastness of China, in some undiscovered tomb or ancient riverbed, the nine dings are still there, waiting to be discovered by the next big hero.

But, that said, I at least am not that hero. I am a humble scholar, which according to ancient Chinese law entitles me to just one ding. Although my ding is an unorthodox ding, since it’s made of cast iron rather than bronze. It also has these cool nine dragons on it, which is cool because Da Yu seems to have liked both the number nine and dragons. So I’d like to think that if I went back in time and met my bro Da Yu, he’d think me and my ding were pretty cool. Maybe he’d be so impressed that he’d make me his royal historical linguist, and I could spend my days putting together an Old Chinese etymological dictionary that would make even Edwin Pulleybank come back to life and give me a high five.

It’s fun to dream.

It's all Chinese to Me, Part 4: Chinese language varieties

So after our discussion of the very ancient origins of Chinese, let’s come back to modern times and talk about varieties of Chinese spoken now. In modern parlance, we usually refer to “dialects” of the “Chinese language”, but today we won’t beThis is because Chinese is so diverse internally that, at least to me as a language learner, it doesn’t seem like one language at all, but rather a subfamily of related languages.

Of course this is all quite subjective, as there is really no strict rule for separating “languages” from “dialects”. Ultimately I think it’s a question of politics. Since China places a strong emphasis on national unity, they’re very eager to think of even highly divergent varieties as “dialects”. Imagine if the Roman Empire had never fallen, and persisted into the 20^th century—and to this day half of Europe is governed by its successor state. We would still have languages like Spanish and French, but they might still be considered regional Latin “dialects”, given the history of political unity. Just as a Spaniard and Frenchman may recognize the similarities between their languages, but still find communication difficult, so would the situation be between a Sichuanese and a Hong Konger. So, instead of using the words “language” and “dialect”, let’s just say “variety” instead.

So let’s take a look! There are about ten main varieties of Chinese, give or take. I have exposure to only three of these, and even then I can’t claim to be an expert. But I do think it’s interesting, and would love to spread the word about this cool topic.

Firstly I’d like to talk about what is called in English “Mandarin”. Mandarin is by far the most widely spoken Chinese variety. In common parlance the term “Mandarin” is frequently used as a name for Standard Chinese, which really is only one of many Mandarin sub-varieties. For instance, here in Guiyang locals speak what’s called a Southwest Mandarin variety—but that doesn’t mean it’s the same as Standard Chinese, as any Guiyanger will tell you. Although closer to Standard Chinese than what you’d hear in Hong Kong, Guiyanghua has a southern Chinsese habit of merging its /l/ and /n/ sounds. Northern Mandarin varieties don’t have this habit—instead, they tend to add an /r/ sound after vowels, leading to a popular joke among laowai that Beijing people all talk like pirates.

So let’s compare a simple sentence in Standard Chinese, Guiyanghua, and a northern Mandarin variety:

Standard Chinese: Zai4 na4 li3

Northern Mandarin: Zai4 nar4

Guiyang Mandarin [tsai n̪a n̪i]

English It’s over there.

Another cool thing about Guiyanghua does that Standard Chinese doesn’t is merge post-alveolar “hushers” with alveolar “hissers”, such that si4 “four” and shi2 “ten” blend together, at least to my uninitiated ear. This results in endless confusion for poor laowai like me who just want to get their shopping done. In fact this really cool feature is shared with other varieties across southern China.

One of these varieties is Wu, spoken around the mouth of the Yangtze in places like Shanghai and Hangzhou, where I used to live. It shares the hisser-husher merger that we see in Guiyanghua, with another really cool feature: Wu has voiced initials.

Let’s quickly go over what I mean when I say that. When we take apart a Chinese syllable—say 同 tong2 “together” we can break the syllable down into three parts: initial /t/, vowel /o/, and coda /ŋ/ (that is, “ng”). In most modern Chinese varieties there are two main rules concerning the consonants:

1. Don’t talk about Fight Club The only consonants allowed in the coda are /n/ and /ŋ/.

2. Non-nasal initial consonants are voiceless.

Voiceless means that you’re not making a humming noise in your throat when you make the sounds. You can test whether a sound is voiced or voiceless by putting a finger on your throat and checking for a vibration. Using this method, for example, we can deduce that /b/ is voiced, while /p/ is voiceless. The Mandarin phonemic inventory contains the latter, but not the former.

But wait a minute, isn’t there a B in Beijing?

Although the modern Hanyu Pinyin romanization system uses the letter B, the initial consonant in Beijing is actually an unaspirated /p/, which means that it’s a P sound, but unaccompanied by a puff of air. It’s hard for English speakers to do at the beginning of a word, so it’s romanized to B. This confusion of unaspirated vs. voiced is one of Pinyin’s great shortcomings, which is why I myself greatly prefer the older Wade-Giles romanization system. With this system we have Beijing romanized as “Pei-ch’ing”, which really is much more accurate to the Chinese pronunciation.

In Wu, on the other hand, /b/ actually exists as a distinct sound, along with other voiced consonants that existed in ancient Chinese, but have dropped out of most modern varieties.

Back when I lived in Wuxi and Hangzhou, two Wu-speaking cities, I remember how every day I would get to listen to people using these beautiful, millennia-old voiced initials. I used to close my eyes and imagine that I had traveled back in time to the Tang or Song dynasty—which we do, in a way, when we hear these voiced consonants handed down from long ago. I only know a few words in Wu, but I do remember how to say “Thank you”: [d͡ʒʲa d͡ʒʲa]. Compare with Mandarin xiexie and Old Chinese [*lja:gs] (1). In the Wu version we have not only a voiced initial, but the vowel itself has even retained its ancient pronunciation.

Speaking of retaining ancient pronunciations, let’s take a look at Cantonese. Cantonese is very special because it preserves an important feature that has been lost in most other modern varieties: along with varieties like Hakka and Min-Nan, Cantonese retains the word-final consonants that existed in the Chinese of a thousand years ago.

Take, for instance, the word 越yue4, which historically referred to various kingdoms and tribes in southern China. We can reconstruct it to have been pronounced [*ɦuat̚] in Middle Chinese (my main man Pulleybank) and [*ɢʷa:d] in Old Chinese (Zhengzhang) (2). Amazingly, Cantonese retains this ancient ending in its pronunciation of the word, that is, jyut6.

Can you think of where else we might see this ancient word-final /t/? As I say, the word yue4 refers generally to the ancient peoples and cultures of southern China. It originally referred to peoples living in the area of what is now Shanghai. As Chinese civilization spread southward, the concept of yue4—or as they would’ve said, Gwa:d—gradually came to refer to peoples living farther and farther south, until finally it gave the name to China’s southern neighbor: Vietnam, from Middle Chinese 越南 /* ɦuat̚ nəm/ (Pulleybank) (3).

So that’s it for our discussion of Chinese language varieties. As always, feel free to leave a comment, always great to hear from you guys. Once again, I’m the Brofessor—see you next time.

Sources:

1. https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E8%AC%9D

2. https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E8%B6%8A#Chinese

3. https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E8%B6%8A%E5%8D%97#Chinese

Meeting the Proto-Sino-Tibetans

Last time we talked about the language family that Chinese belongs to, called Sino-Tibetan, or less commonly Trans-Himalayan. If you’re just joining us now and you’re unsure on what a language family is, I recommend you look at our previous discussion to review.

Sino-Tibetan still needs a lot of research, but it is pretty well-accepted that it is in fact a language family—that is, all Sino-Tibetan languages today are the daughters of one hypothetical ancient language. Even though it was never written down, it’s possible to reconstruct a few words and some simple grammar by comparing the daughter languages. While we can’t be sure exactly what their language sounded like, we can make an educated guess. Incredibly, their voices come alive once again after millennia of silence.

So who were these people? What was their culture like? Let’s take a quick trip back in time and visit these Proto-Sino-Tibetans. But before we fire up the DeLorean, I would like to reiterate that this is only my highly fanciful imagining. We really have no idea what they were like, but we do know about a few cultural concepts that may have existed in their society. Indeed, the culture that I’m about to describe may actually be closer to Proto-Sinitic rather than PST proper. See Blench and Post’s excellent 2013 paper “Rethinking Sino-Tibetan phylogeny from the perspective of North East Indian languages” for a great discussion of Northeast Indian languages, which are usually ignored in discussions of Sino-Tibetan. In their paper they argue that PST speakers were actually hunter-gatherers practicing sago arboriculture, which is a really cool idea. For a bit less fanciful of a discussion I recommend checking them out.

Now that we’ve got the disclaimer out of the way, let’s get in the Delorean (or the Wu-Tang Clan’s time-traveling elevator, whichever you prefer) and head back a long, long time. No one’s really sure how long, but it cannot have been more recent than six thousand years (1). However, I think Blench and Post are more on the money when they estimate eight to nine thousand years (2). Let’s compromise and say eight. This was a time before Achilles, before the sphinx—a time as far removed from the laying of Sumer’s foundations as the time of Caesar from our own. The birth of Christ is recent on such a scale—the halfway point between us and the Proto-Sino-Tibetans was the time of Abraham.

It is in this world that we now find ourselves. As the vertigo of time travel wears off, we find ourselves standing in a lush and verdant mountain valley. The air is warm and damp—but if it has rained this morning, as it very often does in this part of the world, there may be a sweet coolness in the air, and fingers of mist may yet brush the very tops of the trees. Looking up, the walls of the valley shoot up before us as if taunting our puniness—and high, high above, in a frozen white stillness, the mountain peaks glimmer and laugh in a world all their own.

Hiking through the valley, we soon come to a wooden stockade, probably near a stream, with terraced gardens marching up the hillside. Growing in the fields we would find millet, barley, perhaps buckwheat, or maybe even sago palms. The gardeners, mostly men, are going about their work with adzes fashioned from jade—a precious stone to us, but an everyday material to these people.

Moving into the village, we pass through the stockade’s gate. Perhaps it’s additionally fortified with a ditch or watchtower; in the latter case, we might see a large drum at the top, used for communication with neighboring villages. The village itself is a collection of low huts and pit shelters, perhaps of bamboo, or as they call it, /*g-pwa/(3). Some huts would undoubtedly be larger than others—even at this early time, the haves and have-nots would have been emerging, as inevitably happens in sedentary cultures. Around the village we see kids, dogs and maybe an occasional novelty: the newly-domesticated chicken(4). Whether or not pigs and cattle would have been present is debateable, but if there has been a hunt recently we may see a few of their less fortunate wild ancestors being butchered. If we heard the conversations of the people around us, we might hear words like /*d-kʷəj-n/ “dog” (5), /*pʷak/ “pig” (6) and /*ŋwa/ “cattle” (7). Go ahead and say those words out loud right now. While we can’t be sure these words are 100% correct, by comparing the words for “dog” “pig” and “cow” in daughter languages, we can make an educated ballpark guess. When we say these words today, it’s like listening to a voice, faint and tinny but still there, speaking to us through the chasm of eight thousand years. How cool is that? It gives me chills to think about. In a way, by uttering the very words they spoke, we are conquering time and distance to befriend people who lived thousands of years before the pyramids were conceived, or the first ziggurat’s foundation laid.

Let’s suppose we’ve been invited by some kind people into their home. It’s a hut belonging to a well-to-do family. Dad is a powerfully-built man with an intricately tattooed chest. At his hip hangs a carved and decorated jade adze beside a stone knife—marks of his status as a leader in the community.

Around his neck hangs a jade disc, a representation of the ever-turning wheel of heaven. In their seances, the shamans of these people climb the cords linking them to heaven, ascending through the North Star—represented here by the hole drilled through the middle of Dad’s jade disk.

No less imposing a figure is Mom. Her ornate headdress, fashioned from the skull, horns and skin of a goat, speaks to the power she wields inside and outside the home—for among these people women are the decision makers and heads of families. Often indeed one woman is head of several families, for she may have more than one husband, a custom still practiced in some remote Himalayan communities. As they welcome us into their home, we are handed cups of what they call “the flat one”, or /*s-la/ (8)--a reference to the shape of the leaves used in its production. Taking a sip, we recognize a familiar taste: that of green tea.

Thanking our new friends for their hospitality, we return to our own time, finding ourselves on the bustling streets of modern Shanghai. Walking down Nanjing Road toward the Bund, we begin to recognize echoes of an almost unfathomably distant past.

This time of year it’s quite hot in Shanghai, so let’s step into Starbucks for a break. Here we see that /*s-la/, of course, is still enjoyed, and still known by the same name, albeit with a different pronunciation: cha2 in Modern Standard Chinse. As we approach the barista, we can’t help but notice that around her neck is hanging a jade disk. Being an American, I’m going to order a cafe Americano:

美式咖啡 meishi kafei “Cafe Americano”

Let’s take a look at this name. The first symbol, 美 mei2, means “beautiful”. Taking a closer look at this hanzi, or Chinese written symbol, we see a person with arms outstretched (perhaps shamanizing?) wearing a dead goat as a headdress. As we know from our time-traveling excursion, the dead-goat headdress would have been a highly prized adornment, hence we have this hanzi. It’s also a hanzi very familiar to me because it’s used in the Chinese name of my home country: 美国, mei2guo3, or America. So, whenever I go into a Chinese Starbucks and order an Americano, we are still paying a silent tribute to this stone-age fashion statement.

As the barista hands us our coffee, we notice something familiar around her neck: a jade pendant in the shape of a disk, just like Dad wore back in the village. Speaking of dad, we now realize the origin of the hanzi for “father”, fu3:

父

It’s a pictogram of a hand grasping a stone adze.

So essentially, through the form of written Chinese, the neolithic past is preserved, and in a way lives on even today. Cool, huh?

Sources:

1. http://stedt.berkeley.edu/about-st#homeland

2.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sino-Tibetan_languages#CITEREFBlenchPost2013

3. https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Appendix:Stable_roots_in_Sino-Tibetan

4. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicken#Origins

5. https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Reconstruction:Proto-Sino-Tibetan/d-k%CA%B7%C9%99j-n

6. https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Reconstruction:Proto-Sino-Tibetan/p%CA%B7ak

7. https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Reconstruction:Proto-Sino-Tibetan/%C5%8Bwa

8. https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Reconstruction:Proto-Sino-Tibetan/s-la

9. https://www.khanacademy.org/humanities/art-asia/imperial-china/neolithic-art-china/a/jade-cong-and-bi

Intro to the Sino-Tibetan Language Family

Hi everybody, today I’d like to talk about the language family that Chinese belongs to: Sino-Tibetan, also sometimes called Trans-Himalayan.

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

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sino-Tibetan_languages#Vocabulary

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:

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/5/5e/SinoTibetanLanguagesInBranches.png/300px-SinoTibetanLanguagesInBranches.png

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!

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sino-Tibetan_languages#Typology

2. http://stedt.berkeley.edu/about-st#TBlg