Sino-Tibetan Languages - History of The Proposal

History of The Proposal

During the 18th century, several scholars had noticed parallels between Tibetan and Burmese, both languages with extensive literary traditions. Early in the following century, Brian Houghton Hodgson and others noted that many non-literary languages of the highlands of northeast India and Southeast Asia were also related to these. The name "Tibeto-Burman" was first applied to this group in 1856 by James Richardson Logan, who added Karen in 1858. Charles Forbes viewed the family as uniting the Gangetic and Lohitic branches of Max Müller's Turanian, a huge family consisting of all the Eurasian languages except the Semitic, Aryan (Indo-European) and Chinese languages.

Studies of the "Indo-Chinese" languages of Southeast Asia from the mid-19th century by Logan and others revealed that they comprised four families: Tibeto-Burman, Tai, Mon–Khmer and Malayo-Polynesian. Julius Klaproth had noted in 1823 that Burmese, Tibetan and Chinese all shared common basic vocabulary, but that Thai, Mon and Vietnamese were quite different. In 1858 Logan suggested that Chinese, Tibeto-Burman, Tai and Mon–Annamese (Mon–Khmer) formed a Chino-Himalaic subgroup of Turanian. Ernst Kuhn divided the Indo-Chinese languages, plus Chinese, into northern and southern groups in 1883, sub-dividing the former into two primary branches:

Northern Indo-Chinese

• Chinese-Siamese
• Tibeto-Burman

August Conrady called this group Indo-Chinese in his influential 1896 classification, though he had doubts about Karen. Conrady's terminology was widely used, but there was uncertainty regarding his exclusion of Vietnamese. Franz Nikolaus Finck in 1909 placed Karen as a third branch of Chinese-Siamese.

Jean Przyluski introduced the term sino-tibétain (Sino-Tibetan) as the title of his chapter on the group in Meillet and Cohen's Les Langues du Monde in 1924. He retained Conrady's two branches of Tibeto-Burman and "Sino-Daic", with Miao–Yao included within Tai–Kadai (sometimes called Daic). The term was adopted by Alfred Kroeber for the UC Berkeley Sino-Tibetan Philology project, where Robert Shafer worked. Shafer quickly realized that Tai–Kadai was not Sino-Tibetan, but after meeting Henri Maspero in Paris he left comparative Tai–Kadai material in the project's publications, though he remained skeptical about a genealogical relationship. Shafer (1941) also rejected the division of the family into Sinitic and Tibeto-Burman branches, but instead placed Sinitic on the same level as other branches as working hypotheses:

Sino-Tibetan

• Sinitic
• Daic
• Bodic
• Burmic
• Baric
• Karenic

(For Shafer, the suffix -ic denoted a primary division of the family, whereas the -ish suffix denoted a sub-division of one of those.)