The Sino-Tibetan Languages

Routledge Language Family

by Graham Thurgood (Editor), Randy J. LaPolla (Editor)

There are more native speakers of Sino-Tibetan languages than of any other language family in the world. Our records of these languages are among the oldest for any human language, and the amount of active research on them has multiplied in the last few decades. Now in its second edition and fully updated to include new research, The Sino-Tibetan Languages includes overview articles on individual languages, with an emphasis on the less commonly described languages, as well as descriptions and comments on the subgroups in which they occur. There are overviews of the whole family on genetic classification and language contact, syntax and morphology, and also on word order typology. There are also more detailed overview articles on the phonology, morphosyntax, and writing system of just the Sinitic side of the family. Supplementing these overviews are articles on Shanghainese, Cantonese and Mandarin dialects. Tibeto-Burman is reviewed by genetic or geographical sub-group, with overview articles on some of the major groups and areas, and there are also detailed descriptions of 41 individual Tibeto-Burman languages, written by world experts in the field. Designed for students and researchers of Asian languages, The Sino-Tibetan Languages is a detailed overview of the field. This book is invaluable to language students, experts requiring concise, but thorough, information on related languages, and researchers working in historical, typological and comparative linguistics.

Genres: Linguistics, Language

1018 pages, Paperback

First published February 1, 2013

Reviews

[Christopher · Rating 4 out of 5]

THE SINO-TIBETAN LANGUAGES, edited by Graham Thurgood and Randy J. LaPolla, is part of the Routledge Language Family Series. Like all volumes, this one contains mainly synchronic descriptions of all the languages in a recognized family, with some extra chapters on the family as a whole and writing systems. While I am trained in linguistics, my own research focuses on the the Indo-European, Finno-Ugrian/Uralic, and Turkic languages. I read THE SINO-TIBETAN LANGUAGES only for pleasure, and so my review will attempt to merely describe it rather than critique it.

The chapters on the family in general are three. Graham Thurgood contributes "A subgrouping of the Sino-Tibetan languages", where he describes the interaction between language contact, change, and inheritance. From Randy J. LaPolla we have an "Overview of Sino-Tibetan Morphosyntax", which lists the derivational prefixes and suffixes reconstructed for the proto-language and then shows how Sinitic and Tibeto-Burman may have innovated from this. Matthew S. Dryer writes on "Word order in Sino-Tibetan languages from a typological and geographical perspective". It is a pity that there is no chapter here which describes the reconstructed lexicon of the proto-language, which might give us a glimpse of the life some millennia back of the common ancestor of all these languages.

For Sinitic, we get several informative and entertaining chapters, though the authors chose to embrace to some degree the appelation "dialect" for them, meaning not every form of Chinese speech gets its own chapter. Derek Herforth contributes "A sketch of late Zhou Chinese grammar". Zhou Chinese is late, but it is the first Chinese language we have abundant information on. Unfortunately, he completely neglects the reconstructed phonology of Zhou Chinese. Jerry Norman write "The Chinese dialects: phonology", which sketches the ways that the sound system of these languages have grown apart. There's a great chart here of cognates across languages with the reconstructed proto-form. From Anne O. Yue comes the complementary "Chinese dialects: grammar". There then follow individual chapters on Mandarian dialects (Dah-an Ho), Shanghai (Eric Zee and Liejiong Xu), and Cantonese (Robert S. Bauer and Stephan Matthews). Finally, there's a chapter on Chinese writing.

The bulk of the book, however, is dedicated to the Tibeto-Burman languages and dialects, of which 32 are described in individual chapters. Unfortunately, there may not be room in this review to list them all. Some of these are sure to pique your interest. For me, it was some of the smallest of the languages, holding on in some remote village, where the chapter's author had to do the fieldwork himself to describe the language here.

The Routledge Language Family Series is mostly now available in paperback, which with Routledge is still rather pricey, but hundreds less than the original hardcover. If you enjoy reading about the Sino-Tibetan languages, this may be a volume worth picking up.