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This article says Sino-Tibetan languages tend to be agglutinative languages, and that page says this is opposite to analytic languages, and that page in turn says Mandarin Chinese is the best example of analytic. I am very confused. -- Kaihsu Tai 09:53, 10 Oct 2003 (UTC)
How can language families be "hypothetical" or "proposed". They either exist or they don't. It doesn't look like they dont exist now and will exist tomorrow. -- Jia ng 04:45, 6 Apr 2004 (UTC)
actually the tibetan and burmese languages had alot of borrowings and cognates with indian language due to indian influence, so the similarities between chinese tibetan and burmese show a common ancestor in language —Preceding unsigned comment added by 141.155.146.29 ( talk) 02:01, 26 July 2008 (UTC)
Jiang, it's hypothetical because there is substantiated evidence to prove a plausible connection between various languages and language groups, but there is not enough evidence to completely say that those languages are directly related with attested connections and also a display of rules and a reconstructed proto-language. For all it matters, IE is quite hypothetical. It's a hypothesis which can be refuted. But it has been agreed by many to be the best model to understand European and the Subcontinental Indian languages by far. H-Man ( talk) 13:41, 15 August 2012 (UTC)
A new stub category has been created specifically for Sino-Tibetan languages: {{ st-lang-stub}} . Use {{st-lang-stub}} rather than {{stub}} or {{lang-stub}} to label stubs on Sino-Tibetan languages as such.
Stub categorizing is a convenient way to keep track of Sino-Tibetan-related stubs and additionally helps in keeping the category of language stubs usable. Whoever feels like it, is invited to browse Category:Language stubs to sift out any Sino-Tibetan language stubs... Thanks!
For discussion see: WP:WSS/Stub types#Language and literature and WP:WSS/Criteria#Split of lang-stub. — mark ✎ 23:20, 4 Jun 2005 (UTC)
it seems that sino-tibetan langauges have the largest number of speakers and not the indo-european languages, as is said in the entry "Sino-Tibetan languages".
Since the publication of his Handbook, van Driem has rethought the validity of Mahakiranti. I beleive he discusses this both in his essay in the proceedings of the 9th Himalayan Language Symposium (published by de Gruyter last year, Anju Saxena Ed.) and in the proceedings of the fifth published in Nepal.
All of the Tibetan citations in the "Common Roots" section are wrong for Written Tibetan. The numbers are gcig, gnyis, gsum, bzhi, lnga, drug, bdun, bgryad, dgu, bcu.
This list is far from helpful for determining genetic relationship. By this same list, mostly consisting of numbers, one could presume that Japanese, Korean, and several other unrelated (or relationship undeterminable) languages are genetically related to Chinese. For a better list please see the list on the page for Germanic Languages, it is very thorough.
the similarities between japanese to chinese, and korean to chinese, are only due to borrowing and language contact, which did NOT happen between tibetans and chinese, or burmese and chinese, due to the fact that they were more influenced by india, proving that this list is correct and you are not...... tibetan and chinese trace back to a common origin —Preceding unsigned comment added by 141.155.146.29 ( talk) 01:57, 26 July 2008 (UTC)
the writing system of Tibetan is totally different from Chinese, but the sound of numbers from 1-10 is almost the same between the two languages. Analytical feature is also common among the language familiy. Chinese madarin "was" more agglutinative in the past, remember the chinese language had developed for thousands of year and the modern form of the language is very much different than the language spoken in the Tang dynasty. in general, Sino-Tibetan are more analytical, although Tibetan and Burma language sometimes show some agglutinative suffix, that doesn't change the nature of the language. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 123.113.191.118 ( talk) 15:02, 31 December 2010 (UTC)
"the writing system of Tibetan is totally different from Chinese, but the sound of numbers from 1-10 is almost the same between the two languages.": That's because the Tibetan language borrowed from the Chinese language since ancient times! They are not related languages! Sino-Tibetan doesn't even make sense as ONE language family [Sino- is from Latin via Arabic, but the Greek root should be used, it makes better sense, since Latin is now a "dead language"!], since none of the words are related. When they sound the same, that's due to borrowing from various Chinese dialects just like what the Japanese did. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 108.41.65.248 ( talk • contribs) 14:47, 4 March 2012 (UTC)
Recent studies on the genetics of East Asian populations have suggested that the hypothesis of a Sino-Tibetan language family has a good chance of being correct. All populations that speak a language classified as Sino-Tibetan display high frequencies of Y-chromosomes belonging to Haplogroup O3-M122 and especially its subclade, O3a5-M134. Haplogroup O3-M122 is also typical of many populations that speak Hmong-Mien languages, Austronesian languages, or Tai-Kadai languages, which suggests that all these language families might ultimately be related. Haplogroup O1a-M119 is also rather common among people who speak an Austronesian or a Tai-Kadai language, however, so it is possible that the connection between Austronesian/Tai-Kadai and Sino-Tibetan might be more ancient than the connection between Sino-Tibetan and Hmong-Mien.
nobody said they spread the same wat, he only said the genes SUPPORT the language theory, and somewhrer on wikipedia it says chinese and tibetans came from same origin
If they don't spread the same way, they can't SUPPORT (or not support) it. 85.241.124.173 ( talk) 02:11, 30 October 2009 (UTC)
I know the articles says comparative method is hard for this language family; however, can we at least get a table up showing similarities of confirmed languages? -- Voidvector ( talk) 09:37, 31 August 2008 (UTC)
Since there is no such thing as a "Sino-Tibetan people", I moved that article here. kwami ( talk) 00:50, 27 January 2009 (UTC)
There are way too much hypothetical guesses in the template and not enough references to support such break-down of lists. The mainstream view of Sino-Tibetan language is definitely not listed as such, see Encyclopædia Britannica [1] and Ethnologue [2].-- TheLeopard ( talk) 21:29, 4 February 2009 (UTC)
Just to concur: Ethnologue is NOT generally considered reliable by linguists. It is just another information repository, and that information is not put there by experts, nor even neutral robots; it's selectively collected by SIL, which neither follows academic standards nor has scientific objectives or guidelines. That said, of course not even Ethnologue can get everything wrong; but it would be A Good Thing if Wikipedia guidelines specifically mentioned that whenever it's only-Ethnologue vs. Anything-Else, Anything-Else should prevail. Simply put, Ethnologue is not a primary source and is full of OR; that makes it worse than Wikipedia itself as a source, and of course Wikipedia can't be a source, so much less Ethnologue. 85.241.124.173 ( talk) 02:20, 30 October 2009 (UTC)
Does anyone else agree that the gallery featuring pictures of people of the different ethnic groups is unnecessary? This article is about the languages they speak, not the people themselves, and the pictures don't seem too relevant. The article even mentions that Sino-Tibetan is only a linguistic construct anyway. 66.71.70.66 ( talk) 13:27, 26 March 2009 (UTC)
Koro : http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-11479563 Cdrk ( talk) 19:11, 5 October 2010 (UTC)
We are now told that the internal classification of the Sino-Tibetan languages is "in flux". —Preceding unsigned comment added by 94.30.71.244 ( talk) 13:51, 7 May 2011 (UTC)
The diagram File:SinoTibetanTree.svg seems not to match the named source, and its contents are dubious.
The diagram is described as "largely following" or "primarily based on" The Sino-Tibetan languages, by Graham Thurgood and Randy J. LaPolla (2003), ISBN 0700711295. The first chapter of that book contains an outline classification of ST languages by Thurgood, but it seems very different from this tree. For example, Thurgood subdivides Chinese as Northern (Mandarin), Central (Wu, Xiang, Gan and Hakka) and Southern (Yue and Min), while this diagram has a very odd structure, e.g. claiming that only Yue and Mandarin are descended from Middle Chinese, that there is a Wu-Min subgroup, that Gan is some sort of mixture of Wu and Xiang, and so on. The Tibeto-Burman subgrouping also differs from Thurgood's (Lolo-Burmese, Bodic, Sal, Kuki-Chin-Naga, Rung and Karenic), and seems to contain a number of high-level nodes of uncertain provenance. Kanguole 09:34, 10 May 2011 (UTC)
Well, guess what? Then put that in the caption instead of removing the image or make your own image. Something's better than nothing and this is Wikipedia. The world lets you do your scholarship so that you can make it accessible for all academics, not just Sino-Tibetan linguists and not just historical linguists. Everyone outside of that bubble relies on you to do what you can to make your work available to them. ... Which includes not removing images from Wikipedia which are at least in the general ballpark of reality. Unbelievably ridiculous the kind of quality control for historical linguistics and ancient languages on Wikipedia. Wikipedia needs to work on being more welcoming to competent people instead of the kind of people who scare them out and end up running things. Compare articles from 2010 to today and see the effects of how things are run on Wikipedia. It's not a movie and it's not television, it's knowledge, and competent people are rare and should be treated with welcome, or they're just going to leave.
Oliverhaart ( talk) 12:04, 16 February 2015 (UTC)
The "Naic Languages" article contains a good image that covers a lot of Sino-Tibetan. This old flawed one and this Naic one (from some professors in 2011) should be added this article, if anyone in Wikipedia still cares for having Wikipedia be a useful resource for scholars and non-scholars.
/info/en/?search=Naic_languages
Oliverhaart ( talk) 12:10, 16 February 2015 (UTC)
Why should a link to the Glottolog page entitled "Sino-Tibetan" [5] be labelled as the "Sino-Tibetan / Tibeto-Burman entry"? Kanguole 11:01, 25 March 2014 (UTC)
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Why is the genetic studies being rejected? I don't see anything wrong with it. — Preceding unsigned comment added by ShanghaiWu ( talk • contribs) 07:06, 29 April 2014 (UTC)
But how do you know what is fact or opinion when it comes to genetic. Many genetic and DNA analysis come from scholars opinion. That's what I want to know first. — Preceding unsigned comment added by ShanghaiWu ( talk • contribs) 08:15, 29 April 2014 (UTC)
So if I write it down in the for of opinion,does that mean it can be included in wiki page? — Preceding unsigned comment added by ShanghaiWu ( talk • contribs) 08:44, 29 April 2014 (UTC)
Do any authors make a connection between ergative marking in some TB languages and Cikoski's "ergative verbs" in Classical Chinese? If not, we shouldn't juxtapose them as if they were somehow related. Kanguole 10:29, 15 July 2014 (UTC)
Gong Hwang-Cherng's discovery, the common Tibeto-Burman merger of Proto-Sino-Tibetan *ə with *a, where Old Chinese still preserves the vowel distinction, receives a short mention both in this article (under "Study of literary languages") and in Old Chinese#Vocabulary (under "Sino-Tibetan"), but in light of the fact that it is such a crucial argument, it should really be emphasised more here, because it's easy to miss. In fact, I had missed it all the time – until right now. (I will assume here that researchers have some kind of argument that the distinction cannot have arisen secondarily from a proto-phoneme *a.) When you're not told any details, it's reasonable to be sceptical about the validity (coherence) of the Tibeto-Burman subbranch, after all. -- Florian Blaschke ( talk) 17:55, 11 October 2014 (UTC)
This claim, although not strictly cited from literature, does follow from an absense of strong evidence for the unity of Tibeto-Burman. The question if Sinitic brances first, or doesn't, is not a 50:50 race, or even 10:90. It's "Sinitic branches first" versus "Karen brances first" versus "Sino-Bodic branches first" versus "Tani+Siangic+Kiranti branches first" versus all the other 2^39 other ways that the 40 established branches could be divided in two. Bringing up just one particular hypothesis is already a strong allegiance to it (perhaps as strong as is at all warranted). -- Trɔpʏliʊm • blah 16:12, 18 October 2014 (UTC)
Many of these languages and groups are referred to in the literature under a variety of names, making it difficult to relate what is written here to other accounts. I know I've found it difficult to unravel. It's true that other names are given in the specific articles on those languages and groups, but it would take a lot of clicking to find them. It would therefore be helpful to readers for this article to mention alternative names that are widely used in the literature. Kanguole 13:40, 20 October 2014 (UTC)
The East and West branches of the tree in Figure 6 seem to have their names the wrong way round, both from the locations of the languages mentioned, and from the discussion elsewhere of Sinitic, Tujia, Bai, etc as eastward migrations (illustrated in Figure 5). The figure in the conference version has the labels the other way round, but the conference presentation doesn't. Kanguole 11:21, 21 October 2014 (UTC)
I'll ask here, because there has been no response at Talk:Tibetic languages. At Central Tibetan language there is a hatnote saying "not to be confused with Central Tibetic languages", which then redirects to the Classification section at Tibetic languages. Yet, its Classification section only mentions Central Tibetan. It does mention that some authors break up Central Tibetan. What is the difference and how does it relate to that break up by some authors? -- JorisvS ( talk) 18:39, 28 October 2014 (UTC)
You wouldn't find a sentence in Indo-European languages stating there was no ethnic unity among the speakers. Why is it included here? -- Explosivo ( talk) 12:06, 2 July 2015 (UTC)
this article seems to be more about the study of the languages and historical findings than about the languages themselves. for a non-linguist who is expecting a description of the languages and their roots, it's rather disappointing to find what looks like an academic paper summarizing historical studies, focusing more on who found what than on the topic at hand. might i suggest this article be rewritten to focus on the languages, rather than the study of them, and be worded for the general wikipedia audience, rather than aimed at linguists. much of the current page could be moved to a new page that focusses on the field of studying these languages and its history. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 46.193.65.91 ( talk) 18:36, 7 June 2016 (UTC)
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I feel like this section seriously needs some clarification, particularly the second subheading which talks only about Chinese, Hmong-Mien, and Tai-Kadai, the last two of which seem irrelevant (being not part of ST according to most recent researchers). Additionally, the wording is occasionally a little confusing. Does anybody know someone who can clear this up? — Preceding unsigned comment added by 149.175.254.1 ( talk) 02:59, 24 February 2018 (UTC)
I have reverted a change from Chinese linguists generally include Tai-Kadai and Hmong-Mien languages, but Western linguists do not. to Chinese linguists generally include Tai-Kadai and Hmong-Mien languages,which roughly corresponds to Sino-Austronesian languages or bigger family Sino-Tibetan-Austronesian languages.. Firstly, that Western linguists do not include Tai-Kadai or Hmong-Mien in Sino-Tibetan is a significant fact about the family, and summarizes referenced text in the Classification section (particularly under Li's classification). Sagart's Sino-Austronesian proposal does not place Tai-Kadai within Sino-Tibetan, but rather within Austronesian, which is then viewed as a sibling of Sino-Tibetan. There is no correspondence. Moreover, Sagart's proposal is just one of a host of macro-linkage proposals that has found limited support. To single it out for placement in the lead is undue weight. Kanguole 15:13, 18 April 2018 (UTC)
This section is barely in English (notice the second person) and jumps around in a crazy way between Chinese, Tibetan and Jingpo, with no obvious relevance to anything. The claims are also so vague as to be meaningless. I suggest cutting the section altogether. Tibetologist ( talk) 23:44, 28 August 2019 (UTC)
Old Chinese#Classification has a bigger comparative vocabulary table might be worth incorporating. -- Voidvector ( talk) 23:23, 27 December 2019 (UTC)
This map has been placed in the History section, but that section deals with the history of Sino-Tibetal studies; a more relevant position would be the later Homeland section. As described in that section, a range of models have been proposed. This map singles out one variant, and thus gives it undue weight. It might be better to have a map that simply displays the locations of the various cultures mentioned in the text (which are uncontroversial). Kanguole 22:16, 17 October 2021 (UTC)
Hello, I have made a map that should be more detailed than the current main map of this article. I would like to replace the current map, so I would like anyone to review this map before I upload it.
GalaxMaps ( talk) 17:53, 18 February 2022 (UTC)
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There is no indigenous Sino-Tibetan languages in Malaysia and there is no Sino-Tibetan majority in any districts of states or sub-districts in Malaysia. If you idiots cannot make an accurate map better don't put the map at all! 180.75.233.189 ( talk) 10:31, 19 June 2023 (UTC)
The article states: "In morphosyntactic alignment, many Tibeto-Burman languages have ergative and/or anti-ergative (an argument that is not an actor) case marking."
Anti-ergative links to Secundative language. Secundative means that in sentences "Anna hits Bob" and "Anna sends Bob a package", Bob takes the same case in both sentences, whereas the package gets a separate marking.
"An argument that is not an actor" does not - in my understanding - explain or hint at this phenomenon in ditransitive verbs. I have knowledge about typology in general, but not Sino-Tibetan languages, so I cannot clear this up on my own. -- Holothuroid ( talk) 09:33, 25 January 2024 (UTC)
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This article says Sino-Tibetan languages tend to be agglutinative languages, and that page says this is opposite to analytic languages, and that page in turn says Mandarin Chinese is the best example of analytic. I am very confused. -- Kaihsu Tai 09:53, 10 Oct 2003 (UTC)
How can language families be "hypothetical" or "proposed". They either exist or they don't. It doesn't look like they dont exist now and will exist tomorrow. -- Jia ng 04:45, 6 Apr 2004 (UTC)
actually the tibetan and burmese languages had alot of borrowings and cognates with indian language due to indian influence, so the similarities between chinese tibetan and burmese show a common ancestor in language —Preceding unsigned comment added by 141.155.146.29 ( talk) 02:01, 26 July 2008 (UTC)
Jiang, it's hypothetical because there is substantiated evidence to prove a plausible connection between various languages and language groups, but there is not enough evidence to completely say that those languages are directly related with attested connections and also a display of rules and a reconstructed proto-language. For all it matters, IE is quite hypothetical. It's a hypothesis which can be refuted. But it has been agreed by many to be the best model to understand European and the Subcontinental Indian languages by far. H-Man ( talk) 13:41, 15 August 2012 (UTC)
A new stub category has been created specifically for Sino-Tibetan languages: {{ st-lang-stub}} . Use {{st-lang-stub}} rather than {{stub}} or {{lang-stub}} to label stubs on Sino-Tibetan languages as such.
Stub categorizing is a convenient way to keep track of Sino-Tibetan-related stubs and additionally helps in keeping the category of language stubs usable. Whoever feels like it, is invited to browse Category:Language stubs to sift out any Sino-Tibetan language stubs... Thanks!
For discussion see: WP:WSS/Stub types#Language and literature and WP:WSS/Criteria#Split of lang-stub. — mark ✎ 23:20, 4 Jun 2005 (UTC)
it seems that sino-tibetan langauges have the largest number of speakers and not the indo-european languages, as is said in the entry "Sino-Tibetan languages".
Since the publication of his Handbook, van Driem has rethought the validity of Mahakiranti. I beleive he discusses this both in his essay in the proceedings of the 9th Himalayan Language Symposium (published by de Gruyter last year, Anju Saxena Ed.) and in the proceedings of the fifth published in Nepal.
All of the Tibetan citations in the "Common Roots" section are wrong for Written Tibetan. The numbers are gcig, gnyis, gsum, bzhi, lnga, drug, bdun, bgryad, dgu, bcu.
This list is far from helpful for determining genetic relationship. By this same list, mostly consisting of numbers, one could presume that Japanese, Korean, and several other unrelated (or relationship undeterminable) languages are genetically related to Chinese. For a better list please see the list on the page for Germanic Languages, it is very thorough.
the similarities between japanese to chinese, and korean to chinese, are only due to borrowing and language contact, which did NOT happen between tibetans and chinese, or burmese and chinese, due to the fact that they were more influenced by india, proving that this list is correct and you are not...... tibetan and chinese trace back to a common origin —Preceding unsigned comment added by 141.155.146.29 ( talk) 01:57, 26 July 2008 (UTC)
the writing system of Tibetan is totally different from Chinese, but the sound of numbers from 1-10 is almost the same between the two languages. Analytical feature is also common among the language familiy. Chinese madarin "was" more agglutinative in the past, remember the chinese language had developed for thousands of year and the modern form of the language is very much different than the language spoken in the Tang dynasty. in general, Sino-Tibetan are more analytical, although Tibetan and Burma language sometimes show some agglutinative suffix, that doesn't change the nature of the language. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 123.113.191.118 ( talk) 15:02, 31 December 2010 (UTC)
"the writing system of Tibetan is totally different from Chinese, but the sound of numbers from 1-10 is almost the same between the two languages.": That's because the Tibetan language borrowed from the Chinese language since ancient times! They are not related languages! Sino-Tibetan doesn't even make sense as ONE language family [Sino- is from Latin via Arabic, but the Greek root should be used, it makes better sense, since Latin is now a "dead language"!], since none of the words are related. When they sound the same, that's due to borrowing from various Chinese dialects just like what the Japanese did. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 108.41.65.248 ( talk • contribs) 14:47, 4 March 2012 (UTC)
Recent studies on the genetics of East Asian populations have suggested that the hypothesis of a Sino-Tibetan language family has a good chance of being correct. All populations that speak a language classified as Sino-Tibetan display high frequencies of Y-chromosomes belonging to Haplogroup O3-M122 and especially its subclade, O3a5-M134. Haplogroup O3-M122 is also typical of many populations that speak Hmong-Mien languages, Austronesian languages, or Tai-Kadai languages, which suggests that all these language families might ultimately be related. Haplogroup O1a-M119 is also rather common among people who speak an Austronesian or a Tai-Kadai language, however, so it is possible that the connection between Austronesian/Tai-Kadai and Sino-Tibetan might be more ancient than the connection between Sino-Tibetan and Hmong-Mien.
nobody said they spread the same wat, he only said the genes SUPPORT the language theory, and somewhrer on wikipedia it says chinese and tibetans came from same origin
If they don't spread the same way, they can't SUPPORT (or not support) it. 85.241.124.173 ( talk) 02:11, 30 October 2009 (UTC)
I know the articles says comparative method is hard for this language family; however, can we at least get a table up showing similarities of confirmed languages? -- Voidvector ( talk) 09:37, 31 August 2008 (UTC)
Since there is no such thing as a "Sino-Tibetan people", I moved that article here. kwami ( talk) 00:50, 27 January 2009 (UTC)
There are way too much hypothetical guesses in the template and not enough references to support such break-down of lists. The mainstream view of Sino-Tibetan language is definitely not listed as such, see Encyclopædia Britannica [1] and Ethnologue [2].-- TheLeopard ( talk) 21:29, 4 February 2009 (UTC)
Just to concur: Ethnologue is NOT generally considered reliable by linguists. It is just another information repository, and that information is not put there by experts, nor even neutral robots; it's selectively collected by SIL, which neither follows academic standards nor has scientific objectives or guidelines. That said, of course not even Ethnologue can get everything wrong; but it would be A Good Thing if Wikipedia guidelines specifically mentioned that whenever it's only-Ethnologue vs. Anything-Else, Anything-Else should prevail. Simply put, Ethnologue is not a primary source and is full of OR; that makes it worse than Wikipedia itself as a source, and of course Wikipedia can't be a source, so much less Ethnologue. 85.241.124.173 ( talk) 02:20, 30 October 2009 (UTC)
Does anyone else agree that the gallery featuring pictures of people of the different ethnic groups is unnecessary? This article is about the languages they speak, not the people themselves, and the pictures don't seem too relevant. The article even mentions that Sino-Tibetan is only a linguistic construct anyway. 66.71.70.66 ( talk) 13:27, 26 March 2009 (UTC)
Koro : http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-11479563 Cdrk ( talk) 19:11, 5 October 2010 (UTC)
We are now told that the internal classification of the Sino-Tibetan languages is "in flux". —Preceding unsigned comment added by 94.30.71.244 ( talk) 13:51, 7 May 2011 (UTC)
The diagram File:SinoTibetanTree.svg seems not to match the named source, and its contents are dubious.
The diagram is described as "largely following" or "primarily based on" The Sino-Tibetan languages, by Graham Thurgood and Randy J. LaPolla (2003), ISBN 0700711295. The first chapter of that book contains an outline classification of ST languages by Thurgood, but it seems very different from this tree. For example, Thurgood subdivides Chinese as Northern (Mandarin), Central (Wu, Xiang, Gan and Hakka) and Southern (Yue and Min), while this diagram has a very odd structure, e.g. claiming that only Yue and Mandarin are descended from Middle Chinese, that there is a Wu-Min subgroup, that Gan is some sort of mixture of Wu and Xiang, and so on. The Tibeto-Burman subgrouping also differs from Thurgood's (Lolo-Burmese, Bodic, Sal, Kuki-Chin-Naga, Rung and Karenic), and seems to contain a number of high-level nodes of uncertain provenance. Kanguole 09:34, 10 May 2011 (UTC)
Well, guess what? Then put that in the caption instead of removing the image or make your own image. Something's better than nothing and this is Wikipedia. The world lets you do your scholarship so that you can make it accessible for all academics, not just Sino-Tibetan linguists and not just historical linguists. Everyone outside of that bubble relies on you to do what you can to make your work available to them. ... Which includes not removing images from Wikipedia which are at least in the general ballpark of reality. Unbelievably ridiculous the kind of quality control for historical linguistics and ancient languages on Wikipedia. Wikipedia needs to work on being more welcoming to competent people instead of the kind of people who scare them out and end up running things. Compare articles from 2010 to today and see the effects of how things are run on Wikipedia. It's not a movie and it's not television, it's knowledge, and competent people are rare and should be treated with welcome, or they're just going to leave.
Oliverhaart ( talk) 12:04, 16 February 2015 (UTC)
The "Naic Languages" article contains a good image that covers a lot of Sino-Tibetan. This old flawed one and this Naic one (from some professors in 2011) should be added this article, if anyone in Wikipedia still cares for having Wikipedia be a useful resource for scholars and non-scholars.
/info/en/?search=Naic_languages
Oliverhaart ( talk) 12:10, 16 February 2015 (UTC)
Why should a link to the Glottolog page entitled "Sino-Tibetan" [5] be labelled as the "Sino-Tibetan / Tibeto-Burman entry"? Kanguole 11:01, 25 March 2014 (UTC)
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Why is the genetic studies being rejected? I don't see anything wrong with it. — Preceding unsigned comment added by ShanghaiWu ( talk • contribs) 07:06, 29 April 2014 (UTC)
But how do you know what is fact or opinion when it comes to genetic. Many genetic and DNA analysis come from scholars opinion. That's what I want to know first. — Preceding unsigned comment added by ShanghaiWu ( talk • contribs) 08:15, 29 April 2014 (UTC)
So if I write it down in the for of opinion,does that mean it can be included in wiki page? — Preceding unsigned comment added by ShanghaiWu ( talk • contribs) 08:44, 29 April 2014 (UTC)
Do any authors make a connection between ergative marking in some TB languages and Cikoski's "ergative verbs" in Classical Chinese? If not, we shouldn't juxtapose them as if they were somehow related. Kanguole 10:29, 15 July 2014 (UTC)
Gong Hwang-Cherng's discovery, the common Tibeto-Burman merger of Proto-Sino-Tibetan *ə with *a, where Old Chinese still preserves the vowel distinction, receives a short mention both in this article (under "Study of literary languages") and in Old Chinese#Vocabulary (under "Sino-Tibetan"), but in light of the fact that it is such a crucial argument, it should really be emphasised more here, because it's easy to miss. In fact, I had missed it all the time – until right now. (I will assume here that researchers have some kind of argument that the distinction cannot have arisen secondarily from a proto-phoneme *a.) When you're not told any details, it's reasonable to be sceptical about the validity (coherence) of the Tibeto-Burman subbranch, after all. -- Florian Blaschke ( talk) 17:55, 11 October 2014 (UTC)
This claim, although not strictly cited from literature, does follow from an absense of strong evidence for the unity of Tibeto-Burman. The question if Sinitic brances first, or doesn't, is not a 50:50 race, or even 10:90. It's "Sinitic branches first" versus "Karen brances first" versus "Sino-Bodic branches first" versus "Tani+Siangic+Kiranti branches first" versus all the other 2^39 other ways that the 40 established branches could be divided in two. Bringing up just one particular hypothesis is already a strong allegiance to it (perhaps as strong as is at all warranted). -- Trɔpʏliʊm • blah 16:12, 18 October 2014 (UTC)
Many of these languages and groups are referred to in the literature under a variety of names, making it difficult to relate what is written here to other accounts. I know I've found it difficult to unravel. It's true that other names are given in the specific articles on those languages and groups, but it would take a lot of clicking to find them. It would therefore be helpful to readers for this article to mention alternative names that are widely used in the literature. Kanguole 13:40, 20 October 2014 (UTC)
The East and West branches of the tree in Figure 6 seem to have their names the wrong way round, both from the locations of the languages mentioned, and from the discussion elsewhere of Sinitic, Tujia, Bai, etc as eastward migrations (illustrated in Figure 5). The figure in the conference version has the labels the other way round, but the conference presentation doesn't. Kanguole 11:21, 21 October 2014 (UTC)
I'll ask here, because there has been no response at Talk:Tibetic languages. At Central Tibetan language there is a hatnote saying "not to be confused with Central Tibetic languages", which then redirects to the Classification section at Tibetic languages. Yet, its Classification section only mentions Central Tibetan. It does mention that some authors break up Central Tibetan. What is the difference and how does it relate to that break up by some authors? -- JorisvS ( talk) 18:39, 28 October 2014 (UTC)
You wouldn't find a sentence in Indo-European languages stating there was no ethnic unity among the speakers. Why is it included here? -- Explosivo ( talk) 12:06, 2 July 2015 (UTC)
this article seems to be more about the study of the languages and historical findings than about the languages themselves. for a non-linguist who is expecting a description of the languages and their roots, it's rather disappointing to find what looks like an academic paper summarizing historical studies, focusing more on who found what than on the topic at hand. might i suggest this article be rewritten to focus on the languages, rather than the study of them, and be worded for the general wikipedia audience, rather than aimed at linguists. much of the current page could be moved to a new page that focusses on the field of studying these languages and its history. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 46.193.65.91 ( talk) 18:36, 7 June 2016 (UTC)
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I feel like this section seriously needs some clarification, particularly the second subheading which talks only about Chinese, Hmong-Mien, and Tai-Kadai, the last two of which seem irrelevant (being not part of ST according to most recent researchers). Additionally, the wording is occasionally a little confusing. Does anybody know someone who can clear this up? — Preceding unsigned comment added by 149.175.254.1 ( talk) 02:59, 24 February 2018 (UTC)
I have reverted a change from Chinese linguists generally include Tai-Kadai and Hmong-Mien languages, but Western linguists do not. to Chinese linguists generally include Tai-Kadai and Hmong-Mien languages,which roughly corresponds to Sino-Austronesian languages or bigger family Sino-Tibetan-Austronesian languages.. Firstly, that Western linguists do not include Tai-Kadai or Hmong-Mien in Sino-Tibetan is a significant fact about the family, and summarizes referenced text in the Classification section (particularly under Li's classification). Sagart's Sino-Austronesian proposal does not place Tai-Kadai within Sino-Tibetan, but rather within Austronesian, which is then viewed as a sibling of Sino-Tibetan. There is no correspondence. Moreover, Sagart's proposal is just one of a host of macro-linkage proposals that has found limited support. To single it out for placement in the lead is undue weight. Kanguole 15:13, 18 April 2018 (UTC)
This section is barely in English (notice the second person) and jumps around in a crazy way between Chinese, Tibetan and Jingpo, with no obvious relevance to anything. The claims are also so vague as to be meaningless. I suggest cutting the section altogether. Tibetologist ( talk) 23:44, 28 August 2019 (UTC)
Old Chinese#Classification has a bigger comparative vocabulary table might be worth incorporating. -- Voidvector ( talk) 23:23, 27 December 2019 (UTC)
This map has been placed in the History section, but that section deals with the history of Sino-Tibetal studies; a more relevant position would be the later Homeland section. As described in that section, a range of models have been proposed. This map singles out one variant, and thus gives it undue weight. It might be better to have a map that simply displays the locations of the various cultures mentioned in the text (which are uncontroversial). Kanguole 22:16, 17 October 2021 (UTC)
Hello, I have made a map that should be more detailed than the current main map of this article. I would like to replace the current map, so I would like anyone to review this map before I upload it.
GalaxMaps ( talk) 17:53, 18 February 2022 (UTC)
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There is no indigenous Sino-Tibetan languages in Malaysia and there is no Sino-Tibetan majority in any districts of states or sub-districts in Malaysia. If you idiots cannot make an accurate map better don't put the map at all! 180.75.233.189 ( talk) 10:31, 19 June 2023 (UTC)
The article states: "In morphosyntactic alignment, many Tibeto-Burman languages have ergative and/or anti-ergative (an argument that is not an actor) case marking."
Anti-ergative links to Secundative language. Secundative means that in sentences "Anna hits Bob" and "Anna sends Bob a package", Bob takes the same case in both sentences, whereas the package gets a separate marking.
"An argument that is not an actor" does not - in my understanding - explain or hint at this phenomenon in ditransitive verbs. I have knowledge about typology in general, but not Sino-Tibetan languages, so I cannot clear this up on my own. -- Holothuroid ( talk) 09:33, 25 January 2024 (UTC)