Chapter 2 Tongues, Texts, and Scripts 51islands: taro, breadfruit, banana, yam, sago, coconut. Rice disappears from the
economy of the Malayo-Polynesians when they enter the Pacific.
Sino-Tibetan
This brings us to Sino-Tibetan, which includes Tibeto-Burman and Chi-
nese. Surprisingly, Sino-Tibetan may be the least understood of all these lan-
guage families. Though there have been scholars aplenty—for centuries—
devoted to the study of Chinese, its vast written traditions have absorbed most
of their energies. There has been far less interest in spoken forms of the lan-
guage, and still less interest in establishing links between the elevated language
of the Middle Kingdom and the most certainly “lower” forms of speech of
Western and Southern Barbarians. As a result, as recently as a few decades
ago, many scholars were still uncertain whether Chinese belonged with the
Tibeto-Burman group at all. Tibeto-Burman consists of over a hundred poorly
documented languages spoken mostly by small tribal groups, although a few of
these, notably Tibetan and Burmese, have very important literary traditions. In
fact, a seventh-century Tibetan text and a twelfth-century Burmese text have
been useful in reconstructing Proto-Tibeto-Burman.
All the Sino-Tibetan languages are tonal, but so are a number of other
nearby language families, like Tai-Kadai and Miao-Yao. Further, Chinese is
one of the most purely “isolating” languages in the world; that is, its words,
mostly monosyllabic, are very rarely modified with prefixes and suffixes
(unlike English, Sanskrit, and Japanese, which are highly inflected languages).
This, too, is a Sino-Tibetan characteristic, but Chinese is a more extreme form.
However, the word order of the Chinese sentence is unlike the Tibeto-Burman
languages: subject-verb-object (SVO) rather than subject-object-verb (SOV).
(English also happens to be SVO, a meaningless similarity since there are only
six possible variations for all world languages to choose from, and only three
Figure 2.4 Members of the Sino-Tibetan language family.
Sino-TibetanTibeto-Burman ChineseTibetan Burmese Newari Sherpa etc.