2015

This study applies the observation of alignment between geographical watersheds and linguistic groupings to the Tibetan Plateau and the Himalayas. Tournadre (2014) estimates 220 Tibetic language varieties in 25 major groupings, sharing a common linguistic ancestry. Typological groupings can be readily identified through mapping human settlements to watersheds. For areas that have yet to be researched, consistent hypotheses for typological groupings can be arrived at. Next to explaining anomalous data within a particular area or how certain linguistic features spread, a watershed-based map identifies possible linguistic areas to be researched. The concept is applied in detail to the watersheds and languages of Bhutan and then expanded out to the broader Tibetan region.

Journal of the Southeast Asian Linguistic Society, 11 (2): xcviii-cx., 2018

It has been fourteen years since the appearance of the first edition of this compendium of Trans-Himalayan languages. In its second edition, the volume has swollen to encompass 53 chapters. As Simon and Hill (2015: 381) noted, the language family "is known by names including 'Tibeto-Burman', 'Sino-Tibetan' and 'Trans-Himalayan', of which the last is the most neutral and accurate". McColl et al. (2018: 362) put it more succinctly in their Science article, stating simply: "Trans-Himalayan (formerly Sino-Tibetan)". In the very title to this volume, the two editors, Graham Ward Thurgood and Randy John LaPolla, loudly proclaim their adherence to the obsolete and empirically unsupported "Sino-Tibetan" phylogeny, but many of the contributors to this Routledge volume do not themselves subscribe to the same antiquated Indo-Chinese understanding of the language family. Outside of this volume, a good number of the contributing scholars openly abjure this family tree model. Later, we shall examine how the outspoken bias of the two editors pervades the volume in a thorough and more insidious manner than in the first edition. The anthology comprises 44 grammatical sketches, two of which are devoted to dead Trans-Himalayan languages, five survey articles, two editorial pieces, a piece on the Chinese writing system and a discussion of word order. Editorial misrepresentations, the state of the art and Gerber's Law This volume contains many valuable, some truly wonderful and a few problematic instalments, but the Routledge compendium is truly marred by the two editorial pieces authored by Thurgood and LaPolla and positioned at the very beginning of the book. In addition to the two large editorial pieces, the first section also contains a brief study of word order in Trans-Himalayan languages by Matthew Synge Dryer. A volume that purports to present a general overview of the field should dispassionately present different positions held by specialists in that field, and the failure even just once to mention that alternative views exist that are quite at variance with Thurgood and LaPolla's own particular view characterises an unfair comportment on the part of the two editors that is not just unsportsmanlike, but unscholarly and unworthy of our field. For well over a century, the phylogeny of the language family has been a matter of considerable controversy. Yet both editors are careful to cite and quote only such sources as happen to agree with their own model. The empirically unsupported Indo-Chinese taxonomy relentlessly propounded by an ever dwindling number of "true believer" Sino-Tibetanists permeates the very arrangement of the book, and the two editors have even wilfully skewed the contents of the volume in order to fit their obsolete Indo-Chinese family tree. In keeping with this "Sino-Tibetan" conceit, the editors have included six instalments on Sinitic, though the sheer brevity of Dah-an Ho's instalment on Mandarin could reflect a reluctance on the part of its contributor to indulge the paradigm championed by the two editors. Indeed, as already noted, many of the scholars who have contributed to this volume reject the language family tree model touted by the editors. Moreover, the editorial twosome surreptitiously sneak their own "Rung" subgroup into the table of contents, thereby falsely suggesting that this fiction represents a valid taxon within the family. To exacerbate matters, their table of contents incompetently groups Tshangla and Newar as "Bodish" languages.

Language and Linguistics 13:1, 2012

This paper presents epistemological and methodological problems found in work on the subgrouping of Sino-Tibetan languages and the reconstruction of features of the languages. A key problem is the lack of an accepted standard for judging this work, one that can stand up to statistical evaluation. An alternative methodology that involves using fixed sets of features to give us the statistical probability of common origin is suggested.

Acta Linguistica Hafniensia, 26: 45-56., 1993

2014. In N. Hill, and T. Owen-Smith, Eds. Trans-Himalayan Linguistics. Berlin, de Gruyter: 71-104.

Language and Linguistics Compass, 2008

Sino-Tibetan is one of the great language families of the world, containing hundreds of languages spoken by over 1 billion people, from Northeast India to the Southeast Asian peninsula. The best-known languages in the family are Chinese, Tibetan, and Burmese. Although the existence of the family has been recognized for nearly 200 years, significant progress in reconstructing the history of the family was not achieved until the latter half of the twentieth century. In recent decades, this progress has accelerated, thanks to an explosion of new data and new approaches. At the same time, a number of interesting controversies have emerged in the field, centered on such issues as subgrouping and reconstruction methodology.

appeared in a different layout in: Enoch O. Aboh and Norval Smith (eds.) Complex processes in new languages. (Creole Language Library, 35.) Amsterdam, Philadelphia: John Benjamins, pp. 75-95. Reducing phonetical complexity and grammatical opaqueness: Old Tibetan as a lingua franca and the development of the modern Tibetan varieties. 1 Bettina Zeisler, SFB 441, Universität Tübingen

The verb agreement systems of Jinghpaw, Meyor, Northern Naga, and Northern, Northwest and Southern Kuki-Chin contain material which is demonstrably inherited from Proto-Trans-Himalayan. Here we discuss morphological evidence that these systems share a common ancestor more recent than PTH. There is strong evidence connecting Jinghpaw with both Northern Naga and Kuki-Chin, and weaker comparisons directly linking Northern Naga and Kuki-Chin, and both of these with Meyor. These data support the claim that all of these languages belong to a single branch of the family, an idea which has been suggested in the past but never argued for.

2018

This is my oral presentation handout for "The 51st International Conference on Sino-Tibetan Languages and Linguistics" (2018/09/25-2018/09/28, Kyoto, Japan)