Skip to main navigation Skip to search Skip to main content

Tibeto-Burman subgroups and historical grammar

George van Driem

    Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

    Abstract

    Several distinct strains of thought on subgrouping, presented in memory of David Watters and Michael Noonan, are united by a golden thread. Tamangic consists of Tamangish and maybe something else, just as Shafer would have wanted it. Tamangic may represent a wave of peopling which washed over the Himalayas after Magaric and Kiranti but before Bodish. There is no such language family as Sino-Tibetan. The term 'trans-Himalayan' for the phylum merits consideration. A residue of Tibeto-Burman conjugational morphology shared between Kiranti and Tibetan does not go unnoticed, at least twice. Black Mountain Mönpa is not an East Bodish language, and this too does not go unnoticed.
    Original languageEnglish
    Pages (from-to)31-39
    JournalHimalayan Linguistics
    Volume10
    Issue number1
    Publication statusPublished - 2011

    Keywords

    • Language in Time and Space (incl Historical Linguistics, Dialectology)

    Fingerprint

    Dive into the research topics of 'Tibeto-Burman subgroups and historical grammar'. Together they form a unique fingerprint.

    Cite this