From horne-scott@CS.YALE.EDU Wed Jan 4 03:12:42 1995 Received: from SUNED.ZOO.CS.YALE.EDU (ZOO-GW.CS.YALE.EDU) by nfs1.digex.net with SMTP id AA15077 (5.67b8/IDA-1.5 for ); Wed, 4 Jan 1995 03:12:39 -0500 Received: by SUNED.ZOO.CS.YALE.EDU; Wed, 4 Jan 1995 03:12:38 -0500 Date: Wed, 4 Jan 1995 03:12:38 -0500 From: Scott Horne Message-Id: <199501040812.AA19427@SUNED.ZOO.CS.YALE.EDU> To: lojbab@access.digex.net Subject: Re: Sinitic and Tai (was: sci.lang FAQ) Status: RO > Nevertheless, the world of scholarship once believed that Tai was a branch > of Sinitic, and now it no longer believes so. Was there a definitive paper > "Tai Is Not Sinitic", or was the hypothesis merely allowed to die of old > age? I'm not aware of any crushing disproof. More likely, sensible people realised that there never was a sound basis for linking Tai and Sino-Tibetan. The data certainly do not support such a link. Actually, I'm not sure it's possible to prove that two language families are not related. But that's of course the assumption we make in the lack of evidence in favour of relation. > There is a bit more evidence: the presence of a Great Tone Split in both > families (and in Vietnamese as well), the tendency to monosyllabic words, > the presence of similar kinds of consonant clusters in Tai and Tibeto-Burman, > etc. Such typological features do not constitute evidence of relation. > It isn't enough to say "The hypothesis of relationship is rejected because > there's no sufficient reason to accept it." Why not? > Earlier scholars did find > sufficient reason. There has never been a paper describing sound correspondences between Sino-Tibetan and Tai, and a few haphazard musings about tone splits and consonant clusters aren't likely to provoke many linguists to write a detailed refutation. If someone has a good case for Tai-ST, let him make it. In the meantime, I'm not going to worry too much about it--or about Tai-IE, or Tai-Altaic, or any of a number of hypotheses and possible hypotheses I haven't seen defended. --Scott