Indo-Aryan Controversy by Bryant Edwin; Patton Laurie;

Author:Bryant, Edwin; Patton, Laurie;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Taylor and Francis
Published: 2017-02-13T05:00:00+00:00

7.6.4 Sino-Tibetan

To prove an Asian homeland for IE, it is not good enough to diminish the connections between IE and more westerly language families. To anchor IE in Asia, the strongest argument would be genetic kinship with an East-Asian language family. However, in the case of Sino-Tibetan, all we have is loans, early but apparently not PIE. The early dictionaries suggested a connection between Tibetan lama, written and originally pronounced as blama, and Sanskrit brahma (S. C. Das 1902: 900); blama is derived from bla-, ‘upper, high’ (as in (b)ḷa-dakh, ‘high mountain-pass’), and doesn't Sanskrit bṛh-, root of brahma, mean ‘to grow’, that is, ‘to become high’, close enough to the meaning of Tibetan bla-? But more such look-alikes to build a case for profound kinship were never found.

On the other hand, early contact between members of the two families is wellattested, though not in India. A well-known set of transmitted terms was in the sphere of cattlebreeding, all from IE (mostly Tocharian) to Chinese: terms for horse (ma < *mra, cfr. mare); hound (quan, cfr. Skt shvan); honey (mi, cfr. mead, Skt medhu); bull (gu, cfr. Skt go); and, more recently, lion (shi, Iranian sher). This does not add new information on the Urheimat question, for the IE-speaking cattle-breeders in Northwest China could have come from anywhere, but it confirms our image of the relations between the tea-drinking Chinese farmers (till today, milk is a rarity in the Chinese diet) and the milk-drinking “barbarians” on their borders.

The first one to point out some common vocabulary between IE and Chinese was Edkins (1871). Since then, the attempt has become more ambitious. The old racial objection has been overruled: there is no reason why the Early Indo-Europeans should have been fair-haired Caucausians (the mummies and skeletons of such types found in large numbers in Xinjiang have been dated to well after the PIE age range), and at any rate languages are known to cross racial frontiers, witness the composition of the Turkish language community, from Mongoloid in pre-Seljuq times to indistinguishable from Armenians or Syrians or Bulgarians today. Also, unlike modern Chinese, archaic Chinese was similar to IE in the shape of its words: monosyllabic roots with consonant clusters, and probably not yet with different tones except for a pitch accent, traces of which also exist in Sanskrit and Greek.

Pulleyblank (1993) claims to have reconstructed a number of rather abstract similarities in the phonetics and morphology of PIE and Sino-Tibetan. Though he fails to back it up with any lexical similarities, he confidently dismisses as a “prejudice” the phenomenon that “for a variety of reasons, the possibility of a genetic relationship between these two language families strikes most people as inherently most improbable”. He believes that “there is no compelling reason from the point of view of either linguistics or archaeology to rule out the possibility of a genetic connection between Sino-Tibetan and Indo-European. Such a connection is certainly inconsistent with a European or Anatolian homeland for the Indo-Europeans but it

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