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Validity
The other tonal language families of East Asia, Tai-Kadai and Hmong-Mien, are sometimes included in Sino-Tibetan. This view fell out of favor in the West in the mid twentieth century, with the similarities credited to borrowings and areal features, but it is still widely held in China. ClassificationJames Matisoff's widely accepted classification is as follows: Sino-Tibetan (Matisoff)
Like Matisoff, George van Driem acknowledges that the relationships of the "Kuki-Naga" languages (Kuki, Mizo, Meitei, etc.), both amongst each other and to the other Tibeto-Burman languages, remain unclear. However, rather than placing them in a geographic grouping, as Matisoff does, van Driem leaves them unclassified. Certain linguists, most notably van Driem, have proposed that Chinese owes its traditional privileged place in the Matisoffian classification to cultural rather than linguistic criteria, much as Semitic was once considered a primary branch of a "Hamito-Semitic" family; and just as Semitic was later demoted to a sub-branch of Afro-Asiatic, several recent classifications have demoted Chinese to a sub-branch of Tibeto-Burman. Roger Blench comments that
Van Driem's classification is typical of this view: Tibeto-Burman (van Driem)
The essential part of this model is called the Sino-Bodic hypothesis, for it proposes that the closest relatives of Chinese are the Bodic languages such as Tibetan. Sino-BodicAdvocates of the Sino-Bodic hypothesis point to two main pieces of evidence establishing a special relationship between Sinitic and Bodic, and thus placing Chinese within the Tibeto-Burman family. First, there are a number of parallels between the morphology of Old Chinese and the modern Bodic languages. Second, there is an impressive body of lexical cognates between the Chinese and Bodic languages. Opponents of the Sino-Bodic hypothesis present two rebuttals. First, they note that the existence of shared lexical material only serves to establish an absolute relationship between two linguistic groups, not their relative relationship to one another. While it is true that some of the cognate sets presented by supporters of the Sino-Bodic hypothesis are confined to Chinese and Bodic, many others are found in Tibeto-Burman languages generally and thus do not serve as evidence for a special relationship between Chinese and Bodic. Second is the reconstruction of Proto-Tibeto-Burman produced by Benedict and refined by later scholars. This was largely based on data from literary Tibetan, literary Burmese, Mizo (Lushai), and Jingpho (Kachin). From the reconstructed forms, reflexes in each of these and many other Tibeto-Burman languages may be derived by the application of regular sound laws. If Chinese had an especially close relationship to Bodic, and therefore to literary Tibetan, any reconstruction that accounted properly for both Tibetan and languages outside of Bodic (such as Mizo and Jingpho) should be able to account for Chinese as well; however, Chinese forms may not be derived from these reconstructions through regular sound laws. Thus Sino-Bodic is not supported as a group distinct from Sino-Tibetan in this view. See AlsoReferences
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