The Sino-Tibetan family consists of about 300 languages what arouses doubt on the possibility of ascertaining their relation by the graphical-analytical method without pre-classification by methods purely linguistic. This problem is still not fully resolved, but seven of these languages were singled out in the project "Tower of Babel"and their etymology was presented in tabular form. Such representation allowed constructing of the graphic model of their kinship which can be located on a map. In total, the database included 2,775 of the roots for the following languages: Chinese, Tibetan, Burmese, Kachin, Lushai, Lepcha, and Kiranti. And 91 roots can be considered as common to all these languages, and 174 occurs in only one of them. All they were excluded from the list that was used for counting the number of common words in pairs of languages. These data are shown in the table.
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| The total amount of words of each language taken for analysis is shown in the diagonal of the table. Immediately evident that it is disproportionately small for languages Kiranti and Lepcha compared with other languages. Reasons for this may be different. Perhaps these languages are not sufficiently understood, but may be the ancestors of speakers lived far enough away from the rest of the Sino-Tibetan. There are other possible causes, but one way or another, the two languages do not fit into the graphical model of kinship Sino-Tibetan languages, although, of course, they are genetically closely related to them. A graphical representation of the Sino-Tibetan languages is filed in the diagram on the right. This, rather than a mirror version of the model was chosen because it meets the modern places of settlement of Tibetans, Chinese and Burmese.
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| The map of the settlements of the speakers of the Sino-Tibetan languages |
As you can see, the points for each of the languages are fairly compact, which testifies to the correctness of the lexical material and about the adequacy of the representation of a system of kinship. It was assumed that the Sino-Tibetan Urheimat was somewhere in Central Asia or the Far East. However, finding here a place on the map to which one might be to impose this scheme failed. Apparently, there is no such place in this part of Asia at all.
Since the configuration of the model resembles the char of kinship Nostratic languages, and perhaps they are similar, if area of any of the languages (Lepcha or Kiranti) was below (south) the areas of the Burmese and Kachin Languages. We have grounds for such assumption because studies have shown that the location of the area of settlement of related peoples corresponds to a certain extent to the location of their Urheimats at the time of formation of their languages.
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| Currently, speakers oh the languages Lepcha and Kiranti live closer to the Burmese than to the Chinese. The Lepcha folk is the indigenous people of the State of Sikkim in India, which is located between Nepal and Bhutan. The Kiranti people living in Nepal. All this is not far from Burma, but also from Tibet, too. The proposed scheme of kinship Sino-Tibetan languages is shown above. The similarity of diagrams of kinship of the Sino-Tibetan Nostratic languages is striking. Accordingly, we have reason to locate the Urheimat of the Sino-Tibetans in the area of three lakes Van, Sevan, and Urmia (Rezaye) in Asia Minor (see map below). |
Thus, the Tibetan language was formed on the Plateau of Kars in the upper valleys of the rivers Kura and Chorokh. Chinese - in the valley of the Aras at Lake Sevan. The Urheimat of the folk Lepcha was located further downstream Aras. Burmese was formed near the Lake Van was formed, and Kaczin did near the Lake Urmia (Rezaye). The area in the valley of the Great Zab likely was inhabited not by folks Lepcha or Kiranti, which location of settlements could be somewhere in the eastern part of Asia Minor, having in mind their present place of settlements and their distant relationship with other Sino-Tibetan languages.
The time of the stay of Sino-Tibetan people in Urheimat should be attributed to the Upper Palaeolithic, because later this place was dwelt by carriers the Nostratic languages, which came here from the west, droving the original inhabitants to the east and assimilating, or killing their remains. The Sino-Tibetans moved to Central Asia, where they became the creators of the local Mesolithic cultures. They arrived to current places of habitat as early as the Neolithic or it was brought with them, since neither in China nor Burma reliable traces of Mesolithic period were not found.
It is clear that the Sino-Tibetans belong to the yellow race, to which also belonged to the Indians of America, the peoples of the Mongolian and Manchu-Tungus groups. Since the languages of these latter do not contain clear signs of kinship with the Sino-Tibetan, ie were formed very far from the settlement of the Sino-Tibetans, we have to assume that people of yellow race inhabited a vast area in Asia at a time when human language was held only the initial phase of its formation. See also Maykopian Hypothesis
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