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The Tibeto-Burman languages are the non-Sinitic members of the Sino-Tibetan language family, over 400 of which are spoken throughout the highlands of Southeast Asia, as well as lowland areas in Myanmar (Burma). The name derives from the most widely spoken of these languages, namely Burmese (over 32 million speakers) and the Tibetic languages (over 8 million). Most of the other languages are spoken by much smaller communities, and many of them have not been described in detail. Some taxonomies divide Sino-Tibetan into Sinitic and Tibeto-Burman branches (e.g. Benedict, Matisoff). However, other scholars deny that Tibeto-Burman comprises a monophyletic group. Van Driem argues that the Sino-Tibetan family should be called "Tibeto-Burman", but this usage has not been widely adopted. Others exclude a relationship with Chinese altogether (e.g. Beckwith, R. A. Miller). The oldest attested Tibeto-Burman language is Pai-lang, of the third century, followed by Tibetan and Burmese. ==History== During the 18th century, several scholars noticed parallels between Tibetan and Burmese, both languages with extensive literary traditions. In the following century, Brian Houghton Hodgson collected a wealth of data on the non-literary languages of the Himalayas and northeast India, noting that many of these were related to Tibetan and Burmese. Others identified related languages in the highlands of southeast Asia and southwest China. The name "Tibeto-Burman" was first applied to this group in 1856 by James Logan, who added Karen in 1858. Charles Forbes viewed the family as uniting the Gangetic and Lohitic branches of Max Müller's Turanian, a huge family consisting of all the Eurasian languages except the Semitic, "Aryan" (Indo-European) and Chinese languages. The third volume of the ''Linguistic Survey of India'' was devoted to the Tibeto-Burman languages of British India. Julius Klaproth had noted in 1823 that Burmese, Tibetan and Chinese all shared common basic vocabulary, but that Thai, Mon and Vietnamese were quite different. Several authors, including Ernst Kuhn in 1883 and August Conrady in 1896, described an "Indo-Chinese" family consisting of two branches, Tibeto-Burman and Chinese-Siamese. The Tai languages were included on the basis of vocabulary and typological features shared with Chinese. Jean Przyluski introduced the term ''sino-tibétain'' (Sino-Tibetan) as the title of his chapter on the group in Antoine Meillet and Marcel Cohen's ''Les Langues du Monde'' in 1924. The Tai languages have not been included in most Western accounts of Sino-Tibetan since the Second World War, though many Chinese linguists still include them. The link to Chinese is now accepted by most linguists, with a few exceptions such as Roy Andrew Miller and Christopher Beckwith. More recent controversy has centred on the proposed primary branching of Sino-Tibetan into Chinese and Tibeto-Burman subgroups. In spite of the popularity of this classification, first proposed by Kuhn and Conrady, and also promoted by Paul Benedict (1972) and later James Matisoff, Tibeto-Burman has not been demonstrated to be a valid family in its own right. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Tibeto-Burman languages」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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