is a very good introduction to issues of SinoTibetan historical phonology, Note that the intended audience for this book is a scholarly one, readers already well trained in the historical phonology of other language families who want to understand how work has been ongoing for the last century to establish a genetic relationship between the three language families of this books title and reconstruct their common ancestor SinoTibetan or, the term the author prefers, TransHimalayan.
The author dedicates a separate chapter each to Tibetan, Burmese and Chinese, In each, he uses various techniques to reconstruct the earliest stage of the respective branch of SinoTibetan:comparing the classical written language to the various dialects,internal reconstruction, andloanwords into surrounding language families of the region.
For Chinese, evidence from the character writing system is also used to recover earlier stages of the language,
For Chinese, the author generally uses the reconstruction of Old Chinese which Baxter amp Sagart published in, This reconstruction is controversial, to say the least, especially because of the rather odd and unnaturallooking phonological inventory that those authors posit, However, Hill feels that this reconstruction is stronger than its competitors, because the distinctions between phonemes hold up, even if the phonetics applied to those phonemes is suspect.
The Baxter amp Sagart reconstruction therefore serves as a good basis for further work, which may eventually refine the phonetic details into something more pleasing.
The last chapter then sets out what we might be able to say about ProtoSinoTibetan on the basis of the earliest recoverable stages of Tibetan, Burmese and Chinese.
Yet at the present stage, that isnt much:
The preceding chapters trace the attested forms of Tibetan, Burmese, and Chinese backwards in time to the greatest extent that currently appears possible.
This final chapter compares the results of these three exercises, If all developments in the three languages followed exceptionless phonological patterns with no interference from analogy and lost morphology a few scant remarks would suffice to point out that the backward projection of each of the three languages leads to the selfsame result.
The true situation is far less elegant, The TransHimalayan family is an ancient and ramified one the three languages studied here offer only fragmentary glimpses of the protolanguage,
So, no one reading this book should expect as detailed a picture of the protolanguage as one might get from other established language families like
IndoEuropean or Turkic.
Still, Hill hopes that SinoTibetan reconstruction is gradually moving towards the neogrammarian rigor of IndoEuropean reconstruction and progress will come,
As someone working with some other language families, I really appreciated this book for clearly laying out the methodology used by scholars in this field, their disagreements, and the difficulties presently faced.
Until now, historical linguists working elsewhere have lacked such a friendly introduction written for the historicallinguistics community at large, The discovery of sound laws by comparing attested languages is the method which has unlocked the history of European languages stretching back thousands of years before the appearance of written records, e.
g. Latin p corresponds to English f pes, foot primus, first plenus, full, Although Burmese, Chinese, and Tibetan have long been regarded as related, the systematic exploration of their shared history has never before been attempted, Tracing the history of these three languages using just such sound laws, this book sheds light on the prehistoric language from which they descend.
Written for readers with little linguistic knowledge of these languages, but fully explicit and copiously indexed for the specialist, this work will serve as the bedrock for future progress in the study of these languages.
Librarians note: There is than one author in the Goodreads database with this name, .