Talk: Tibetan language
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There's really no point in creating a separate article for the written language. Why not merge? --Jiang|(Talk)
- Most languages with distinct writing systems have them separated (Armenian alphabet, Chinese written language, Hangul, etc). Theoretically it too could be expanded to full article size. --Menchi 08:37, 6 Dec 2003 (UTC)
But is this limited only to the Tibetan language? Armenia alphabet is an alphabet system, like Latin alphabet and Hangul is only a subset of Korean writing, not the entire system. The English language, Spanish language, etc. all cover their written components on the same page. I don't see the rationale behind the separation. The page isn't near getting too long. --Jiang|(Talk) 08:42, 6 Dec 2003 (UTC)
- I don't see how this case differs from Armenian alphabet, even if it's not alphabetic. I'm not familiar with Tibetan to know if it's truly alphabetic or not. If it soothes you, Esperanto calls it eo:Tibeta alfabeto. But then Esperanto also calls Hangul "Korean alphabet"-- and I know that's not the whole story. --Menchi 08:51, 6 Dec 2003 (UTC)
Maybe "Tibetan script" or "Tibetan alphabet" would be more representative of the article, like how we have an article on Chinese characters, since the grammar and most of everything else is still located in the main article. --Jiang|(Talk) 22:06, 6 Dec 2003 (UTC)
The Tibetan script is used to write other languages as well.
Umrao/217.88.115.5:
Please cite your sources. The Columbia Encyclopedia says the same thing. What have you got to say about this? --Jiang 21:59, 4 Apr 2004 (UTC)
Is Tibetan tonal? Agglutinating? a member of a language family?
Nanshu has proposed not describing Tibetan as tonal. I appreciate the fact that tones are less critical in Tibetan than in Mandarin, but I think it is a mistake to not classify the language as tonal. Two well-respected reference I can point to are the SIL Ethnologue and www.omniglot.com.
Also, I think it is most accurate to describe Tibetan as primarily isolating although somewhat agglutinative. To describe it as purely agglutinative is clearly misleading. I take my lead on this from the the Columbia Encyclopedia entry on Sino-Tibetan languages [1] and another wonderful website that I can't seem to put my finger on right now.
On the topic of Sino-Tibetan as a proposed language family, we need to steer clear of Sino-Tibetan politics. While it is unfortunate that the PRC propaganda machine finds it useful to point to this language family as part of their political claims over Tibet, we must not loose sight of the fact that the vast majority of independent linguists also find the Sino-Tibetan family an appropriate family designation, based soley on the linguistic evidence. The 36th International Conference on Sino-Tibetan Languages was just held this last November with nary a sign of Beijing party bosses calling the shots. So I'm tweaking the wording to reflect this and ignoring the politics of it.
technopilgrim 19:25, 7 Apr 2004 (UTC)
What is the most significant feature of Tibetan to be added to the first sentence? Maybe not adding it is better. Before offering my opinion, I notice you that I don't speak, read, or write Tibetan at all. My interests are the Tibetan script and Tibetans' political interactions with the Mongols.
Classifing the language as tonal is inappropriate. Tone characterizes most dialects but most Amdo dialects lack it. The emergence of tone was far later in Tibetan than in Chinese. In addition, written Tibetan doesn't reflect tone.
Isolating or agglutinative. Maybe Tibetan is a language which the traditional claffisication doesn't work for well. Sapir's old clafficiation is interesting. I don't know which is more significant, but I personally think Tibetan is more agglutinative than isolating.
Sino-Tibetan isn't so clear as the Indo-European language family, and I don't like to mention to it without noticing its uncertainty, maybe because I tend to be skeptical. Linguists were inclined to set up bigger language families but it is carefully reviewed today. They framed the Altaic language family and some built up the "Ural-Altaic language family". But today, almost no linguist supports the latter and many even question the former because the relationships between the Turkic, Mongolic, and Tungusic languages are not confirmed even though Altaic languages share several features. Thus at least Japanese linguists vaguely call them "Altaic languages" instead of using the term "language family." The same is true of Sino-Tibetan "languages", I think. Apparently, Chinese and Tibetan share some basic words, but their relationship isn't established yet. And I'd like to speficy the uncertainty. "Proposed" may not be good because all language families are nothing more than hypotheses. I hope someone find a better term. --Nanshu 23:06, 20 Apr 2004 (UTC)
This is incorrect. Sino-Tibetan is much more widely accepted than Altaic. What is essential here is not "shared words" but predictable sound changes between the two. This means that if "mother" is "mxxqqqkw" in one and "gbvpln" in the other, it is wrong to immediately assume there is no relation. Rather, you should dig deeper to look for other things. If "father" is "qqqmxxst" in one and "plgbvrz" in the other, and "horse" is "xxmstkw" in one and "bvgrzn" in the other, it becomes slowly apparent that there are regular sound correspondences between words with identical or extremely similar meaning.
To filter out borrowed words, a "Swadesh list" of 207 vocabulary words is often used. While a word like "encyclopedic", "astronomy", or "empire" is very likely to be borrowed from a different language, words on the Swadesh list such as "sun", "mother", "I", "skin", "tree", and the like are much less likely to be borrowed as they are the "core vocabulary" of the language, and studies have shown that on average, the words on the Swadesh list are the 207 slowest-changing words (ie, they have the lowest rate of being borrowed).
Thus the evidence is solid - this is not a proposed language family, the only people who disagree with it are non-linguists or highly nationalistic linguists. --Node 01:23, 9 Dec 2004 (UTC)
markup issues
There are markup issues in the last paragraph of Tibetan language#Evolution of Styles. It seems that there are issues with the number of ' used. I can't fix it myself, because I don't know if some of the ' are actually a part of a symbol, e.g. z'. If someone could fix this, that would be great, so it can be removed from Wikipedia:WikiProject_Wiki_Syntax/double-quotes-065.txt.
– Foolip 13:26, 18 Nov 2004 (UTC)
- It's text taken from an OCR of the 1911 EB. The only way to correct the text is to look at the 1911 EB, and I can't find actual scans online anywhere. The code is messed up, closing the italics isn't going to make it worse, so that's what I did. --Ben Brockert 00:52, Nov 19, 2004 (UTC)
