Proto Sino Tibetan

[Otto Kretschmer]

What was it's morphology?

Was it more analytic like Chinese or agglutinative like Tibetan?

[Travis B.]

What was it's morphology?

Was it more analytic like Chinese or agglutinative like Tibetan?

Do we even know? The main guess I've seen, from STEDT and like, is that PTB at least involved prefixes and suffixes stuck onto words. But I would take STEDT with a large grain of salt, because it is very heavily based on Old Tibetan, and I've even seen one reconstruction that was mistaken because it took the Old Tibetan form verbatim as the proto-form, when in fact Old Tibetan had a regular sound change in that word that they failed to take into account.

[bradrn]

My understanding is that it was polysynthetic, with lots of consonants, contrastive velarisation in vowels and a high tolerance of initial clusters. The most conservative group is reportedly rGyalrongic, which preserves all of these traits. That being said, I don’t believe anyone has yet succeeded in reconstructing PST.

(Also, the name ‘Sino–Tibetan’ is almost certainly wrong, given that Sinitic is almost certainly not basal. I use the name for consistency, but prefer ‘Trans-Himalayan’.)

[Nortaneous]

The amount of verbal morphology to reconstruct is one of the major points of debate in the reconstruction of PST. Rgyalrongic and Kiranti have some verbal person marking affixes that look cognate, which, assuming it isn't a huge coincidence, means that either PST had verbal person marking or Rgyalrongic and Kiranti form a morphologically innovative subgroup within ST.

My understanding is that it was polysynthetic, with lots of consonants, contrastive velarisation in vowels and a high tolerance of initial clusters. The most conservative group is reportedly rGyalrongic, which preserves all of these traits. That being said, I don’t believe anyone has yet succeeded in reconstructing PST.

The large consonant inventories of Rgyalrongic are probably innovative. PST would've had esesquisyllables rather than initial clusters, but Blench thinks even this is secondary. Contrastive vowel velarization is not present in the best-documented Rgyalrongic languages, but at least in Japhug and Wobzi Lavrung its loss is recent. IIRC vowel uvularization in Nuosu developed from final stops rather than being inherited from PST, and I'm not sure if traces of it show up elsewhere (except maybe in Sinitic as one of several explanations for the OC A/B contrast), so it's possible that that's just an areal feature of some kind. Vowel uvularization is old enough to show up in Tangut, though.