Editing Sino-Tibetan languages (section)

===Study of literary languages===
[[File:Kǒngzǐ Shīlùn Manuscript from Shanghai Museum 1.jpg|thumb|right|upright|Ancient Chinese text on [[bamboo strips]]]]
[[Old Chinese]] is by far the oldest recorded Sino–Tibetan language, with inscriptions dating from around 1250 BC and a huge body of literature from the first millennium BC. However, the Chinese script is logographic and does not represent sounds systematically; it is therefore difficult to reconstruct the phonology of the language from the written records. Scholars have sought to reconstruct the [[phonology of Old Chinese]] by comparing the obscure descriptions of the sounds of [[Middle Chinese]] in medieval dictionaries with phonetic elements in [[Chinese characters]] and the rhyming patterns of early poetry. The first complete reconstruction, the ''[[Grammata Serica Recensa]]'' of [[Bernard Karlgren]], was used by Benedict and Shafer.{{sfnp|Matisoff|1991|pp=471–472}}

Karlgren's reconstruction was somewhat unwieldy, with many sounds having a highly non-uniform distribution. Later scholars have revised it by drawing on a range of other sources.{{sfnp|Norman|1988|p=45}} Some proposals were based on cognates in other Sino–Tibetan languages, though workers have also found solely Chinese evidence for them.{{sfnp|Baxter|1992|pp=25–26}} For example, recent [[reconstructions of Old Chinese]] have reduced Karlgren's 15 vowels to a six-vowel system originally suggested by [[Nicholas Bodman]].{{sfnp|Bodman|1980|p=47}} Similarly, Karlgren's *l has been recast as *r, with a different initial interpreted as *l, matching Tibeto–Burman cognates, but also supported by Chinese transcriptions of foreign names.{{sfnp|Baxter|1992|pp=197, 199–202}} A growing number of scholars believe that Old Chinese did not use tones and that the tones of Middle Chinese developed from final consonants. One of these, *-s, is believed to be a suffix, with cognates in other Sino–Tibetan languages.{{sfnp|Baxter|1992|pp=315–317}}

[[File:Turfan fragment tibt.jpg|thumb|left|[[Old Tibetan]] text found at [[Turfan]]]]
[[Tibetic languages|Tibetic]] has extensive written records from the adoption of writing by the [[Tibetan Empire]] in the mid-7th century. The earliest records of [[Burmese language|Burmese]] (such as the 12th-century [[Myazedi inscription]]) are more limited, but later an extensive literature developed. Both languages are recorded in alphabetic scripts ultimately derived from the [[Brahmi script]] of Ancient India. Most comparative work has used the conservative written forms of these languages, following the dictionaries of [[Heinrich August Jäschke|Jäschke]] (Tibetan) and [[Adoniram Judson|Judson]] (Burmese), though both contain entries from a wide range of periods.{{sfnp|Beckwith|2002a|pp=xiii–xiv}}

There are also extensive records in [[Tangut language|Tangut]], the language of the [[Western Xia]] (1038–1227). Tangut is recorded in a Chinese-inspired logographic script, whose interpretation presents many difficulties, even though multilingual dictionaries have been found.{{sfnp|Thurgood|2003|p=17}}{{sfnp|Hill|2015}}

[[Gong Hwang-cherng]] has compared Old Chinese, Tibetic, Burmese, and Tangut to establish sound correspondences between those languages.{{sfnp|Handel|2008|p=434}}{{sfnp|Gong|1980}} He found that Tibetic and Burmese {{IPA|/a/}} correspond to two Old Chinese vowels, *a and *ə.{{sfnp|Handel|2008|p=431}} While this has been considered evidence for a separate Tibeto–Burman subgroup, Hill (2014) finds that Burmese has distinct correspondences for Old Chinese rhymes ''-ay'' : *-aj and ''-i'' : *-əj, and hence argues that the development *ə > *a occurred independently in Tibetan and Burmese.{{sfnp|Hill|2014|pp=97–104}}