Trans-Himalayan

van Driem, George (2014). Trans-Himalayan. In: Owen-Smith, Thomas; Hil, Nathan W. (eds.) Trans-Himalayan Linguistics. Trends in linguistics. Studies and monographs: Vol. 266 (pp. 11-40). Berlin: De Gruyter Mouton

Text Trans-Himalayan 2014.pdf - Published Version Restricted to registered users only Available under License Publisher holds Copyright. Download (2MB)

This Trans-Himalayan tale unites two narratives, an historical account of scholarly thinking regarding linguistic phylogeny in eastern Eurasia alongside a reconstruction of the ethnolinguistic prehistory of eastern Eurasia based on linguistic and human population genetic phylogeography. The first story traces the tale of transformation in thought regarding language relationships in eastern Eurasia from Tibeto-Burman to Trans-Himalayan. The path is strewn with defunct family trees such as Indo-Chinese, Sino-Tibetan, Sino-Himalayan and Sino-Kiranti. In the heyday of racism in scholarship, Social Darwinism coloured both language
typology and the phylogenetic models of language relationship in eastern Eurasia.
Its influential role in the perpetuation of the Indo-Chinese model is generally left
untold. The second narrative presents a conjectural reconstruction of the ethnolinguistic prehistory of eastern Eurasia based on possible correlations between genes and language communities. In so doing, biological ancestry and linguistic affinity are meticulously distinguished, a distinction which the language typologists of yore sought to blur, although the independence of language and race was stressed time and again by prominent historical linguists.

Interest & Impact

Downloads

7 since deposited on 15 Sep 2014
0 in the past 12 months

Citations

5 Citations in Web of Science ®
6 Citations in Scopus

Search

in Google Scholar™

Services

Actions (login required)

Edit item

Actions (login required)

Edit item