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90-597: The Majiayao culture benefited from the warm and humid climatic conditions from the Late Glacial to the Middle Holocene, which led to flourishing agricultural production and rapid population growth. These conditions changed with the aridification of the Late Holocene, provoking material and cultural decline. The Majiayao culture may be associated with the expansion of early Sino-Tibetan peoples during

180-529: A proto-language for the family as a whole is still at an early stage, so the higher-level structure of Sino-Tibetan remains unclear. Although the family is traditionally presented as divided into Sinitic (i.e. Chinese languages) and Tibeto-Burman branches, a common origin of the non-Sinitic languages has never been demonstrated. The Kra–Dai and Hmong–Mien languages are generally included within Sino-Tibetan by Chinese linguists but have been excluded by

270-480: A detailed classification, with six top-level divisions: Shafer was sceptical of the inclusion of Daic, but after meeting Maspero in Paris decided to retain it pending a definitive resolution of the question. James Matisoff abandoned Benedict's Tibeto-Karen hypothesis: Some more-recent Western scholars, such as Bradley (1997) and La Polla (2003), have retained Matisoff's two primary branches, though differing in

360-575: A family whose diversity has been compared with the Romance languages . Diversity is greater in the rugged terrain of southeast China than in the North China Plain . Burmese is the national language of Myanmar , and the first language of some 33 million people. Burmese speakers first entered the northern Irrawaddy basin from what is now western Yunnan in the early ninth century, in conjunction with an invasion by Nanzhao that shattered

450-517: A few thousand meters high, and can close down airports for short periods of time. These winds can last for a full day at the beginning and end of the season, and for several days during the middle of the season. The shamal is a summer northwesterly wind blowing over Iraq and the Persian Gulf states (including Saudi Arabia and Kuwait), often strong during the day, but decreasing at night. This weather effect occurs anywhere from once to several times

540-489: A geographic grouping, as Matisoff does, van Driem leaves them unclassified. He has proposed several hypotheses, including the reclassification of Chinese to a Sino-Bodic subgroup: Van Driem points to two main pieces of evidence establishing a special relationship between Sinitic and Bodic and thus placing Chinese within the Tibeto-Burman family. First, there are some parallels between the morphology of Old Chinese and

630-402: A group with two branches, Chinese-Siamese and Tibeto-Burman. August Conrady called this group Indo-Chinese in his influential 1896 classification, though he had doubts about Karen. Conrady's terminology was widely used, but there was uncertainty regarding his exclusion of Vietnamese. Franz Nikolaus Finck in 1909 placed Karen as a third branch of Chinese-Siamese. Jean Przyluski introduced

720-565: 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

810-462: A hypothesis called Sino-Kiranti . The proposal takes two forms: that Sinitic and Kiranti are themselves a valid node or that the two are not demonstrably close so that Sino-Tibetan has three primary branches: George van Driem , like Shafer, rejects a primary split between Chinese and the rest, suggesting that Chinese owes its traditional privileged place in Sino-Tibetan to historical, typological, and cultural, rather than linguistic, criteria. He calls

900-857: A population of about 313 million. Of the 20 UN member countries fully or partly within the region, 13 are part of the Arab world . The most populous countries in West Asia are Iran , Turkey , Iraq , Saudi Arabia and Yemen . In the World Geographical Scheme for Recording Plant Distributions (WGSRPD), West Asia excludes the Arabian Peninsula and includes Afghanistan . The Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) excludes Egypt and includes Afghanistan. The United Nations Environment Programme excludes Cyprus , Israel , Turkey , and Iran from West Asia. The term West Asia

990-425: A prototypical example of the isolating morphological type, southern Chinese languages express this trait far more strongly than northern Chinese languages do. Initial consonant alternations related to transitivity are pervasive in Sino-Tibetan; while devoicing (or aspiration) of the initial is associated with a transitive/ causative verb, voicing is linked to its intransitive/ anticausative counterpart. This

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1080-547: A provisional classification of the remaining languages: Following that, because they propose that the three best-known branches may be much closer related to each other than they are to "minor" Sino-Tibetan languages, Blench and Post argue that "Sino-Tibetan" or "Tibeto-Burman" are inappropriate names for a family whose earliest divergences led to different languages altogether. They support the proposed name "Trans-Himalayan". A team of researchers led by Pan Wuyun and Jin Li proposed

1170-486: 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. The descriptions of non-literary languages used by Shafer and Benedict were often produced by missionaries and colonial administrators of varying linguistic skills. Most of

1260-412: A six-vowel system originally suggested by Nicholas Bodman . 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. 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,

1350-526: A special relationship between Chinese and Bodic. Van Driem has also proposed a "fallen leaves" model that lists dozens of well-established low-level groups while remaining agnostic about intermediate groupings of these. In the most recent version (van Driem 2014), 42 groups are identified (with individual languages highlighted in italics ): He also suggested (van Driem 2007) that the Sino-Tibetan language family be renamed "Trans-Himalayan", which he considers to be more neutral. Orlandi (2021) also considers

1440-513: A survey in the 1937 Chinese Yearbook , Li Fang-Kuei described the family as consisting of four branches: Tai and Miao–Yao were included because they shared isolating typology, tone systems and some vocabulary with Chinese. At the time, tone was considered so fundamental to language that tonal typology could be used as the basis for classification. In the Western scholarly community, these languages are no longer included in Sino-Tibetan, with

1530-466: A two-way distinction on initial consonants based on voicing, with aspiration conditioned by pre-initial consonants that had been retained in Tibetic but lost in many other languages. Thus, Benedict reconstructed the following initials: Although the initial consonants of cognates tend to have the same place and manner of articulation , voicing and aspiration are often unpredictable. This irregularity

1620-624: A year. West Asia contains large areas of mountainous terrain. The Anatolian Plateau is sandwiched between the Pontus Mountains and Taurus Mountains in Turkey . Mount Ararat in Turkey rises to 5,137 m (16,854 ft). The Zagros Mountains are located in Iran, in areas along its border with Iraq. The Central Plateau of Iran is divided into two drainage basins . The northern basin

1710-532: Is Dasht-e Kavir (Great Salt Desert), and Dasht-e-Lut is the southern basin. In Yemen , elevations exceed 3,700 m (12,100 ft) in many areas, and highland areas extend north along the Red Sea coast and north into Lebanon . A fault zone also exists along the Red Sea, with continental rifting creating trough -like topography with areas located well below sea level . The Dead Sea , located on

1800-494: Is argued to reflect morphological derivations that existed in earlier stages of the family. Even in Chinese, one would find semantically-related pairs of verbs such as 見 'to see' ( MC : kenH ) and 現 'to appear' ( ɣenH ), which are respectively reconstructed as *[k]ˤen-s and *N-[k]ˤen-s in the Baxter-Sagart system of Old Chinese . Western Asian West Asia , also called Western Asia or Southwest Asia ,

1890-501: Is at Baidaogouping, Gansu . The manufacture of large amounts of painted pottery means there were professional craftspeople to produce it, which is taken to indicate increasing social complexity. Control over the production process and quality declined by the Banshan phase, potentially due to greater demand for pottery to use in funeral rituals, similar to what Hung Ling-yu calls the "modern Wal-Mart syndrome". Pottery style emerging from

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1980-477: Is believed to be a suffix, with cognates in other Sino-Tibetan 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 (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

2070-756: Is disagreement over whether to include the entire Kra–Dai family or just Kam–Tai (Zhuang–Dong excludes the Kra languages ), because the Chinese cognates that form the basis of the putative relationship are not found in all branches of the family and have not been reconstructed for the family as a whole. In addition, Kam–Tai itself no longer appears to be a valid node within Kra–Dai. Benedict overtly excluded Vietnamese (placing it in Mon–Khmer) as well as Hmong–Mien and Kra–Dai (placing them in Austro-Tai ). He otherwise retained

2160-422: Is no consensus regarding the date and location of their origin. During the 18th century, several scholars noticed parallels between Tibetan and Burmese, both languages with extensive literary traditions. Early in the following century, Brian Houghton Hodgson and others noted that many non-literary languages of the highlands of northeast India and Southeast Asia were also related to these. The name "Tibeto-Burman"

2250-815: Is the westernmost region of Asia . As defined by most academics, UN bodies and other institutions, the subregion consists of Anatolia , the Arabian Peninsula , Iran , Mesopotamia , the Armenian highlands , the Levant , the island of Cyprus , the Sinai Peninsula and the South Caucasus . The region is separated from Africa by the Isthmus of Suez in Egypt , and separated from Europe by

2340-410: Is used pragmatically and has no "correct" or generally accepted definition. Its typical definitions overlap substantially, but not entirely, with definitions of the terms Middle East , Eastern Mediterranean , and Near East (which is historically familiar but widely deprecated today). The National Geographic Style Manual as well as Maddison 's The World Economy: Historical Statistics (2003) by

2430-456: The Arabian Peninsula numbering more than 3 million. Christian communities have played a vital role in West Asia. Judaism is the predominant religion in Israel , and there are small ancient Jewish communities in West Asia such as in Turkey (14,300), Azerbaijan (9,100), and Iran (8,756). The Druze Faith or Druzism originated in West Asia. It is a monotheistic religion based on

2520-453: The Baháʼí Faith , Yarsanism , Yazidism , Zoroastrianism , Mandaeism , and Shabakism . The economy of West Asia is diverse and the region experiences high economic growth. Turkey has the largest economy in the region, followed by Saudi Arabia and Iran. Petroleum is the major industry in the regional economy, as more than half of the world's oil reserves and around 40 percent of

2610-950: The Brahmi script of Ancient India. Most comparative work has used the conservative written forms of these languages, following the dictionaries of Jäschke (Tibetan) and Judson (Burmese), though both contain entries from a wide range of periods. There are also extensive records in 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. Gong Hwang-cherng has compared Old Chinese, Tibetic, Burmese, and Tangut to establish sound correspondences between those languages. He found that Tibetic and Burmese /a/ correspond to two Old Chinese vowels, *a and *ə. While this has been considered evidence for

2700-552: The Gulf of Oman . The population of West Asia was estimated at 272 million as of 2008, projected to reach 370 million by 2030 by Maddison (2007; the estimate excludes the Caucasus and Cyprus). This corresponds to an annual growth rate of 1.4% (or a doubling time of 50 years), well above the world average of 0.9% (doubling time 75 years). The population of West Asia is estimated at 4% of world population , up from about 39 million at

2790-642: The Karen languages , spoken by 4 million people in the hill country along the Myanmar–Thailand border, with the greatest diversity in the Karen Hills , which are believed to be the homeland of the group. The highlands stretching from northeast India to northern Myanmar contain over 100 highly diverse Sino-Tibetan languages. Other Sino-Tibetan languages are found along the southern slopes of the Himalayas and

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2880-611: The Lolo-Burmese group. While Benedict contended that Proto-Tibeto-Burman would have a two-tone system, Matisoff refrained from reconstructing it since tones in individual languages may have developed independently through the process of tonogenesis . Sino-Tibetan is structurally one of the most diverse language families in the world, including all of the gradation of morphological complexity from isolating ( Lolo-Burmese , Tujia ) to polysynthetic ( Gyalrongic , Kiranti ) languages. While Sinitic languages are normally taken to be

2970-533: The Mediterranean Sea . West Asia contains the majority of the similarly defined Middle East . The Middle East is a political term that has changed many times depending on political and historical context while West Asia is a geographical term with more consistency. It excludes most of Egypt and the northwestern part of Turkey , and includes the southern part of the Caucasus . West Asia covers an area of 5,994,935 km (2,314,657 sq mi), with

3060-639: The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) include only Bahrain, Iran, Iraq, Israel, Jordan, Kuwait, Lebanon, Oman, Qatar, Palestine (called West Bank and Gaza in the latter), Saudi Arabia, Syria, Turkey, UAE, and Yemen as West Asian countries. By contrast, the United Nations Industrial Development Organization (UNIDO) in its 2015 yearbook includes Armenia and Azerbaijan, and excludes Israel (as Other) and Turkey (as Europe). Unlike

3150-530: The Piora Oscillation . Sino-Tibetan peoples Sino-Tibetan (sometimes referred to as Trans-Himalayan ) is a family of more than 400 languages, second only to Indo-European in number of native speakers. Around 1.4 billion people speak a Sino-Tibetan language. The vast majority of these are the 1.3 billion native speakers of Sinitic languages . Other Sino-Tibetan languages with large numbers of speakers include Burmese (33 million) and

3240-703: The Pyu city-states . Other Burmish languages are still spoken in Dehong Prefecture in the far west of Yunnan. By the 11th century, their Pagan Kingdom had expanded over the whole basin. The oldest texts, such as the Myazedi inscription , date from the early 12th century. The closely related Loloish languages are spoken by 9 million people in the mountains of western Sichuan, Yunnan, and nearby areas in northern Myanmar, Thailand, Laos, and Vietnam. The Tibetic languages are spoken by some 6 million people on

3330-607: The Tibetan Plateau and neighbouring areas in the Himalayas and western Sichuan . They are descended from Old Tibetan , which was originally spoken in the Yarlung Valley before it was spread by the expansion of the Tibetan Empire in the seventh century. Although the empire collapsed in the ninth century, Classical Tibetan remained influential as the liturgical language of Tibetan Buddhism . The remaining languages are spoken in upland areas. Southernmost are

3420-639: The Tibetic languages (6 million). Four United Nations member states ( China , Singapore , Myanmar , and Bhutan ) have a Sino-Tibetan language as their main native language. Other languages of the family are spoken in the Himalayas , the Southeast Asian Massif , and the eastern edge of the Tibetan Plateau . Most of these have small speech communities in remote mountain areas, and as such are poorly documented. Several low-level subgroups have been securely reconstructed , but reconstruction of

3510-548: The Tigris and Euphrates rivers contribute very well. West Asia is primarily arid and semi-arid , and can be subject to drought , but it also contains vast expanses of forest and fertile valleys. The region consists of grasslands , rangelands , deserts , and mountains . Water shortages are a problem in many parts of West Asia, with rapidly growing populations increasing demands for water, while salinization and pollution threaten water supplies. Major rivers, including

3600-579: The Tigris and Euphrates , provide sources for irrigation water to support agriculture . There are two wind phenomena in West Asia: the sharqi and the shamal . The sharqi (or sharki ) is a wind that comes from the south and southeast. It is seasonal, lasting from April to early June, and comes again between late September and November. The winds are dry and dusty, with occasional gusts up to 80 kilometres per hour (50 miles per hour) and often kick up violent sand and dust storms that can carry sand

3690-578: The Yangshao culture spread to the Majiayao culture, and then further to Xinjiang and Central Asia. The Majiayao culture used a wide variety of symbols in its pottery, some of them abstract and geometric, including the well-known Neolithic symbol of the Swastika , some of them figurative, such as frontal and rather realistic anthropomorphic depictions , The Swastika symbol was particularly used during

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3780-587: The "Gansu Yangshao" culture. This culture developed from the middle Yangshao (Miaodigou) phase, through an intermediate Shilingxia phase. The culture is often divided into three phases: Majiayao (3300–2500 BC), Banshan (2500–2300 BC) and Machang (2300–2000 BC). At the end of the 3rd millennium BC, the Qijia culture succeeded the Majiayao culture at sites in three main geographic zones: eastern Gansu, central Gansu, and western Gansu/eastern Qinghai. Majiayao phase (3300–2500 BC) sites are mostly found on terraces along:

3870-631: The Banshan phase is distinguished by curvilinear designs using both black and red paints. Machang-phase pottery is similar, but often not as carefully finished. Its development is associated with interaction between hunter-gatherers in the Qinghai region and the westward expansion of agricultural Yangshao people. In contrast to plain pottery, the Majiayao painted pottery was produced at large, centralised workshops. The largest Neolithic workshop found in China

3960-532: The French term sino-tibétain as the title of his chapter on the group in Meillet and Cohen 's Les langues du monde in 1924. He divided them into three groups: Tibeto-Burman, Chinese and Tai, and was uncertain about the affinity of Karen and Hmong–Mien . The English translation "Sino-Tibetan" first appeared in a short note by Przyluski and Luce in 1931. In 1935, the anthropologist Alfred Kroeber started

4050-593: The Hexi Corridor during the Majiayao culture period, although an alternative may be a route through the Eurasian grasslands and then through the Mongolian plateau circa 3500-2500 BCE. Scholars have come to the conclusion that the development of the Majiayao culture was highly related to climate changes. A group of scholars from Lanzhou University have researched climate changes during the Majiayao culture and

4140-622: The Neolithic. The archaeological site was first found in 1924 near the village of Majiayao in Lintao County , Gansu by Swedish archaeologist Johan Gunnar Andersson , who considered it part of the Yangshao culture . Following the work of Xia Nai , the founder of modern archaeology in the People's Republic of China, it has since been considered a distinct culture, named after the original site, whereas previously it had been referred to as

4230-678: The Sino-Tibetan Philology Project, funded by the Works Project Administration and based at the University of California, Berkeley . The project was supervised by Robert Shafer until late 1938, and then by Paul K. Benedict . Under their direction, the staff of 30 non-linguists collated all the available documentation of Sino-Tibetan languages. The result was eight copies of a 15-volume typescript entitled Sino-Tibetan Linguistics . This work

4320-1265: The UNIDO, the United Nations Statistics Division (UNSD) excludes Iran from West Asia and includes Turkey, Georgia, and Cyprus in the region. In the United Nations geopolitical Eastern European Group , Armenia and Georgia are included in Eastern Europe, whereas Cyprus and East Thracian Turkey are in Southern Europe. These three nations are listed in the European category of the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO). National members of West Asian sports governing bodies are limited to Bahrain, Iran, Iraq, Jordan, Kuwait, Lebanon, Syria, Oman, Palestine, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates, and Yemen. The Olympic Council of Asia 's multi-sport event West Asian Games are contested by athletes representing these 13 countries. Among

4410-463: The Yangshao and/or Majiayao cultures. Sagart et al. (2019) performed another phylogenetic analysis based on different data and methods to arrive at the same conclusions to the homeland and divergence model but proposed an earlier root age of approximately 7,200 years ago, associating its origin with millet farmers of the late Cishan culture and early Yangshao culture. Several low-level branches of

4500-423: The absence of any sort of systematic comparison – whether the data are thought reliable or not – such "subgroupings" are essentially vacuous. The use of pseudo-genetic labels such as "Himalayish" and "Kamarupan" inevitably gives an impression of coherence which is at best misleading. In their view, many such languages would for now be best considered unclassified, or "internal isolates" within the family. They propose

4590-471: The beginning of the 20th century, or about 2% of world population at the time. The most populous countries in the region are Turkey and Iran , each with around 79 million people, followed by Iraq and Saudi Arabia with around 33 million people each, and Yemen with around 29 million people. Numerically, West Asia is predominantly Arab , Persian , Turkish , and the dominating languages are correspondingly Arabic , Persian and Turkish , each with of

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4680-686: The border between the West Bank , Israel , and Jordan , is situated at 418 m (1,371 ft) below sea level, making it the lowest point on the surface of the Earth . Rub' al Khali , one of the world's largest sand deserts, spans the southern third of the Arabian Peninsula in Saudi Arabia, parts of Oman, the United Arab Emirates and Yemen. Jebel al Akhdar is a small range of mountains located in northeastern Oman, bordering

4770-849: The boundary between the Aegean and Anatolian plate in eastern Turkey is also seismically active. Several major aquifers provide water to large portions of West Asia. In Saudi Arabia, two large aquifers of Palaeozoic and Triassic origins are located beneath the Jabal Tuwayq mountains and areas west to the Red Sea. Cretaceous and Eocene -origin aquifers are located beneath large portions of central and eastern Saudi Arabia, including Wasia and Biyadh which contain amounts of both fresh water and saline water . Flood or furrow irrigation, as well as sprinkler methods, are extensively used for irrigation , covering nearly 90,000 km (35,000 sq mi) across West Asia for agriculture. Also,

4860-415: The current spread of Sino-Tibetan languages is the result of historical expansions of the three groups with the most speakers – Chinese, Burmese and Tibetic – replacing an unknown number of earlier languages. These groups also have the longest literary traditions of the family. The remaining languages are spoken in mountainous areas, along the southern slopes of the Himalayas , the Southeast Asian Massif and

4950-547: The details of Tibeto-Burman. However, Jacques (2006) notes, "comparative work has never been able to put forth evidence for common innovations to all the Tibeto-Burman languages (the Sino-Tibetan languages to the exclusion of Chinese)" and that "it no longer seems justified to treat Chinese as the first branching of the Sino-Tibetan family," because the morphological divide between Chinese and Tibeto-Burman has been bridged by recent reconstructions of Old Chinese . The internal structure of Sino-Tibetan has been tentatively revised as

5040-488: The dominant language in Israel in the second half of the 20th century, and Neo-Aramaic (spoken by modern Arameans , Assyrians , and Chaldeans ) and Greek both remain present in their respective territories as minority languages. Significant native minorities include, in alphabetical order: Arameans , Assyrians , Chaldeans , Druze , Jews , Lurs , Mandeans , Maronites , Shabaks and Yezidis . Religion in West Asia (2020) Four major religious groups (i.e.

5130-538: The eastern edge of the Tibetan Plateau . The branch with the largest number of speakers by far is the Sinitic languages , with 1.3 billion speakers, most of whom live in the eastern half of China. The first records of Chinese are oracle bone inscriptions from c.  1250 BC , when Old Chinese was spoken around the middle reaches of the Yellow River . Chinese has since expanded throughout China, forming

5220-536: The eastern edge of the Tibetan plateau. The 22 official languages listed in the Eighth Schedule to the Constitution of India include only two Sino-Tibetan languages, namely Meitei (officially called Manipuri) and Bodo . There has been a range of proposals for the Sino-Tibetan urheimat , reflecting the uncertainty about the classification of the family and its time depth. Three major hypotheses for

5310-453: The entire family "Tibeto-Burman", a name he says has historical primacy, but other linguists who reject a privileged position for Chinese nevertheless continue to call the resulting family "Sino-Tibetan". Like Matisoff, van Driem acknowledges that the relationships of the "Kuki–Naga" languages ( Kuki , Mizo , Meitei , etc.), both amongst each other and to the other languages of the family, remain unclear. However, rather than placing them in

5400-451: The family, particularly Lolo-Burmese , have been securely reconstructed, but in the absence of a secure reconstruction of a Sino-Tibetan proto-language , the higher-level structure of the family remains unclear. Thus, a conservative classification of Sino-Tibetan/Tibeto-Burman would posit several dozen small coordinate families and isolates ; attempts at subgrouping are either geographic conveniences or hypotheses for further research. In

5490-413: The few scholars still arguing that Chinese is not related to Tibeto-Burman. Benedict also reconstructed, at least for Tibeto-Burman, prefixes such as the causative s- , the intransitive m- , and r- , b- g- and d- of uncertain function, as well as suffixes -s , -t and -n . Old Chinese is by far the oldest recorded Sino-Tibetan language, with inscriptions dating from around 1250 BC and

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5580-433: The final Majiayao Machang period (2300-2000 BCE), and became a current symbol in Buddhism representing samsara . The symbols include net patterns, eight-angled star patterns, connected-shell patterns, petal patterns, vortex patterns etc... Many motifs were already known from the preceding Yangshao culture (5000-3000 BCE). Bronze technology was imported to China from the steppes. The oldest bronze object found in China

5670-466: The following Stammbaum by Matisoff in the final print release of the Sino-Tibetan Etymological Dictionary and Thesaurus (STEDT) in 2015. Matisoff acknowledges that the position of Chinese within the family remains an open question. Sergei Starostin proposed that both the Kiranti languages and Chinese are divergent from a "core" Tibeto-Burman of at least Bodish, Lolo-Burmese, Tamangic, Jinghpaw, Kukish, and Karen (other families were not analysed) in

5760-472: The following phylogenetic tree in 2019, based on lexical items: Except for the Chinese, Bai , Karenic , and Mruic languages, the usual word order in Sino-Tibetan languages is object–verb . However, Chinese and Bai differ from almost all other subject–verb–object languages in the world in placing relative clauses before the nouns they modify. Most scholars believe SOV to be the original order, with Chinese, Karen, and Bai having acquired SVO order due to

5850-409: The influence of neighbouring languages in the Mainland Southeast Asia linguistic area . This has been criticized as being insufficiently corroborated by Djamouri et al. 2007, who instead reconstruct a VO order for Proto-Sino-Tibetan. Contrastive tones are a feature found across the family although absent in some languages like Purik . Phonation contrasts are also present among many, notably in

5940-500: The international community since the 1940s. Several links to other language families have been proposed, but none have broad acceptance. A genetic relationship between Chinese, Tibetan, Burmese, and other languages was first proposed in the early 19th century and is now broadly accepted. The initial focus on languages of civilizations with long literary traditions has been broadened to include less widely spoken languages, some of which have only recently, or never, been written. However,

6030-545: The modern Bodic languages. Second, there is a body of lexical cognates between the Chinese and Bodic languages, represented by the Kirantic language Limbu . In response, Matisoff notes that the existence of shared lexical material only serves to establish an absolute relationship between two language families, not their relative relationship to one another. Although some cognate sets presented by van Driem are confined to Chinese and Bodic, many others are found in Sino-Tibetan languages generally and thus do not serve as evidence for

6120-456: The northwest and north, the region is delimited from Europe by the Turkish Straits and drainage divide of the Greater Caucasus , to the southwest, it is delimited from Africa by the Isthmus of Suez , while to the northeast and east, the region adjoins Central Asia and South Asia . The region is located east of Southern Europe and south of Eastern Europe . The Dasht-e Kavir and Dasht-e Lut deserts in eastern Iran naturally delimit

6210-414: The order of 70 million speakers, followed by smaller communities of Kurdish , Azerbaijani , Hebrew , Armenian and Neo-Aramaic . The dominance of Arabic and Turkish is the result of the medieval Arab and Turkic invasions beginning with the Islamic conquests of the 7th century AD, which displaced the formerly dominant Aramaic in the region of Syria , and Greek in Anatolia, although Hebrew became

6300-405: The outlines of Conrady's Indo-Chinese classification, though putting Karen in an intermediate position: Shafer criticized the division of the family into Tibeto-Burman and Sino-Daic branches, which he attributed to the different groups of languages studied by Konow and other scholars in British India on the one hand and by Henri Maspero and other French linguists on the other. He proposed

6390-453: The part of Asia known in classical antiquity, as opposed to the reaches of "interior Asia", i.e. Scythia , and "Eastern Asia" the easternmost reaches of geographical knowledge in classical authors, i.e. Transoxania and India . In the 20th century, "Western Asia" was used to denote a rough geographical era in the fields of archaeology and ancient history , especially as a shorthand for "the Fertile Crescent excluding Ancient Egypt " for

6480-566: The place and time of Sino-Tibetan unity have been presented: Zhang et al. (2019) performed a computational phylogenetic analysis of 109 Sino-Tibetan languages to suggest a Sino-Tibetan homeland in northern China near the Yellow River basin. The study further suggests that there was an initial major split between the Sinitic and Tibeto-Burman languages approximately 4,200 to 7,800 years ago (with an average of 5,900 years ago), associated with

6570-705: The purposes of comparing the early civilizations of Egypt and the former. Use of the term in the context of contemporary geopolitics or world economy appears to date from at least the mid-1960s. The region is surrounded by eight major seas; the Aegean Sea , the Black Sea , the Caspian Sea , the Persian Gulf , the Arabian Sea , the Gulf of Aden , the Red Sea , and the Mediterranean Sea . To

6660-412: The reconstruction of the family is much less developed than for families such as Indo-European or Austroasiatic . Difficulties have included the great diversity of the languages, the lack of inflection in many of them, and the effects of language contact. In addition, many of the smaller languages are spoken in mountainous areas that are difficult to reach and are often also sensitive border zones. There

6750-670: The region from Balochistan and South Asia. Three major tectonic plates converge on West Asia, including the African , Eurasian , and Arabian plates. The boundaries between the tectonic plates make up the Azores-Gibraltar Ridge , extending across North Africa , the Red Sea , and into Iran. The Arabian Plate is moving northward into the Anatolian plate (Turkey) at the East Anatolian Fault , and

6840-591: The region's sports organisations are the West Asia Basketball Association , West Asian Billiards and Snooker Federation , West Asian Football Federation , and the West Asian Tennis Federation . "Western Asia" was in use as a geographical term in the early 19th century, before " Near East " became current as a geopolitical concept. In the context of the history of classical antiquity , "Western Asia" could mean

6930-475: The results indicate that the climate was wet during 5830 to 4900 BP, which promoted the development of early and middle Majiayao culture in eastern Qinghai province. However, from 4900 to 4700 BP, the climate underwent droughts in this area, which may be responsible for the decline and eastward movement of prehistoric cultures during the period of transition from early-mid to late Majiayao culture. The transition from Yangshao to Majiayao coincides, climatically, with

7020-644: The rhyming patterns of early poetry. The first complete reconstruction, the Grammata Serica Recensa of Bernard Karlgren , was used by Benedict and Shafer. 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. Some proposals were based on cognates in other Sino-Tibetan languages, though workers have also found solely Chinese evidence for them. For example, recent reconstructions of Old Chinese have reduced Karlgren's 15 vowels to

7110-570: The similarities attributed to diffusion across the Mainland Southeast Asia linguistic area , especially since Benedict (1942) . The exclusions of Vietnamese by Kuhn and of Tai and Miao–Yao by Benedict were vindicated in 1954 when André-Georges Haudricourt demonstrated that the tones of Vietnamese were reflexes of final consonants from Proto-Mon–Khmer . Many Chinese linguists continue to follow Li's classification. However, this arrangement remains problematic. For example, there

7200-585: The smaller Sino-Tibetan languages are spoken in inaccessible mountainous areas, many of which are politically or militarily sensitive and thus closed to investigators. Until the 1980s, the best-studied areas were Nepal and northern Thailand . In the 1980s and 1990s, new surveys were published from the Himalayas and southwestern China. Of particular interest was the increasing literature on the Qiangic languages of western Sichuan and adjacent areas. Most of

7290-413: The subclassification or even ST affiliation in all of several minor languages of northeastern India, in particular, is either poor or absent altogether. While relatively little has been known about the languages of this region up to and including the present time, this has not stopped scholars from proposing that these languages either constitute or fall within some other Tibeto-Burman subgroup. However, in

7380-522: The teachings of figures like Hamza ibn-'Ali ibn-Ahmad and Al-Hakim bi-Amr Allah and Greek philosophers such as Plato and Aristotle . The number of Druze people worldwide is around one million, with about 45% to 50% living in Syria , 35% to 40% living in Lebanon , and less than 10% living in Israel ; recently there has been a growing Druze diaspora. There are also important minority religions like

7470-934: The two largest religions in the world: Christianity and Islam , plus Judaism and Druze faith ) originated in West Asia. Islam is the largest religion in West Asia, but other faiths that originated there, such as Judaism and Christianity , are also well represented. In Armenia and Georgia , Oriental Orthodoxy and Eastern Orthodoxy respectively are the predominant religions, and there are still different ancient communities of Eastern Christians in Azerbaijan . There are still large ancient communities of Eastern Christians (such as Assyrians , Middle Eastern Christians and Arab Christians ) in Lebanon , Iraq , Iran , Turkey , Syria , Jordan , Israel and Palestine numbering more than 3 million in West Asia. There are also large populations of expatriate workers which include sizeable Christian communities living in

7560-481: The upper Wei River valley; upper Bailong River valley; middle and lower Tao River and Daxia River valleys; upper Yellow River valley; the Huangshui River ; and lower Datong River . The most distinctive artifacts of the Majiayao culture are the painted pottery. During the Majiayao phase, potters decorated their wares with designs in black pigment featuring sweeping parallel lines and dots. Pottery of

7650-415: The van Driem's Trans-Himalayan fallen leaves model to be more plausible than the bifurcate classification of Sino-Tibetan being split into Sinitic and Tibeto-Burman. Roger Blench and Mark W. Post have criticized the applicability of conventional Sino-Tibetan classification schemes to minor languages lacking an extensive written history (unlike Chinese, Tibetic, and Burmese). They find that the evidence for

7740-596: The waterways of the Turkish Straits and the watershed of the Greater Caucasus . Central Asia lies to its northeast, while South Asia lies to its east. Twelve seas surround the region (clockwise): the Aegean Sea , the Sea of Marmara , the Black Sea , the Caspian Sea , the Persian Gulf , the Gulf of Oman , the Arabian Sea , the Gulf of Aden , the Red Sea , the Gulf of Aqaba , the Gulf of Suez , and

7830-784: Was a knife found at a Majiayao site in Dongxiang , Gansu, and dated to 2900–2740 BC. Further copper and bronze objects have been found at Machang-period sites in Gansu. Metallurgy spread to the middle and lower Yellow River region in the late 3rd millennium BC. Contacts between the Afanasievo culture and the Majiayao culture and the Qijia culture have been considered for the transmission of bronze technology. Domesticated cattle, sheep, and goats first appear in Western Asian circa 8000 BCE. Their introduction in China may have been through

7920-401: Was attacked by Roy Andrew Miller , though Benedict's supporters attribute it to the effects of prefixes that have been lost and are often unrecoverable. The issue remains unsolved today. It was cited together with the lack of reconstructable shared morphology, and evidence that much shared lexical material has been borrowed from Chinese into Tibeto-Burman , by Christopher Beckwith , one of

8010-712: Was first applied to this group in 1856 by James Richardson Logan , who added Karen in 1858. The third volume of the Linguistic Survey of India , edited by Sten Konow , was devoted to the Tibeto-Burman languages of British India . Studies of the "Indo-Chinese" languages of Southeast Asia from the mid-19th century by Logan and others revealed that they comprised four families: Tibeto-Burman, Tai , Mon–Khmer and Malayo-Polynesian . Julius Klaproth had noted in 1823 that Burmese, Tibetan, and Chinese all shared common basic vocabulary but that Thai , Mon , and Vietnamese were quite different. Ernst Kuhn envisaged

8100-488: Was never published, but furnished the data for a series of papers by Shafer, as well as Shafer's five-volume Introduction to Sino-Tibetan and Benedict's Sino-Tibetan, a Conspectus . Benedict completed the manuscript of his work in 1941, but it was not published until 1972. Instead of building the entire family tree, he set out to reconstruct a Proto-Tibeto-Burman language by comparing five major languages, with occasional comparisons with other languages. He reconstructed

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