The ancestors of Chinese, Tibetan, Burmese, Thai, Miao, etc. originated from a proto Sino-Tibetan ancestor. Scholars assume they came from Southeast Asia before migrating north.

But, in Siberia, there is a 5,000 Ket tribe that speak a language that scholars speculate is distantly connected to Sino-Tibetan. This leads one to wonder how a Sino-Tibetan tribe got to the far Arctic reaches of Siberia?

Half of modern-day Tibetans have the YAP+ Y chromosome. Ironically, close to half of Japanese also have it (esp. among Ryukyans, Okinawans, Ainus). Jomon people must have been connected to northern Tibetans genetically.

How did Chinese split from other Sino-Tibetans? And, how did Tibetans split from Japanese?

currently there are two theories: north migration from SEA and south migration from China. The mainstream anthropology supports the former but i personally think the latter is more plausible: people don't easily acquire negritos' features but negritos can acquire mongoloid features through long term environmental impacts. If North Chinese are more homologeous then certainly they are not the source of migration, aren't they?

Altaic (Turko-Mongols) are from the same racial origins as Sino-Tibetan, but they split off even way longer. God knows when? Chinese split from Tibetans when?

I don't think having slightly different skull sizes make them different races. Their skull type shows there're mongoloid. Since Kaixin mentioned that only half of Tibetans have YAP+ lineage, then it means they have more than one origin. I would think most east asians have some YAP+ lineage since they were one of the early ancestors who migrated out of Africa, some may have more than others.

But that's just my guess.

Unlikely, the original Kets were not Mongoloid and inhabitted a very small area in Siberia. They only "recently" obtained Mongoloid features due to intermixing with Nenets (aka Samoyeds) and Turkic people, but by the time this happened, Chinese dynasties already existed.

Furthermore, alot of linguistic connections are just speculative and nothing more, there were "strong" cases that Ainu and Basque, Japanese and Hebrew, etc could've been related because they had a number of similar sounding words, but ultimately it was inconclusive and mere coincidence.



I heard about this too, but I would also take this with a grain of salt. A recent Japanese geneology test produced some odd results, such as Uighurs being closely related to the Japanese in comparison to Mongols or Koreans who scored lower.

people speculate too much on linguistics and common ancestral origins

blood is blood. Languages are adopted all the time. Everyone on the forum speaks english, it does not mean we are "Indo European"

Agreed.

When I mention genetic research, I tend to only focus on Y marker (paternal lineage) because in our Chinese tradition, you are what your father is. Most East and North Asians don't have the YAP+ marker. It is an oddity. Most of it is found in Africa and southern Arabia. Don't know how it got vanished in much of Asia?

Northern Tibetans have the YAP+ marker. Most southern Tibetans are like Han Chinese. They have the Haplotype O. Most Koreans also have Haplotype O. About 45% of the Japanese have it too.

I wouldn't know, but wouldn't this admission throw 'scientific' objectivity out the window?

Is anything 100% in genetics?

The problem with looking only at the Y marker is that it doesn't give you the whole picture.

Looking at the female side lets you know how long ago two groups of people became seperated.

Just curious, are Tibetans also considered Mongoloids ?

Generally, yes. Why, do you know of some reason to believe otherwise?

well,does dalai lama look enough mongoloid to you?

Actually Chinese (at least northerners) usually have greater facial height than Tibetans from what I've seen. If you mean in profile, I'd say Tibetans are less dolichocephalic than southerners... f.e check out Chiang Kai Shek.

You made your point that mere similar sounding words do not mean that those people using those words are related. The similarly sounding words could be either coincidence or loanded words. However, if you consider different aspects of the languages, such as vocabulary, grammar, sounds, expressive ways, then it becomes clear that some languages are definitely related to each others.

Seen from these factors, it becomes clear that Tibetan, Qiangic, and Burmese languages have nothing to do with Chinese, except for some mutually borrowed words.

Tibetan, Qiangic, Burmese languages are closely related to each other where as they have totally different gramatical structures from that of Chinese, Thai and Hmong, and Vietnamese.

e.g.

Tibet: Kerang nga-la deb dih nangro-nang!
English: You me to (I-to) book this give

Turkic: Sen maga bu ketab (ni) bering!
You me to this book (acc.case) give

Chinese: (Ni) ba zheben shu gei wo.
You (acc. case) this book give me

You can see the similarities (Tibet-Turkic) and differences between these languages (Tibet-Chinese).

In other respects (gramar etc), Tibetan, Qiangic and Burmese are similar and closer to Altaic (Turkic, Mongol, Korean, Japanese) languages, except that the former group contain a lot of monosyllabic words which is not common to the second group.

Regarding the third, Thai, Miao, Chinese, Lao and Vietnamese, they are all related in the sense that 1) they are all TONAL languages (4-9 tones), have 2) monosyllabic vocabulary, 3) have siliar word orders, 4) and other similar characteristics.


Your comparison that we use English is not a good one, because in addition to English, we all use different. original languages as well.

I'm possitive sure that whoever those lingustist came up with the sino-tibetan family are well aware of those differences between chinese and tibetan. yet they are still genetic related languages.

There are some features in Chinese that are similar to Altaics,but such mere similirities won't make Chinese a altaic language, same goes to Tibetan.

Koren and Japanese are not even an Altaic language,most of the time they are considered languages isolated.

Thai and Miao are tai-kadai languages,agian they are not related to Chinese.

Vietnamese is related to austro-asiatic,once again,not genetically related to Chinese language.

I don't see similar word orders between Chinese, and vietnamese.

Tonal doesn't make a language relate to others,since that there are many african languages that are tonal in antrue. are you saying they are related to Chinese because they are Tonal?


Oh, in the example of Chinese. the word Ba is actually an Altaic influence.

no one is denying that these similarities exist.. but rather, if this is enough proof to make them related. From my experiences learning Korean.. there is ALOT of grammatical similarities with Turkic languages. Japanese too. But despite all this it's still not enough proof for most linguists, to link them together as part of a larger family. the Finno-Uralic languages also share an SOV grammar order and also has vowel harmony just like Altaic languages, but they are not considered related families.

Languages aside, I am curious to if Tibetans are really Northern mongoloids. From what I see.. some could pass as Mongols.. others like the Khampas are dark skinned, long nosed, and tall.. and others look more similar to Indians and S.E Asians. Likewise, other groups also claimed to be descended from the Qiang (i.e Yi, etc) look much more akin to southern mongoloid groups. Bhutanese are also considered northern.

Ok, firstly, most of those who even accept the idea of an Altaic language family don't believe Korean and Japanese are included.

Second, I don't think a one-sentence comparison between languages is going to prove much. Culturally, linguistically and often phenotypically, Chinese and Tibeto-Burmans are closer to each other than to South-east Asians and Altaic peoples.

If you've seen country people of northern China, they often have that specific look (dark skin, prominent nose), like this guy from Hebei.


Most city folk look different somehow... closer to the other Asian groups I guess. Also notice e.g the Dalai Lama looks more stereotypically 'Asian' than many Tibetans. Just my observation, not sure what people with more experience in this kind of stuff will make of it...

he looks like a farmer to me. most cityfolks are not that dark.
I think all country folks look dark.
see my other related thread

You are at the wrong place. To discuss on thai, miao and vietnamese language go to:

http://www.chinahistoryforum.com/index.php?showforum=72

How tonal is tonal ? Just because a very small proportion of the language such as english/french raise the tone as in a question doesn't mean it is tonal. I have explained this before in other threads. Tonality alone doesn't define a language family.

For asian languages discussion goto:

http://www.chinahistoryforum.com/index.php?showforum=72

May be "borrowing" or "original words". When there is some regular word correspondences (also predictable sound differences), linguists will conclude that the language are related.

"book this" order, as in many Southeast Asian languages....
S prep OV. "You + to me + this book + give"
Anyway, this SOV order makes it dissimilar to Chinese and SEA languages.

head adjective order, and preposition ordering is quite different from Tibetan...

This 'ba' is for Mandarin only.
This S [particle(?)] OV makes it quite similar to Japanese..
Anyway, it should be possible to change this SOV ordering to SVO. Cantonese use "將" in place of "把" to make SOV, but use much more regularly a SVO ordering.

Tai-Kadai and Miao-Yao are 2 language families...

The SVO common structure and Numeral-Classifier-Object. (and it's very very similar, as the poster above ignores adjective-head ordering )

Sound Han Chinese split from prehistorical Sino-Tibetan 5,000 ago ~~~

oh, who can tell me how to up-load my head picture?