Nathan W. Hill -- Old Tibetan and its pre-history

This lecture was given as part of the class "Chinese historical phonology and Sino-Tibetan comparative linguistics" in the Leiden Summer School in Languages and Linguistics (July 2021).

[@douggieharrison6913]

Cool video mate, I love this kind of content

[@gtc239]

Thank you!!!!

[@za5833]

Thanks for the video brother!!
Is it correct that Balti dialect adheres more close to the archiec tibetan, than other dialects??

[@NathanWHill]

Yes, not in every detail but more or less, Balti is one of the most conservative. (For for the delayed reply.)

[@fenghualiu2653]

Is the square root symbol supposed to mean the root? That’s so funny 😂

[@WaMo721]

9:24
Kill "bsad" is pronounced "sey"....not "saat"........
Bnans(suppress) is "nen"
Listen is pronounced "nyen"
...

[@NathanWHill]

Languages change through time. You are right with reference to modern Lhasa Tibetan but there are about 25 different Tibetan dialects. Back in the 7th century the spelling matched the pronunciation quite well. My 2010 article in Transactions of the philological society discusses this.

[@dreamadventure8220]

​@@NathanWHillhello, when can I get your transaction

[@NathanWHill]

@@dreamadventure8220 Here is the doi doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-968X.2010.01234.x and you can find it on ResearchGate here -- www.researchgate.net/publication/230053967_An_overview_of_Old_Tibetan_synchronic_phonology

[@yichenghuang]

I can't agree with you that "because Tibetan languages began to diverge from each other some centuries after Old Tibetan was committed to writing, the written system represents an état de langue (Old Tibetan) older than that reconstructible via the comparative method (Common Tibetan). As a consequence, for the purposes of this study there is no need to consult data from the Tibetan languages of today." Not to mention the Western dialects spoken in Ladak and Balti that diverged from Proto-Tibetan earlier than Classical Tibetan, even in Lhasa Tibetan, the "newest" dialect can we find much information about what the proto language is like. For example, སློབ་གྲྭ slob-grwa is pronounced as [lap⁵⁵tʂa⁵], གྲྭ་བཞི grwa-bzhi is pronounced as [tʂʰəp¹¹tɕi⁵] or [tʂʰap¹¹tɕi⁵], ས་གདན sa-gdan is pronounced as [sap⁵⁵tɛ̃⁵⁵]. Some of them can be traced back to Old Tibetan spellings. For example, མིག is pronounced as [miʔ⁵²] instead of [miʔ¹³²]. In manuscripts there are དམིག dmig. I don't know whether there has been someone who has collected all the words that are pronounced not accorded with their spelling forms in Lhasa; but of course the information preserved in dialects is very useful in the reconstruction of Proto-Tibetan.

[@yichenghuang]

And also the coda -d which is deleted in late Tibetan Empire is preserved in Lhasa tones. For example, ཕྱིན phyin is pronounced as [tɕʰĩ⁵²] instead of [tɕʰĩ⁵⁵], which means it is derived from phyind instead of phyin. Therefore, Common Tibetan must be older than Old Tibetan.

[@NathanWHill]

You have pointed to several points where Lhasa preserves features of Old Tibetan lost in Classical, but these are irrelevant to my point. What you need to show is that Tibetan dialects preserve things that are already lost in old Tibetan. The only proposal of this that I've seen is a uvular v. velar distinction and I am not convinced by the evidence presented so far.
About Ladakhi and Balti, you are following Bielmeier's West Bodish hypothesis. Prima facie it is unlikely because these areas were colonized relatively late. In any case the one piece of evidence that Bielmeier himself gave (some vowel correspondences) have been shown by Guillaume Jacques to be late conditioned changes in Balti.

[@yichenghuang]

@@NathanWHill Thank you for your reply. I'd like to ask what is the dialect that you mentioned to have a uvular v. velar distinction?

[@yichenghuang]

@@NathanWHill Since you define Old Tibetan as the earliest written form of Tibtan, can we say some of the lhasa words are from proto tibetan instead of old tibtan since they are not found in any written texts. eg, sa gdan (OT/CT) reads sap taen in lhasa. I guess it might be *sa-bdan in PT.

[@NathanWHill]

@@yichenghuang Many dialects have uvulars, but they are generally secondary. Huang Bufan has an article. I don't have the citation on me, but I have a scan of it at home and can send it to you if send me an email at my university address. I know that Jesse Gates is also working on this question at the moment, but he hasn't published anything yet. As for Lhasa forms like *sapdan. They are analogical. I think that is the explanation of Chang and Chang and subsequent research. There are about three articles on this question, which I am also happy to send you.