Talk:Tibetic languages

Standard Tibetan

Do we want to split off a Standard Tibetan article for the grammar, and leave the dialects / languages behind here? kwami (talk) 16:53, 31 January 2009 (UTC)

Seems like a good idea to me. Tibetologist (talk) 17:05, 31 January 2009 (UTC)

Okay, I split it off. Would you like to write the intro for it? I wrote the bare minimum, since I don't know what I'm talking about. (Is Standard Tibetan used for religious purposes in Bhutan? or is that Old Tibetan? etc.) kwami (talk) 01:41, 1 February 2009 (UTC)

I also moved the talk page so that its history would show up there, as most of the discussion concerned the standard language. kwami (talk) 01:47, 1 February 2009 (UTC)

Kwamikagami, "Standard Tibetan" (whatever *that* is supposed to mean here) is not used in Bhutan for religious purposes. In Bhutan Chöké Wylie: chos skad or "Religious Language" is used for that purpose. BTW IMO a big problem with this article is that it fails to clearly distinguish between written and spoken Tibetan languages which are actually very different - and there are so-called intermediate forms. User:CFynn, 00:33, 2009 June 16

Chris, knock yourself out. I'm almost completely ignorant on the subject. I would've liked it if s.o. else had stepped up to clean up this mess, where "Tibetan" was a conflation of the language and the language family, and languages were defined by political boundaries rather than in of themselves, but since no-one seemed about to, I did my best given my limited resources. kwami (talk) 09:27, 16 June 2009 (UTC)

OK - but since there seems to be a lot to go over, I'll wait till I have more time and can try do it properly. While someone has obviously spent a lot of time writing the article, as it stands there are no references - so it is hard to figure out where different parts comes from and whose views they reflect. A lot of this is contentious (and sometimes political) so I think statements need to be very well sourced. There is of course one common literary Tibetan language (with old, classical, modern, etc. varieties) which is read and written all over the Tibetan plateau and Himalayan region. Within this area the peoples who share this common written language actually speak many different often mutually incomprehensible Tibetan languages or dialects - which do not normally have their own written forms. What the Tibetan "Tibetan language used for broadcasting within China" is I'm not sure - while it is spoken by Tibetan broadcasters, when I hear them on the radio it seems to me like they are trying hard to sound Chinese! Except on the radio & TV nobody talks like that - so I'm not sure it is fair to call the language used for broadcasting "Standard Tibetan". Chris Fynn (talk) 10:59, 16 June 2009 (UTC)

I think the point of that was that there are three broadcast standards, dBus, Khams, and Amdo, which of course has social ramifications. Better if you could flesh it out, though. Also, the pronunciation of dBus would be nice. kwami (talk) 11:53, 16 June 2009 (UTC)

"dBus" is pronounced something like [y˧˥˧ʔ]. I have added this to the article. Also, note that the Wylie spelling is not really supposed to have non-initial letters capitalised, so I guess it should change to "Dbus" or "dbus" or simply "Ü".—Nat Krause^{(Talk!·What have I done?)} 12:16, 16 June 2009 (UTC)

༼ད་ཆ་རླུང་འཕྲིན་བརྙན་འཕྲིན་དུ་སྤྱོད་པའི་བོད་སྐད་༽འདི་standardཡིན་མིན་ལ་ངས་བཤད་རྒྱུ་གང་མེད། ཡིན་ནའང་འདི་༼འཚོ་བའི་ཕྲོད་དུ་སྤྱོད་མཁན་མི་འདུ༽༼རྒྱ་སྐད་ལྟ་བུར་ཀློག་འདོན་བྱེད་ཀྱི་འདུག༽ཅེས་པ་དེ་སྐད་དགོད་བྲོ་བའི་གཏམ་རང་རེད། འདི་ནི་ཁྱེད་རང་འཚོ་བའི་འཕྲོད་དུ་ལྷ་སའི་མི་གཙང་གཙང་། ལྷག་པར་དུ་སྐུ་དྲག། སྐུ་ཞབས། （gentlemans）དང་ཐུག་འཕྲད་མེད་པའི་མཚོན་རྟགས་རང་རེད། Gyangsgar Tenzin norbu (talk) 10:05, 24 April 2024 (UTC)

One language, a number of dialects

This discussion continues from ones that started on Talk:Khams_Tibetan_language and Talk:Amdo Tibetan language. The other day I asked here for us to continue it in the former place in accordance with Wikipedia policy to keep to the page where it started so as to avoid duplications over talk pages. Kwami has requested the discussion be moved here, as this page is more central and I've agreed that makes sense. This actually rolls a number of discussions into one, and in a nutshell, this is the way I see it.

At the beginning of the introduction of Melvyn Goldstein's Modern Literary Tibetan, 2nd edn 1977, (p. xvi), Goldstein makes it clear that he sees "the Tibetan language" as one thing. He refers to it twice:

Recent political events in Tibet have triggered a veritable revolution in the Tibetan language. A new genre of modern written Tibetan has emerged which includes the printed materials emanating from China, Tibet, Bhutan, Sikkim and India, and which differs from classical Tibetan to a degree that makes it unintelligible even to scholars who are competent in the classical genre.

The confrontation of the Tibetan language with both modern politics (particularly communist) and modern technology resulted in the borrowing and creation of thousands upon thousands of new vocabulary items as well as certain characteristic stylistic and grammatical modes of expression. A new written style arose.

There is not more than one Tibetan language.

Nicolas Tournadre in his Manual of Standard Tibetan, Snow Lion 2003: 25 has this in the Introduction:

1. The Tibetan language

Tibetan belongs to the Tibeto-Burman family of languages. This group encomasses about two hundred and fifty languages, spoken mainly in the Himalayas, on the Tibetan plateau and in the vicinity of the Mekong and the Salween .Within this linguistic family there are only two ancient literary languages: Burmese (12th century) and Tibetan (7th century). While very different, the common parentage of these two languages means that they share certain characteristics of phonology, syntax and vocabulary...

With the exception of Burmese, Tibetan, both in terms of syntax and vocabulary is entirely different from the other major languages of the region: Chinese, Hindi, Nepali, the Turkish languages (Uigur, Kazakh, Tatar, etc) and Mongolian.

Tibetan in its various dialects is spoken over an area the size of Western Europe, stretching from Baltistan (Pakistan) in the west, to Sichuan (China) in the east. To the north, the linguistic range of Tibetan extends beyond Lake Kokonor (in the province of Qinghai, China). Its southern limits are the southern slopes of the Himalaya, encompassing the independent state of Bhutan, Sikkim (India), the high valleys of Mustang and Dölpo, and Solukhumbu (Nepal), the region of Everest inhabited by the Sherpas of Nepal.

So the varieties of a single Tibetan language in Amdo, Kham, etc are not really languages themselves but rather, dialects. So, then, Central Tibetan is another dialect and standard Tibetan, which Tournadre (same page) treats as deriving from it is another dialect too. This is not surprising, since they share written Tibetan and are mutually intelligible through it, just as the dialects of English share those of written English.

All this affects a few of our articles. Instead of "Tibetan languages", this article needs to be renamed to "Tibetan language" and the content cleaned up accordingly. The articles on the dialects need to be renamed where they have the word "language" in their names and cleaned up. Tibetan language, which currently redirects to standard Tibetan needs to stop redirecting there, as "Tibetan language" will already have become the name of what was previously "Tibetan languages".

Can we start by please looking for *any* reliable source that claims Tibetan is not just one language plus a number of dialects. What do people think?

Tibetologist has already replied to previous strands of this discussion on 14 March with:

The Tibetan language family is as varied as the Romance family. Linguistic works on Tibetan languages refer to them as such. This article does not need to be changed.

I would like to ask for elaboration on these sources. Kwami on 15 March had a suggestion for which sources to follow:

Follow the ISO link in the info box, for one.

I cannot understand this comment but am keen to learn more.

Moonsell (talk) 10:58, 15 March 2010 (UTC)

P.S. Another article needing cleanup is http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Research_on_Tibetan_Languages:_A_Bibliography. Moonsell (talk) 11:11, 15 March 2010 (UTC)

There are two conceptions of "language" here: members of an ethnicity share a common language, and members of a language can understand each other. Tibetan is a language by the first def, but a family of langs by the second. Tibetan is not really mutually intelligible through writing; rather, speakers of various forms all learn a literary language based on Classical Tibetan. By that argument, French and Romanian are dialects of a single language because they are mutually intelligible through Latin (though only for the literate, as in the case of Tibetan). One might even argue that in the Middle Ages, English, Irish, Italian, Polish, Hungaria, and Basque were dialects of "European", as they were all mutually intelligible through their written form (Latin). As for ethnicity, by that argument Zhuang is a dialect of Chinese, even though it belongs to a different language family, because they consider it to be a dialect of Chinese. This may have parallels in Tibetan: It is not even clear that Tibetan is a valid linguistic node, as it may simply be those East Bodish languages spoken by ethnic Tibetans, whereas East Bodish languages spoken by non-Tibetans are not considered Tibetan, even though they may be just as closely related.

As for the ISO, go to the individual language articles, at at the bottom of the info box there is an ISO code with a link. That will take you to the language article at Ethnologue. kwami (talk) 11:40, 15 March 2010 (UTC)

Talking about writing seems to be obscuring matters. Your suggestion that written Tibetan to Tibetans is like Latin to Europeans is unconvincing.

Your argument seems based at root on the fact that speakers from different parts of Tibet have difficulty understanding each other. I promise you, speakers of English in Australia, Scotland and India have even more problems but English is still one language. By your argument, there would be no such thing as dialects that are unintelligible to each other.

I've followed your instructions to find Ethnologue and failed. I have provided sources. Please let me see yours. Moonsell (talk) 21:13, 15 March 2010 (UTC)

kwami is explicit that people use multiple concepts of "language" that people use; according to one concept a "language" is a set of speech varieties in which the speakers of each variety can understand the speakers of the other varieties (perhaps with difficulty), and a "dialect" is a subset of "language". In this sense, two "dialects" of the same language by definition cannot be mutually unintelligible — otherwise, they wouldn't be part of the same language. According to other concepts of "language", the same logic would not apply.

The situation of Tibetan strikes me as quite comparable both to Chinese and to the Romance languages in medieval Europe, before the vernacular literatures had developed. In the former case, we habitually refer to it as "a language", but in the latter as "languages". We should probably describe Tibetan however it is most commonly described in scholarly works. I notice that for Chinese we have an article titled Chinese language, but it its first line reads "Chinese or the Sinitic language(s) is a language family consisting of languages mutually intelligible to varying degrees", i.e. the text describes it as a family of languages—Nat Krause^{(Talk!·What have I done?)} 01:08, 16 March 2010 (UTC)

The way they've done it for Chinese language sounds like two bob each way and I don't think it would fit our case. Either the foremost scholars in the field concur that there is no dispute, as it seems they do in the case of Tibetan, or else they accept that there is a dispute, as in the case of Chinese. It's not our place to argue with that. Moonsell (talk) 01:26, 16 March 2010 (UTC)

In general the various varieties of Tibetan are often referred to as 'dialects'. Unsurprizingly, Sherpa, Ladakhi, Balti, and Dzongkha (i.e. the varieties of Tibetan spoken outside the PRC) are usually referred to as different languages. It would be inappropriate to follow this method in Wikipedia because it is intellectually incoherent. Either Balti and Dzongka are Tibetan dialects or Amdo is a Tibetan language. I would be happy with either solution, but prefer referring to all of the subbranches of the TIbetan family as 'languages'. Tournadre has made the comparison with Romance explicitly. Tibetan languages are as different as French and Spanish. cf. page 17 of or even better the first page of this one

Based on my 20 years of field work throughout the Tibetan language area and on the

existing literature, I estimate that there are 220 ‘Tibetan dialects’ derived from Old Tibetan and nowadays spread across 5 countries: China, India, Bhutan, Nepal and Pakistan. As I discuss in Tournadre (in progress), these dialects may be classed within 25 dialect groups, i. e. groups which do not allow mutual intelligibility. The notion of ‘dialect group’ is equivalent to the notion of language but does not entail any standardization. Thus if we set aside the notion of standardization, I believe it would be more appropriate to speak of 25 languages derived from Old Tibetan. This is not only a terminological issue but it gives an entirely different perception

of the range of variation. When we refer to 25 languages, we make clear that we are dealing with a family comparable in size to the Romance family which has 19 groups of dialects.

Please also take note of the title of Zeisler's book Relative tense and aspectual values in Tibetan languages: a comparative study. It is clear that experts in the field refer to these langauges as separate languages, not as dialects. Tibetologist (talk) 09:41, 16 March 2010 (UTC)

Many thanks for the time you've taken here, Tibetologist. Your quote from Tournadre at http://tournadre.nicolas.free.fr/fichiers/2008-Conjunct.pdf and your mention of him comparing French and Spanish on page 17 of http://tournadre.nicolas.free.fr/fichiers/2005-aire.pdf seem to be the missing links in this discussion. The title of Zeisler's book Relative tense and aspectual values in Tibetan languages: a comparative study also looks valuable as a source.

Clearly there is ground for maintaining the status quo on Wikipedia, which is a relief to me since I have no experience of moving articles and others probably don't have the time. However, if we want the Tibetan articles to look unfunky to a newcomer with some knowledge of the field, the more conventional preference for one language, several dialects still has advantages.

Before I participated in it I carefully studied the various Wikipedia articles on Tibetan and their talk pages. I found this discussion already more than a year old (May 2008 at Talk:Khams Tibetan language) but none of the material you have shown us was there, although you had mentioned your argument for consistency. At the very least, we need some material citing these sources and explaining that there is a controversy over "languages" versus "dialects", whether an incipient or a well-developed one. Does anyone have access to contact with Nicolas Tournadre to clarify how developed this debate has become and how close it is to a resolution, perhaps through email? Moonsell (talk) 10:54, 16 March 2010 (UTC)

There isn't going to be a resolution, because people use the word "language" and "dialect" in different ways, and will continue to do so. The words are simply ambiguous. kwami (talk) 13:19, 16 March 2010 (UTC)

I agree with Kwami -- it is natural for linguists to see Tibetan as a language family and discuss the different Tibetan languages it comprises, but I think that most native speakers would consider Tibetan to be a single language with a number of (not necessarily mutually intelligible) dialects. Exactly the same issues occur with other 'languages' with mutually unintelligible 'dialects' such as Chinese and Zhuang. Whether something is a language or a dialect depends entirely on your point of view. BabelStone (talk) 14:25, 16 March 2010 (UTC)

See also the discussion in Talk:Chinese language#Change "dialects" wording?. I believe all of those can be simply named as "language". A language can be a language family consisting of multiple languages (just like a Portuguese man o' war can be considered one individual animal and its zooids may also be considered individual animals) and Tibetic languages should be moved back to Tibetan language. The linguistic community who did the initial move should have had some basic respect on indigenous Tibetan customary usage. Moving Tibetan language to Tibetic languages and limiting the scope of the article solely to comparative language family was not NPOV. Twas more like tearing a Portuguese man o' war apart into growth media in the name of freedom. 209.2.228.41 (talk) 03:16, 3 February 2024 (UTC)

Requested move

The following discussion is an archived discussion of a requested move. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section on the talk page. Editors desiring to contest the closing decision should consider a move review. No further edits should be made to this section.

The result of the move request was: Moved to Tibetic languages Mike Cline (talk) 19:35, 19 September 2012 (UTC)

---

Tibetan languages → Tibetic languages – Per Tournadre's classification. I think the current title can be confusing since it's really about a language family but readers will expect "Tibetan language" to be a specific language (either the standard spoken or the written form). Tibetan language is also a redirect to this article. I would suggest that that article should be a disambiguation linking to Tibetic languages, Classical Tibetan, Standard Tibetan, and Kham and Amdo for good measure.Greg Pandatshang (talk) 02:16, 9 September 2012 (UTC)

And Central Tibetan language. Sounds like a sound proposal. — kwami (talk) 03:21, 9 September 2012 (UTC)

• It would be nice to see some evidence of common usage in reliable sources. I notice that this has also been discussed a bit above. —  AjaxSmack  04:55, 10 September 2012 (UTC)

I doubt any name for this exact topic is in common usage generally. I cited Tournadre, one of the leading experts in Tibetan linguistics, but he makes it clear that his terminology is not followed generally. The most common term is probably just "Tibetan", but this is highly ambiguous.—Greg Pandatshang (talk) 22:30, 13 September 2012 (UTC)

• Suppport. There are sometimes cases in which a subject is described in multiple reliable sources, but not under one common name. In this case, we have to look to guidelines other than just "common name". "Tibetic" reduces confusion with Standard Tibetan, and does not prejudice against the languages of people who don't identify as "Tibetan" (Ladakhis, Ngalops, etc.). Shrigley (talk) 19:54, 15 September 2012 (UTC)

• Comment Probably the reason that this article is here is that on Ethnologue "Tibetic" is a higher taxon, consisting of Tibetan (this article) plus Tamangic, Tshangla, and Dhimal. Though since we don't accept such a grouping, we're free to use the word for something else. — kwami (talk) 08:26, 17 September 2012 (UTC)

The above discussion is preserved as an archive of a requested move. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section on this talk page or in a move review. No further edits should be made to this section.

• Comment: The discussion was done without consulting people in the above #One language, a number of dialects discussion, and was done after a controversial unilateral move from Tibetan language to Tibetan languages, leading Shrigley to believe that the article should cover languages like Baltiskad. The Tibetan language doesn't necessarily cover all languages descending from Old Tibetan just like the article Chinese language doesn't necessarily incude Dungan. The article should have been moved back to Tibetan language and a separate Tibetic languages should be created. --209.2.228.41 (talk) 03:30, 3 February 2024 (UTC)

Neutrality dispute

Why is this article's neutrality being disputed? Jarble (talk) 17:06, 26 February 2024 (UTC)

It's a dispute over whether or not the article should be titled "languages" or "language". Stockhausenfan (talk) 14:49, 28 March 2024 (UTC)

I understand there's controversy over whether there's a single Tibetan language, but this article is about the broader Tibetic group, whose existence is (AFAIK) uncontroversial. I'll remove the tag. Jpatokal (talk) 22:58, 13 October 2024 (UTC)