Re: [tied] Re: Woof

On 2006-05-15 10:27, tgpedersen wrote:

>>> [Torsten:] The people "in or near China" who domesticated the
>>> dog, are likely to have spoken a language which was spoken in or
>>> near China. That is more likely to have been ST than IE.

>> [Patrick:] While it is possible that most all modern breeds are
>> descended from dogs originating in or near China some 15,000 years
>> ago, that does not necessarily mean that non-Asian canine breeds
>> were not formerly (15,000+ ybp) prevalent.

> [Torsten:] The only reason I can see for that extra assumption is to
> rescue an unspoken premise that a people speaking a Sino-Tibetan
> language is capable only of imitation, not invention. That's what
> they used to say of the Japanese when I was a kid.

A word of warning about loose terminology. "Sino-Tibetan" means a family
consisting of Proto-Sino-Tibetan plus all its descendants. The estimated
time-depth of ST is about 6000 years -- well, you might perhaps stretch
it by a millennium or two, but certainly not eight millennia! ST
languages are now spoken "in or around China" (especially understood as
modern China, including Tibet), but the remote great-grand-ancestor of
PST spoken ca. 14000 years ago may also be the ancestral language of
numerous other families, not all of them located in the "Sinosphere".
Nothing guarantees the linguistic autochthony of
pre-pre-...-proto-Sinitic in China at Late Pleistocene time depths (even
the position of Chinese within ST is not as privileged as it used to be
-- in most recent genetic classifications of ST it's assigned a place a
few branchings away from the root of the family tree).

Piotr