ABSTRACT
The Chinese, or Sinitic, languages are widely, if not unanimously, regarded as geneticallyrelated to the Tibeto-Burman (TB) family whose major members are described in this volume. Evidence for the Sino-Tibetan (ST) hypothesis consists of phonological and semantic correspondences between the basic word-stocks and reconstructed morphological systems of Old Chinese (thirteenth century BCE-third century CE) and TB languages, especially the earliest attested of these, Old Tibetan (eighth century) and Old Burmese (twelfth century). Recent discussions of these aspects of the ST hypothesis can be found in Norman (1988: 12-16) and Baxter (1995) for ST lexicon, and Norman (1988: 84-7) and Baxter and Sagart (1998) for morphology.
