ABSTRACT
Inklings of a TB language family first appeared in the eighteenth century, when Western scholars observed that Tibetan was genetically related to Burmese. However, the precise contours of the TB language family were first defined in Paris in 1823 by the German scholar Julius Heinrich von Klaproth, the same man who first coined the term ‘Indogermanisch’. In his Asia Polyglotta, Klaproth (1823a,b) defined TB as the language family which comprised Burmese, Tibetan and Chinese and all languages which could be demonstrated to be genetically related to these three. He explicitly excluded Thai (i.e. Daic) as well as Vietnamese and Mon (i.e. AA) because the comparison of lexical roots in the core vocabulary indicated that these languages were representatives of other distinct language phyla.
