The Historical Phonology of Tibetan, Burmese, and Chinese.

• Author: Handel, Zev

The Historical Phonology of Tibetan, Burmese, and Chinese. By NATHAN W. HILL. Cambridge: CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS, 2019. Pp. xiv + 373. $110.

This book is an overview of the current state of our knowledge of the historical phonological development of three of the major languages of the Trans-Himalayan (otherwise Sino-Tibetan) family. These three languages have the oldest and best-attested textual histories of the family, and have therefore served as the foundation for most efforts of historical comparison and reconstruction over the last century. Hill's work differs notably from previous studies in aims and approach, although it draws heavily on the contributions of many key figures in the field. Hill describes his goal this way: "The ambition of this work lies not in the proposal of this or that reconstruction but in a methodological reorientation of the study of Trans-Himalayan languages towards the paragon of Indo-European historical linguistics" (p. 257). To realize this aim. Hill attempts, as far as possible given the current state of our knowledge, to provide clear, sequenced sound changes that lead from reconstructed lexical forms of the putative common ancestor into attested Written Tibetan and Written Burmese pronunciations and reconstructed Old Chinese pronunciations.

The book is structured in four main chapters: one each for the three major languages Tibetan, Burmese, and Chinese, and one on reconstructed Trans-Himalayan. There are also some useful appendices and indices, including a complete list of all examples cited in the main body of the work. The chapters are not only divided into subsections in the usual way (e.g., 3.9.11), but the entire text is divided into small, sequentially numbered sections from [section] 1 on page 3 to [section]264 on pp. 289-90, breaking the material down into small topical chunks and facilitating cross references. Because Hill's intended readership includes scholars and students who are not necessarily familiar with the field, each of the first three chapters includes a textual history of the language and an overview of the methods of interpreting early written records to recover underlying pronunciations. Each chapter then proceeds to work backwards from these attested stages through earlier stages of the languages and their subgroups, listing and discussing the sound changes that have taken place. These sections curate and synthesize a century of scholarship, noting the individual hypotheses...