On Language Contact and Language Alliance: An Explanation of the Sino-Vietnamese (Tai-Kadai) Etymological Relationship

Author: Chen Baoyu
Publisher:
Publish Date: 1996-07-01
Features: 19th-century historical comparative linguistics believed that language evolution followed only one pattern, that is, the genealogical tree model where a single parent language continuously diverges into numerous related languages. The author of this book, through tracking the contact between Tai and Chinese, argues that language evolution has two fundamentally different models: the genealogical tree model represented by the Indo-European language family and the language alliance represented by the Sinitic-Austroasiatic alliance.