Proto-Sino-Tibetan language
reconstructed ancestor of the Sino-Tibetan languages
Proto-Sino-Tibetan (PST) is the linguistic reconstruction of the Sino-Tibetan proto-language and the common ancestor of all languages in it, including the Sinitic languages, the Tibetic languages, Yi, Bai, Burmese, Karen, Tangut, and Naga. Paul K. Benedict (1972) placed a particular emphasis on Old Chinese, Classical Tibetan, Jingpho, Written Burmese, Garo, and Mizo in his discussion of Proto-Sino-Tibetan.
While Proto-Sino-Tibetan is commonly considered to have two direct descendants, Proto-Sinitic and Proto-Tibeto-Burman, in recent years several scholars have argued that this was not well-substantiated, and have taken to calling the group "Trans-Himalayan". In this case, Proto-Tibeto-Burman may be considered as equivalent to Proto-Sino-Tibetan if Sinitic is indeed not the first branch to split from Proto-Sino-Tibetan.
Features
Proto-Sino-Tibetan is believed to have been an agglutinative language with an elaborate system of morphological markers. Reconstructed features include prefixes such as the causative s-, the intransitive m-, the miscellaneous b-, d-, g-, and r-, suffixes -s, -t, and -n, and a set of conditioning factors that resulted in the development of tone in most languages of the family. The existence of such an elaborate system of inflectional changes in Proto-Sino-Tibetan makes the language distinctive from some of its modern descendants, such as the Sinitic languages, which have mostly or completely become analytic.
Proto-Sino-Tibetan, like Old Chinese, also included numerous consonant clusters, and was not a tonal language.
Phonology
Benedict (1972)
The table below shows consonant phonemes reconstructed by Benedict.
Peiros & Starostin (1996)
The reconstruction by Peiros & Starostin suggests a much more complex consonant inventory.
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