Greater Siangic is a language grouping that includes the ''
Siangic languages'', ''
Digaro languages
The Digaro (Digarish), Northern Mishmi (Mishmic), or Kera'a–Tawrã languages are a small family of possibly Sino-Tibetan languages spoken by the Mishmi people of southeastern Tibet and Arunachal Pradesh.
The languages are Idu and Taraon (D ...
'' (
Idu Mishmi and
Taraon) and ''Pre-
Tani'', the hypothetical
substrate language branch of Tani before it became relexified by Sino-Tibetan. The Greater Siangic grouping was proposed by
Roger Blench
Roger Marsh Blench (born August 1, 1953) is a British linguist, ethnomusicologist and development anthropologist. He has an M.A. and a Ph.D. from the University of Cambridge and is based in Cambridge, England. He researches, publishes, and w ...
(2014), based on exclusively shared lexical items that had been noted by Modi (2013).
Blench (2014) argues that Greater Siangic is an independent language family that has undergone areal influences from
Sino-Tibetan languages
Sino-Tibetan, also cited as Trans-Himalayan in a few sources, is a family of more than 400 languages, second only to Indo-European in number of native speakers. The vast majority of these are the 1.3 billion native speakers of Chinese languages ...
, and is not a branch of the Sino-Tibetan language family itself.
Various lexical items exclusively shared by Milang, Koro, Taraon, and Idu have also been noted by Modi (2013).
[Modi, Yankee. 2013. ''The nearest relatives of the Tani group''. Paper presented at the 19th Himalayan Languages Symposium, Canberra, Australia.] Modi (2013) suggests that Taraon could be closer to Milang than Idu is.
Languages
Blench (2014) lists the following languages in Greater Siangic.
;Greater Siangic
*Pre-
Tani
*
Idu-
Taraon
*
Siangic
**
Koro
**
Milang
Sound correspondences
Modi (2013: 20-22)
notes the following sound correspondences among Milang, Taraon, Idu, and Proto-Tani.
See also
*
Greater Siangic comparative vocabulary list (Wiktionary)
References
* Blench, Roger (2014).
Fallen leaves blow away: a neo-Hammarstromian approach to Sino-Tibetan classification'. Presentation given at the University of New England, Armidale, 6 September 2014.
* Post, Mark W. and Roger Blench (2011).
Siangic: A new language phylum in North East India, ''6th International Conference of the North East India Linguistics Society'', Tezpur University, Assam, India, Jan 31 – Feb 2.
{{Arunachal languages
Languages of India
Proposed language families