Проблемы китайского и общего языкознания. К 90-летию С. Е. Яхонтова

 483  The Eastern Himalayan Corridor in Prehistory   sheer impressionism. Starosta wrote that the ‘potential utility’ of his hypothe- sis lay ‘in helping to focus scholars’ efforts on particular specific questions, resulting in the replacement of parts of this hypothesis with better supported arguments’ [Sratosta 2005: 194]. At the 18th Himalayan Languages Sympo- sium, held at Benares Hindu University in 2012, I presented the revised East Asian family tree depicted in Figure 8. The revised phylogeny is based on historical linguistic intuitions and other types of information about popula- tion prehistory. 5. Trans-Himalayan and other East Asian families Trans-Himalayan is the world’s second most populous language family. Most speakers of Trans-Himalayan languages today live north of the Himala- yas (Figure 9), but most of the over 300 different languages and three fourths Starosta’s East Asian phylogeny [Starosta 2005: 183]. Starosta’s East Asian phylogeny, as presented at Périgueux in 2001, is reproduced correctly in [van Driem 2005: 322], rectifying the editorial misrepresentation. It remains a matter of conjecture whether the subordinate extra-Formosan status of Kradai in Starosta’s diagram might not also be a posthumous editorial enhancement, since this idea has chiefly been championed by one of the editors since Périgueux. Figure 8. The 2012 Benares Recension: A revised East Asian phylogeny