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

 484  George van Driem   of the major Trans-Himalayan subgroups are located south of the Himalayan divide (Figure 11). The Trans-Himalayan linguistic phylum was first recog- nised by Julius von Klaproth in 1823, who identified the family as consisting of Tibetan, Chinese, Burmese and related languages. This linguistic phylum was called Tibeto-Burman by scholars in the British Isles, e. g. [Hodgson 1857; Cust 1878; Forbes 1878; Houghton 1896]. Yet confusingly, adherents of the In- do-Chinese tradition use the term ‘Tibeto-Burman’ in the sense of non-Sinitic, a putative taxon within the Indo-Chinese tree for which Sino-Tibetanists have perennially failed to adduce evidence 2 . The Sino-Tibetanists’ tree was assailed 1 The maps in Figures 9, 12, 13, 14, 15 and 25, drawn by Christiane Enderle, are repro- duced here from [van Driem 2015] with gracious permission of George Miehe and Colin Pendry, editors of the Flora of Nepal. 2 In 1807, the Scots amateur John Leyden proposed his exuberant but poorly informed Indo-Chinese theory to George Barlow, Governor General of India at Fort William, in which he claimed a priori that all the languages in Asia and Oceania shared a ‘common mixed origin’. Leyden died at the age of 35 after making a short but dazzling career in Figure 9. Geographical distribution of Trans-Himalayan languages 1