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

 486  George van Driem   in Figure 10. Geographical distribution provides one key to unravelling eth- nolinguistic phylogeography. The geographical centre of gravity on the basis of the distribution of major Trans-Himalayan subgroups is more indicative of the location of the linguistic homeland for the phylum than the modern distribution of speech communities 1 . Vast swathes of what today is China are covered by Sinitic languages. Yet Manchuria was only sinicised after the Second World War, and much of south- ern China was only sinicised during the Qín dynasty beginning in the 3rd cen- tury bc . The global spread of English must be viewed in light of the fact that even an ancestral form of the language was not spoken on the British Isles until the fifth century AD. Viewed in terms of the distribution of other Trans- Himalayan subgroups, Sinitic represents a northeastward expansion toward the Yellow River basin. Tŭjiā and Bái most probably represent ethnolinguistic vestiges of the same ancient expansion. The internal phylogeny of Sinitic itself may also reflect this route of migration. The Càijiā 蔡家 language is spoken in the northwestern corner of Guìzhōu province [Bó 2004]. [Zhèngzhāng 2010] considers Càijiā to be a member of the same subgroup as Bái, whereas Sagart believes that both Càijiā and the Wăxiāng 瓦鄉 dialect of western Húnán could 1 The idea that the Tibeto-Burman homeland lay in the sub-Himalayan region was pos- sibly first expressed by [Peiros 1998: 217]. Figure 11. Geographical distribution of the major Trans-Himalayan subgroups. Each dot represents not just one language, but the putative historical geographical centre of each of 42 major linguistic subgroups