TIBETO-BURMAN LANGUAGES. The man family comprises dialects spoken from Tibet in the north to Burma in the south, and from the Ladakh wazarat of Kashmir in the west to the Chinese provinces of Sze-ch'uen and Yiinnan in the east. In the first place we have the various Tibetan dialects, spoken all over Tibet and in the neighbouring districts of India and China. The Himalayan dialects are spoken in the southern Himalayas, from Lahul in the west to Bhutan in the east. East of Bhutan, to the north of the Assam valley, a third small group, the North Assam group, consists of three dialects. A fourth group, the Bodo group, comprises a series of dialects from Bhutan in the north to the Tippera state in the south, which at one time ex tended over most of Assam west of Manipur and the Naga hills, and even far into Bengal proper. To the west of the Bodos, and in the neighbourhood of the Naga hills is a fifth group, the so called Naga group. It comprises dialects of very different kinds. Some of them approach Tibetan and the dialect of the North Assam group. Others lead over to the Bodo languages, and others again connect the Naga dialects with their Tibeto-Burman neigh bours to the south and east. To the south of the Naga hills, in the long chain of hills extending southwards, is a sixth group, the Kuki-Chin dialects. The old Meitei language of Manipur lies mid way between this group and the easternmost branch of the Tibeto Burman family, the Kachin group, in the tract of country to the east of Assam and to the north of Upper Burma, including the headwaters of the Chindwin and the Irrawaddy. The Kachin and
the Kuki-Chin gradually and finally merge into Burmese, the language of the ancient kingdom of Burma.
The dialects spoken in the Himalayas and in Assam can be viewed as a double chain connecting Tibetan with Burmese, the two principal languages of the family. In the first place the Kachin group runs from the easternmost Tibetan dialects in Sze-ch'uen down to the Burmese of Upper Burma. The second chain has a double beginning in the north, one line through the North Assam group, the Naga, Bodo and Kuki-Chin groups, another line pro ceeding from Tibetan through the Himalayan and Bodo groups into Kuki-Chin, finally merging into Burmese.
The Tibeto-Burman languages are closely related to Chinese and Tai, more closely to the former than to the latter. The agree ment is apparent in the phonetical system, in vocabulary and in grammar. The principal point in which they differ is the order of words. The Tibeto-Burman family arranges the words of a sen tence in the order of subject, object, verb, while the order in Chinese and Tai is subject, verb, object. Together all these lan guages form one great family, now called Sino-Tibetan.