She is a direct descendant of old Chinese. Mandarin and other Chinese dialects such as Cantonese have gone through the вЂњmiddle ChineseвЂќ phase, Hokkien did not. It provides an invaluable resource for scholars of ancient Chinese as well as comparative Sino-Tibetan. Hokkien is the oldest Sinitic language alive today. Tibeto-Burman comprises hundreds of languages besides Tibetan and Burmese, spread over a vast geographical area (China, India, the Himalayan region, peninsular SE Asia). Sino-TibetanВ includes both the Sinitic and the Tibeto-Burman languages. The more than 1.1 billion speakers of Sinitic (the Chinese dialects) constitute the worldвЂ™s largest speech community. Sino-Tibetan is one of the largest language families in the world, with more first-language speakers than even Indo-European. One ancestral language, spoken at least 15,000 years ago, gave rise to seven more that formed an ancient Eurasiatic вЂњsuperfamilyвЂќ.В These in turn split into languages now spoken all over Eurasia, from Portugal to Siberia.

Source: Language Affinities Beween Autochthonous Populations Read more hereДЄn idea of of what this treeВ would look like is shown below: Their вЂProto WorldвЂ™ map would show howВ Homo sapiens spread across the world, taking their language with them.В That single language, which the ProfessorВ calls the Mother Tongue or proto-world, diverged naturally over time into the several thousands of diverse forms spoken today. Mother language of all languagesДЄ hypothesis put forward byВ Professor Joseph Greenberg and his colleagues (Stanford University) holdsВ that the original mother language developed in Africa among early Homo sapiens. Eventually, It isВ believed that you will arrive at the main trunk of this tree into which all of the languagesВ came from.

By tracing these branches back we arrive at larger branches, such as Indo-European, and by tracing the Indo-European branch back, weВ arrive at even larger branches. Just like a family tree, we can think of branches as different families, and leaves as languages. Perhaps the similarities that Thai shares with Chinese are due to borrowing, not descent from a common ancestor.вЂќ вЂ“В Peter Thomas NB: вЂњIt has been suggested that Thai could be part of the neighbouring family called Austronesian, rather than the Sino-Tibetan family. Tamil is on another branch called Dravidian.Japanese and Korean have their own branches.Austronesian branch includes: Malay, Indonesian and Tagalog.Indo-European branch includes: English, Russian and Hindi.Sino-Tibetan branchВ includes Mandarin and Thai.IвЂ™ve relabelled some popular languages) The numbers on the tree below are in millions of native speakers. The Language Tree below shows languages that come from the same origin. Indo-European is the largest language family, followed by Sino-Tibetan, and lastly Afro-Asiatic. There are thousands of spoken languages in the world and most can be traced back in history to show how they areВ related to each other.Д«y finding patterns like these, different languages can be grouped together as members of a language family.

Ancient numbers in different languages