Supplementary material for the article "Orthography-Based Prescriptivism: The Divergence of Sino-Tibetan Grammar"

This data set is the supplementary material for the article "Orthography-Based Prescriptivism: The Divergence of Sino-Tibetan Grammar". The philological records of the target characters mentioned in the paper are listed to show their origins, logics underlying the graphic forms, and derivational relationships. Abstract: As two major Sino-Tibetan languages, Chinese and Tibetan went on divergent evolution paths due to the distinct writing systems adopted. The ideographic Chinese characters stabilize monosyllabic morphemes for the Chinese language across time and space, but unable to represent sub-syllabic linguistic forms. Consequently, sub-syllabic morphological processes, including affixation and tonal alternation, were eliminated, giving rise to compounding. For example, the derivative *kraŋ, composed of the root *kra (gra) and the suffix *-ŋ in Proto-Sino-Tibetan, was fused into one morpheme in Chinese when represented by a single character. In contrast, the Tibetan abugida is able to represent every single phoneme in a syllable, and accordingly, the sub-syllabic affixes in Proto-Sino-Tibetan managed to be stabilized. Evidently, writing system determines the granularity of linguistic prescription: the linguistic unit represented by a single sign is always the smallest linguistic unit that can possibly be standardized in the language.