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The present world-wide misconception that the Sino-Tibetan family of languages is divided into an eastern "Chinese-Siamese" sub-family and a western "Tibeto-Burman" sub-family 1 has resulted from two distinguished scholars working on opposite sides of the area and their almost total ignorance of the languages in their colleague's field.Since about 300 Sino-Tibetan languages and dialects have been recorded, some division of labor has naturally occurred in their investigation.And this has followed geographical lines.In southeast Asia, great streams-the Mekong, Salween, Irrawaddy, and Chindwin-flow in a generally southerly direction, and the intermediate ridges, the monsoon forests, the Malay peninsula extending far southward, and the political division with Indo-China under France and Burma and India under.Great Britain have hindered communication and have tended to compartmentize knowledge into one division facing twoard the Pacific Ocean and another facing toward the Indian Ocean.Henri Maspero, the last great scholar to hold to the "Siamese-Chinese" division, was a product of the Ecole Fran~aise d'Extrcme-Orient at Hanoi.He published brilliant work on both the Chinese 1 Konow carelessly stated that Daic and Chinese "form one distinct family as compared with the Tibeto-Burman forms of speech" (Linguistic Survey of India, 3 [ 1909_], p. I).Of course he meant sub-family, but the absurdity of having families within a family of languages has been repeated in the Encyclopedia Britanica down to the last edition, which refers to the "Tibeto-Burman family" and the "Siamese-Chinese family" (1953, v. 22, p. 187, and v. 20, p. 596 a).Ambrogio Ballini and Carlo Tagliavini correctly refer to sub-families but these are Konow's Sino-Siamese and Tibeto-Burman (Enciclopedia Italiana, v. 19, pp.46 and 129fT.The Diccionario Encirlopedico CJ. 1'.E. H. A. mistakenly applies "tibetobirmano" and "siamochino" to race.All have obviously been following Konow and the Linguistic Survey of India.