Gyalrongic languages

Last updated
Gyalrongic
Jiarongic, Rgyalrongic
Geographic
distribution
China
Linguistic classification Sino-Tibetan
Subdivisions
Glottolog rgya1241
Carte2.JPG

The Gyalrongic languages (also known as Rgyalrongic or Jiarongic) constitute a branch of the Qiangic languages of Sino-Tibetan, [1] but some propose that it may be part of a larger Rung languages group and do not consider it to be particularly closely related to Qiangic but suggest that similarities between Gyalrongic and Qiangic may be from areal influence. [2] However, other work suggests that Qiangic as a whole may in fact be paraphyletic, with the only commonalities of the supposed "branch" being shared archaisms and areal features that were encouraged by language contact. [3] Jacques & Michaud (2011) propose that Qiangic including Gyalrongic may belong to a larger Burmo-Qiangic group based on some lexical innovations. [4]

Contents

Geographical distribution

The Gyalrongic languages are spoken in Sichuan in China, mainly in the autonomous Tibetan and Qiang prefectures of Karmdzes and Rngaba. These languages are distinguished by their conservative morphology and their phonological archaisms, which make them valuable for historical linguistics.

The cluster of languages variously referred to as Stau, Ergong or Horpa in the literature are spoken over a large area from Ndzamthang county (in Chinese Rangtang 壤塘县) in Rngaba prefecture (Aba 阿坝州) to Rtau county (Dawu 道孚) in Dkarmdzes prefecture (Ganzi 甘孜州), in Sichuan province, China. At the moment of writing, it is still unclear how many unintelligible varieties belong to this group, but at least three must be distinguished: the language of Rtau county (referred as ‘Stau’ in this paper), the Dgebshes language (Geshizha 格什扎话) spoken in Rongbrag county (Danba 丹巴), and the Stodsde language (Shangzhai 上寨) in Ndzamthang. [5]

Gyalrongic languages are spoken predominantly in the four counties of Ma'erkang, Li, Xiaojin, and Jinchuan in Aba Prefecture, western Sichuan. [6] Other Gyalrongic lects are spoken in neighboring Heishui, Rangtang, Baoxing, Danba, and Daofu counties.

Classification

The Gyalrongic languages share several features, notably in verbal morphology. More recent classifications such as Lai et al. (2020) split Gyalrongic into West and East branches: [7]

The Gyalrong languages in turn constitute four mutually unintelligible varieties: Eastern Gyalrong or Situ, Japhug, Tshobdun, and Zbu.

Khroskyabs and Horpa are classified by Lin (1993) as a "western dialect" of Gyalrong, along with Eastern Gyalrong and the "northwestern dialect" (Japhug, Tshobdun, and Zbu). Otherwise, the scholarly consensus deems the distance between Khroskyabs, Horpa, and the Gyalrong cluster is greater than that between the Gyalrong languages. For example, Ethnologue reports 75% lexical similarity between Situ and Japhug, 60% between Japhug and Tshobdun, but only 13% between Situ and Horpa.

Huang (2007:180) [8] found that Horpa (Rta’u) and Gyalrong (Cogrtse) share only 15.2% cognacy, with 242 cognates out of a total of 1,592 words.

The Khalong Tibetan language has a Gyalrongic substratum. [9]

The Chamdo languages (consisting of Lamo, Larong, and Drag-yab, a group of three closely related Sino-Tibetan languages spoken in Chamdo, eastern Tibet) may or may not be Qiangic. [10] [11] [12]

Comparison with Tibetic

Gyalrongic languages are surrounded by Tibetic languages and have thus been in intense contact with them. However, there many major lexical and morphological differences between them. Gyalrongic tend to use prefixes such as *kə-, *tə-, etc., while Tibetic languages use suffixes such as -pa/-ba, -ma, -po/-bo, -mo, etc. Below is a table of comparing words in bTshanlha and Japhug that do not have cognates in Classical Tibetan. [13]

GlossbTshanlha Japhug Classical Tibetan
yeartəpalo
braintərnoktɯ-moʁklad pa
hailtərmokser ba
milktəlu’o ma
legtametɤmirkang pa
fishtʃhəɣjoqa-ɟynya
flowertapatme tog, men tog
tongueteʃmelce
redkəwərnekɯ-ɣɯmidmar po
yellowkɯ-qarŋeser (po)
sandkəwekbye ma
sheepkə-joqa-ʑolug
horsemborombrorta

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Sino-Tibetan languages</span> Language family native to Asia

Sino-Tibetan, also cited as Trans-Himalayan in a few sources, is a family of more than 400 languages, second only to Indo-European in number of native speakers. Around 1.4 billion people speak a Sino-Tibetan language. The vast majority of these are the 1.3 billion native speakers of Sinitic languages. Other Sino-Tibetan languages with large numbers of speakers include Burmese and the Tibetic languages. Other languages of the family are spoken in the Himalayas, the Southeast Asian Massif, and the eastern edge of the Tibetan Plateau. Most of these have small speech communities in remote mountain areas, and as such are poorly documented.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Tibetic languages</span> Subfamily of the Sino-Tibetan languages

The Tibetic languages form a well-defined group of languages descended from Old Tibetan. According to Tournadre (2014), there are 50 languages, which split into over 200 dialects or could be grouped into 8 dialect continua. These languages are spoken in the Tibetan Plateau and in the Himalayas in Gilgit-Baltistan, Aksai Chin, Ladakh, Nepal, Himachal Pradesh, and Uttarakhand. Classical Tibetan is the major literary language, particularly for its use in Buddhist literature.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Tangut language</span> Extinct Sino-Tibetan language

Tangut is an extinct language in the Sino-Tibetan language family.

Khams Tibetan is the Tibetic language used by the majority of the people in Kham. Khams is one of the three branches of the traditional classification of Tibetic languages. In terms of mutual intelligibility, Khams could communicate at a basic level with the Ü-Tsang branch.

Qiangic is a group of related languages within the Sino-Tibetan language family. They are spoken mainly in Southwest China, including Sichuan and northern Yunnan. Most Qiangic languages are distributed in the prefectures of Ngawa, Garzê, Ya'an and Liangshan in Sichuan with some in Northern Yunnan as well.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Tibeto-Burman languages</span> Group of the Sino-Tibetan language family

The Tibeto-Burman languages are the non-Sinitic members of the Sino-Tibetan language family, over 400 of which are spoken throughout the Southeast Asian Massif ("Zomia") as well as parts of East Asia and South Asia. Around 60 million people speak Tibeto-Burman languages. The name derives from the most widely spoken of these languages, Burmese and the Tibetic languages, which also have extensive literary traditions, dating from the 12th and 7th centuries respectively. Most of the other languages are spoken by much smaller communities, and many of them have not been described in detail.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Guillaume Jacques</span> French linguist of Breton descent

Guillaume Jacques is a French linguist who specializes in the study of Sino-Tibetan languages: Old Chinese, Tangut, Tibetan, Gyalrongic and Kiranti languages. He also performs research on the Algonquian and Siouan language families and publishes about languages of other families such as Breton. His case studies in historical phonology are set in the framework of panchronic phonology, aiming to formulate generalizations about sound change that are independent of any particular language or language group.

Horpa are a cluster of closely related Gyalrongic languages of China. Horpa is better understood as a cluster of closely related yet unintelligible dialect groups/languages closely related to Horpa Shangzhai or Stodsde skad. The term Stodsde skad is a Tibetan name meaning "language of the upper village".

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Gyalrong languages</span> Group of Gyalrongic languages of western Sichuan, China

Gyalrong or rGyalrong, also rendered Jiarong, or sometimes Gyarung, is a subbranch of the Gyalrongic languages spoken by the Gyalrong people in Western Sichuan, China. Lai et al. (2020) refer to this group of languages as East Gyalrongic.

The Burmo-Qiangic or Eastern Tibeto-Burman languages are a proposed family of Sino-Tibetan languages spoken in Southwest China and Myanmar. It consists of the Lolo-Burmese and Qiangic branches, including the extinct Tangut language.

The Rung languages are a proposed branch of Sino-Tibetan languages. The branch was proposed by Randy LaPolla on the basis of morphological evidence such as pronominal paradigms. However, Guillaume Jacques and Thomas Pellard (2021) argues that these languages do not constitute a monophyly based on recent phylogenetic studies and on a thorough investigation of shared lexical innovations.

Situ is a Rgyalrong language spoken in Sichuan, China. The name "Situ", literally "four Tusi", comes from a historical name of the Ma'erkang region.

Zbu, or Showu, is a Rgyalrong language spoken in Sichuan, China.

Japhug is a Gyalrong language spoken in Barkam County, Rngaba, Sichuan, China, in the three townships of Gdong-brgyad, Gsar-rdzong and Da-tshang.

Tshobdun is a Rgyalrong language spoken in Sichuan, China. It is surrounded by the Zbu, Japhug, and Amdo Tibetan languages.

Basum is a divergent Bodish language spoken by about 2,500 people in Gongbo'gyamda County 工布江达县, Nyingtri Prefecture, Tibet, China. Basum is spoken by 13.5% of the population of Gongbo'gyamda County. Glottolog lists Basum as unclassified within Bodish.

Jackson T.-S. Sun, also known as Jackson Tianshin Sun, is a Taiwanese linguist working on languages of the Sino-Tibetan and Austroasiatic families. He is best known for his pioneering documentation and historical-comparative work in Tani, Rgyalrongic, and Tibetic languages. Sun is a research fellow at Academia Sinica in Taipei, Taiwan.

Lamo is an unclassified Sino-Tibetan language spoken in Tshawarong, Zogang County, Chamdo Prefecture, Tibet. It was recently documented by Suzuki & Nyima (2016). sMad skad, a closely related language variety, is also spoken in Tshawarong.

The Chamdo languages are a group of recently discovered, closely related Sino-Tibetan languages spoken in Chamdo Prefecture, Tibet. Their position within the Sino-Tibetan language family is currently uncertain.

The West Gyalrongic languages constitute a group of Gyalrongic languages. On the basis of both morphological and lexical evidence, Lai et al. (2020) add the extinct Tangut language to West Gyalrongic. Beaudouin (2023) through a morphosyntactic analysis based on phonetic correspondences, shows that Tangut should be included within the Horpa languages.

References

  1. Matisoff, James. 2004. "Brightening" and the place of Xixia (Tangut) in the Qiangic subgroup of Tibeto-Burman
  2. LaPolla, Randy. 2003. "Overview of Sino-Tibetan Morphosyntax". In Graham Thurgood & Randy LaPolla (eds.), The Sino-Tibetan Languages., 30. London: Routledge.
  3. Katia Chirkova (2012). "The Qiangic subgroup from an areal perspective: A case study of languages of Muli" (PDF). Language and Linguistics. 13 (1): 133–170.
  4. Guillaume Jaques and Alexis Michaud (2011). "Approaching the historical phonology of three highly eroded Sino-Tibetan languages: Naxi, Na and Laze" (PDF). Diachronica. 28: 468–498. doi:10.1075/dia.28.4.02jac. S2CID   54013956.
  5. Jacques, Guillaume, Anton Antonov, Yunfan Lai & Lobsang Nima. 2017. Stau (Ergong, Horpa). In Graham Thurgood & Randy LaPolla (eds.), The Sino-Tibetan Languages (2nd edition), 597–613. London: Routledge.
  6. Nagano, Yasuhiko and Marielle Prins. 2013. rGyalrongic languages database. Osaka: National Museum of Ethnology (Minpaku).
  7. 1 2 Lai, Yunfan; Gong, Xun; Gates, Jesse P.; Jacques, Guillaume (2020-12-01). "Tangut as a West Gyalrongic language". Folia Linguistica. 54 (s41–s1). Walter de Gruyter GmbH: 171–203. doi:10.1515/flih-2020-0006. ISSN   1614-7308. S2CID   229165606.
  8. Huang Bufan. 2007. Lawurongyu yanjiu (拉坞戎语研究) [A study of the Lavrung language]. Beijing: Minzu Press (民族出版社).
  9. Tournadre, Nicolas (2005). "L'aire linguistique tibétaine et ses divers dialectes." Lalies, 2005, n°25, p. 7–56.
  10. Suzuki, Hiroyuki and Tashi Nyima. 2018. Historical relationship among three non-Tibetic languages in Chamdo, TAR. Proceedings of the 51st International Conference on Sino-Tibetan Languages and Linguistics (2018). Kyoto: Kyoto University.
  11. Zhao, Haoliang. 2018. A brief introduction to Zlarong, a newly recognized language in Mdzo sgang, TAR. Proceedings of the 51st International Conference on Sino-Tibetan Languages and Linguistics (2018). Kyoto: Kyoto University.
  12. Jacques, Guillaumes. 2016. Les journées d'études sur les langues du Sichuan.
  13. Tournadre, Nicolas; Suzuki, Hiroyuki (2023). The Tibetic Languages: an introduction to the family of languages derived from Old Tibetan. Paris: LACITO. pp. 660–1. ISBN   978-2-490768-08-0. Archived from the original on 2023-09-29. Retrieved 2023-09-24.