Mashan Miao

Last updated
Mang
Mashan Miao
Pronunciationmʱaŋ˨
Native to China
Region Guizhou
Native speakers
 140,000 (1995) [1]
Language codes
ISO 639-3 Variously:
hmm  – Central
hmp  – Northern
hma  – Southern
hmw  – Western
Glottolog mash1238 [2]

Mang, or Mashan Miao also known as Mashan Hmong (麻山 máshān), is a Miao language of China. The endonym is Mang, similar to other West Hmongic languages such as Mong.

Contents

Varieties

Mang was classified as a branch of Western Hmongic in Wang (1985), who listed four varieties. [3] Matisoff (2001) gave these four varieties the status of separate languages, and, conservatively, did not retain them as a single group within West Hmongic. Li Yunbing (2000) added two minor varieties which had been left unclassified in Wang, Southeastern (Strecker's "Luodian Muyin") and Southwestern ("Wangmo"). [4]

Luodian County County in Guizhou, Peoples Republic of China

Luodian County is a county under the administration of Qiannan Buyei and Miao Autonomous Prefecture in the south of Guizhou province, China, bordering Guangxi to the south.

Wangmo County is a county in the southwest of Guizhou province, China, bordering Guangxi to the southeast. It is under the administration of the Qianxinan Buyei and Miao Autonomous Prefecture.

Phonology and script

A pinyin alphabet had been created for Mang in 1985, but proved to have deficiencies. Wu and Yang (2010) report the creation of a new alphabet, albeit a tentative one, based on the Central Mang dialect of Ziyun County, Zōngdì 宗地 township, Dàdìbà 大地坝 village. [5]

Consonants, in pinyin, are:

labial: b p nb np, m f v, by py nby my, bl pl nbl npl ml
lateral: l lj
dental or alveolar stops: d t dl dj nd nt n
dental affricates: z c s nz nc
retroflex: dr tr ndr nr sh r
alveolo-palatal: j q nj x y ny
velar or uvular: g k ngg ng, h w hw
(zero onset)

The Latin voiced/voiceless opposition has been coopted to indicate aspiration, as usual in pinyin alphabets.

Correspondences between Central Mang dialects include Dadiba retroflex dr, tr with dental z, c in another village of the same Zongdi township, Sanjiao (三脚 Sānjiǎo). The other five varieties of Mang have more palatalized initials than Central Mang, though these can be transcribed as medial -i-. The onsets by, py, nby, my are pronounced [pʐ pʰʐ mpʐ mʐ ] in Central Mang and [pj pʰj mpj mj] in the other five Mang varieties.

Vowels and finals, including those needed for Chinese loans, are:

a aa[ã]ai ao ain ang
e ea ei en ein eu ew eng
i iou in ie iu iao ian iang
o ou ow ong
u uw ua ui ue un uai uan uang
yu

Most Central Mang and Western Mang dialects have eleven to thirteen tones. Compared to the eight tone categories of other Western Hmongic languages, the odd-numbered tones are each split into two. The tones of at least three villages of Central Mang have been documented: Dadiba (Wu & Yang 2010), Jiaotuozhai (Wang & Mao 1995; Li 2000), and Jingshuiping (Xian 1990; Mortensen 2006 [6] ), all in the Zongdi township of Ziyun County. They lie several kilometers apart and have minor differences.

Tone is the use of pitch in language to distinguish lexical or grammatical meaning – that is, to distinguish or to inflect words. All verbal languages use pitch to express emotional and other paralinguistic information and to convey emphasis, contrast, and other such features in what is called intonation, but not all languages use tones to distinguish words or their inflections, analogously to consonants and vowels. Languages that do have this feature are called tonal languages; the distinctive tone patterns of such a language are sometimes called tonemes, by analogy with phoneme. Tonal languages are common in East and Southeast Asia, the Pacific, Africa, and the Americas; as many as seventy percent of world languages may be tonal.

Central Mang tone
        Dadiba Jingshuiping Jiaotuozhai
1a-b˦˨ 42˧ 3˧˨ 32
1b-p˨ 2
2-x˥ 5˦˨ 42˥˧ 53
3a-d˥˧ 53˦˨ 42
3b-z˨˧˨ 232
4-l˩ 1
5a-t˥ 55
5b-c˨˦ 24˧˥ 35
6-s˩˧ 13
6'-p˨ 2˧ 3
7a-k˧ 3˦ 4
7b-s˩˧ 13
8-f˨˩ 21

Although some pairs of tones (such as tones 6 and 7b) have the same value when pronounced alone, they behave differently with regard to tone sandhi and should be treated as different phonologically. Tones also interact with phonation types and vowel quality. Jiaotuozhai tones 4 and 6 are breathy voiced and have higher vowels.

Tone sandhi is a phonological change occurring in tonal languages, in which the tones assigned to individual words or morphemes change based on the pronunciation of adjacent words or morphemes. It usually simplifies a bidirectional tone into a one-direction tone. It is a type of sandhi, or fusional change, from the Sanskrit word for "joining".

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The West Hmongic languages, also known as Chuanqiandian Miao and Western Miao, is the major branch of the Hmongic languages of China and Southeast Asia.

Luobohe Miao, a.k.a. Hmjo or A-Hmyo, is a Miao language of China.

Guiyang Miao, also known as Guiyang Hmong, is a Miao language of China. It is named after Guiyang County, Guizhou, though not all varieties are spoken there. The endonym is Hmong, a name it shares with the Hmong language.

Pingtang Miao, named after Pingtang County in which it is spoken, is a group of Miao language varieties of China.

Raojia is a Hmongic language spoken by about 5,000 people in 3 villages of Heba Township 河坝乡, Majiang County, Guizhou.

Shehua is an unclassified Sinitic language spoken by the She people of southeastern China. It is also called Shanha 山哈 (San-hak) or Shanhahua 山哈话. Shehua speakers are located mainly in Fujian and Zhejiang provinces of southeastern China, with smaller numbers of speakers in a few locations of Jiangxi, Guangdong, and Anhui provinces.

References

  1. ↑ Central at Ethnologue (18th ed., 2015)
    Northern at Ethnologue (18th ed., 2015)
    Southern at Ethnologue (18th ed., 2015)
    Western at Ethnologue (18th ed., 2015)
  2. ↑ Hammarström, Harald; Forkel, Robert; Haspelmath, Martin, eds. (2017). "Mashan". Glottolog 3.0 . Jena, Germany: Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History.
  3. ↑ 王辅世主编，《苗语简志》，民族出版社，1985年。
  4. ↑ 李云兵，《苗语方言划分遗留问题研究》，中央民族大学出版社，2000年。
  5. ↑ Wú Zhèngbiāo and Yáng Guāngyīng, 2010. 麻山次方言区苗文方案的设计与使用——兼谈苗族英雄史诗《亚鲁王》的记译整理问题, 民族翻译.
    Several consonants were added to the 1985 alphabet, while bz, pz, nbz, mz and gh were removed.
  6. ↑ Mortensen (2006), Diachronic Universals and Synchronic Parochialisms: Explaining Tone-Vowel Interactions.
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