LING: lesson 8 (non-Sinitic lang in China)

What is a language family?

a group of genetically related languages: share a linguistic kinship by virtue of having developed a common ancestor

proto-language → intermediate proto-language → daughter language

What is a language isolate?

a language with no known relatives

e.g. Ainu language

general geographic distribution of non-Sinitic languages in China

North & northwest:

• Turkic (Xinjiang, Gansu, Qinghai)

• Mongolic (Inner Mongolia,Qinghai, Gansu, part of the northeast)

Northeast:

• Tungusic (also in Xinjiang)

• Korean (Jilin, Liaoning, Heilongjiang)

South & southwest:

• Kra-Dai (Guangxi, Guizhou, Yunan, Hainan)

• Hmong-Mien (Guizhou, Hunan, Guangxi, Yunnan)

Yunnan & borderlands with mainland Southeast Asia:

• Austroasiatic, connected to the broader mainland Southeast Asian linguistic area

Taiwan:

• Austronesian (indigenous languages in Taiwan), extending into Island
  Southeast Aisa, the Pacific, and Madagascar.

West & southwest:

• Sino-Tibetan (Qinghai, Sichuan, Yunnan, parts of Guizhou, etc.

Sporadically spread: Indo-European, such as Tajik and Russian in the northwest and
northeast

What about Kra-Dai, Tai-Kadai, and Zhuangdong?

Kra-Dai and Tai-Kadai are outside of the Sino-Tibetan family (similarities are explained by old contact and borrowing)

Zhuangdong: similarities hint to potential genetic relationship

What is the debate on Altaic about?

60s: the Altaic hypothesis: Turkic, Mongol, and Tungusic languages can be grouped together in the Altaic language family

BUT critiques: similarities in typology (SOV, case marking, vowel harmony,….) are because of contact NOT genetic relationship

most recent: Transeurasian hypothesis: replaces Altaic and adds Korean end Japanese in this family → not widely accepted though

Debate on the classification of Koreanic:

• Altaic hypothesis/ transeurasian hypothesis

• Korea-Japonic hypothesis

• Korean as a language isolate

Tibetic language distribution:

• Tibet autonomous region

• Qinghai

• Gansu

• Sichuan

• Yunnan

• Nepal

• Bhutan

• India

• Pakistan

= linguistic Tibet

Writing system of Tibetan

• syllabic writing system: syllable and phrase boundaries are marked, but there are no word boundaries

• writing system did not change alongside phonetic change

• Tibetan has a very important Buddhist textual tradition

Morphology of Tibetan:

• case-marking system

• aspect marking system

Case-marking system om Tibetan

absolutive: unmarked

agentive/ ergative: marks the agent of transitive verbs

instrumental: marks the instrument

genitive

dative

ablative

associative

aspect marking in Tibetan

Mongolic language family

Mongolian writing systems:

• Mongol script (11Th -12th c.): on the basis of Semitic alphabet

• Written Oirat / “Clear Script”(1648): based on Written Mongol

• “Old Script”: now used in Inner Mongolia, as decoration in Outer Mongolia.

• Romanized “Buryat” (1930)

• Cyrillic Buryat (1937)

• Cyrillic Kalmuck (1930s)

• Cyrillic Khalkha (1940s): Khalkha Mongolian as the standard spoken variety of the Republic of Mongolia

• “New script”: now used in Outer Mongolia.

Mongolian agglutinative morphology

forms words by stringing together morphemes, each representing a grammatical meaning

Mongolian word order:

• clause level: SOV

• relative clause: prenominal and verb final

• noun-phrase: modifier-head order (genitive/ adjective/ relative clause before noun)

• case-marking/ postpositions: rather than prepositions

vowel harmony in Mongolian:

phonological process whereby vowels within a phonological domain must agree in one or more phonological features (height, backness, ATR, roundness,…)

→ suffix-vowels change according to vowels in the stem

Zhuang classification

Kra-Dai/ Tai-Kadai family

language contact and influence on Zhuang

long and intense contact with Chinese varieties and other languages of southern China and mainland SE Asia

→ typological similarities (SVO word order, tonal, monosyllabic)

great impact from migration

language corridor

writing system of Zhuang

• borrowed standard Chinese graphs

• new characters made out of Chinese graphic elements, radicals, phonetic graphs

• never subject to standardization → variation

• 1957: alphabetical script based on Latin script

Zhuang word-order

• clause level: SVO

• noun-phrase: head-modifier order

• preposition: few, most are derived from verbs and behave like coverbs

Wutunhua basics

• ca. 4000 speakers

• Tongren County, Huangnan Autonomous Prefecture, Qianghai

• high degree of lexical and grammatical mixing: basic voc Sinitic, morphology and syntax have influences from Tibetic and Mongolic

Amdo Sprachbund Wutunhua

• compromises 15-19 languages spoken in the Upper Yellow River Basin of Western China, in Eastern Qinghai and Southern Gansu Provinces

• Four language families: Sinitic, Tibetic, Mongolic, and Turkic

  • Northwest Mandarin & Amdo Tibetan as dominant regional languages and lingua francas

  • Mongolic and Turkic languages spoken at a more local level

• Many contact features of Wutun are also observed in other Sinitic languages of the region, and it is not always obvious whether the source language for these features is Tibetic or Mongolic because they share a number of morpho-syntactic features

genesis of Wutunhua

consensus: product of mixed marriages between partners from different linguistic groups, and long-term community bilingualism

mixed marriage between (two views):

• Chinese soldiers sent to the area from other parts of China and local Tibetan and Mongolian women; Chen (1986) claims the similarities between the vowel systems of Wutun and the Old Nanjing dialect.

• Local narratives: Tibetan soldiers settled in the Tongren area during the expansion of Tibetan empire during King Songtsen Fampo (605 - 650) and married local Chinese and Mongolian women

Wutun speakers adopted Tibetan Buddhism and use Amdo Tibetan as their lingua franca

lexical and grammatical features Wutunhua shares with other varieties of Mandarin

Basic vocabulary and grammatical forms

• 205 words in a 235-word list (based on Swadesh 200-word list) are always expressed by words of Sinitic origin (Janhunen et al. 2008)

• Most grammatical morphemes of Wutun have their origins in Mandarin Chinese

Standard Negation

• Negative prefixes: be- (negative particle bù 不) / mi- (negative particle méi 没) / bai-(prohibitive particle bié 別)

Verb-complement constructions

grammatical systems that display a blend of Chinese and Tibetan strategies in Wutunhua

Word order of the noun phrase

• Demonstratives and adjectives can either preced the noun as in Sinitic or follow the noun as in Tibetic;

Aspect marking: possible to have multiple aspect marking

• primary markers: perfective –lio (Sinitic origin), progressive –di (Sinitic origin), patient-oriented resultative –ma (unknown origin), prospective –zhe (Sinitic origin);

• secondary markers: incompletive –la (Amdo Tibetan origin), completive –gu (Sinitic origin), agent-oriented resultative –she

Wutunhua grammatical features borrowed from Amdo Tibetan

Wutunhua grammatical features borrowed from Mongolic

Contact Languages: Pidgins / Creoles / Mixed Languages & Where Wutun Hua Fits