Gyalrong languages explained

Gyalrong
Also Known As:East Gyalrongic
States:China
Region:Sichuan
Speakers:83,000
Date:1999
Ref:e18
Familycolor:Sino-Tibetan
Fam2:Tibeto-Burman
Fam3:Qiangic
Fam4:Gyalrongic
Dia1:Situ
Dia2:Japhug
Dia3:Tshobdun
Dia4:Zbu
Script:Tibetan script
Iso3:jya
Glotto:core1262
Glottorefname:Core Gyalrong
Map:Carte2.JPG
Mapcaption:Map of Gyalrong languages

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.[1]

Name

The name Gyalrong is an abbreviation of Tibetan Tibetan: ཤར་རྒྱལ་མོ་ཚ་བ་རོང, shar rgyal-mo tsha-ba rong, "the hot valleys of the queen", to which the queen being Mount Murdo (in Tibetan, dmu-rdo).[2] [3] Mount Murdo is in the historical region of Kham, now mostly located inside Ngawa Tibetan and Qiang Autonomous Prefecture in Sichuan. This Tibetan word is transcribed in Chinese as 嘉绒 or 嘉戎 or 嘉荣, jiāróng. It is pronounced pronounced as /[rɟɑroŋ]/ by speakers of Situ. It is a place-name and is not used by the people to designate their own language. The autonym is pronounced pronounced as /[kəru]/ in Situ and pronounced as /[kɯrɯ]/ in Japhug. The Gyalrong people are the descendants of former Tibetan warriors at the border, where they settled as time went by.[4]

Languages

Based on mutual intelligibility, Gates (2014)[5] considers there to be five Gyalrong languages:

Situ has more than 100,000 speakers throughout a widespread area, while the other three languages, all spoken in Barkam, have fewer than 10,000 speakers each.[6] They are all tonal except for Japhug.

Most early studies on Gyalrong languages (Jin 1949, Nagano 1984, Lin 1993) focused on various dialects of Situ, and the three other languages were not studied in detail until the last decade of the 20th century. The differences between the four languages are presented here in a table of cognates. The data from Situ is taken from Huang and Sun 2002, the Japhug and Showu data from Jacques (2004, 2008) and the Tshobdun data from Sun (1998, 2006).

glossSituJaphugTshobdunShowu
badger pronounced as /pə́s/ pronounced as /βɣɯs/ pronounced as /ɣves/pronounced as /təvîs/
dream pronounced as /ta-rmô/ pronounced as /tɯ-jmŋo/ pronounced as /tɐ-jmiʔ/ pronounced as /tɐ-lmɐʔ/
I saw pronounced as /pɯ-mtó-t-a/ pronounced as /nɐ-mti-aŋ/
sheep pronounced as /kəjó/ pronounced as /qaʑo/pronounced as /qɐɟjiʔ/ pronounced as /ʁiɐʔ/

Gyalrong languages, unlike most Sino-Tibetan languages, are polysynthetic languages and present typologically interesting features such as inverse marking (Sun and Shi 2002, Jacques 2010), ideophones (Sun 2004, Jacques 2008), and verbal stem alternations (Sun 2000, 2004, Jacques 2004, 2008). See Situ language for an example of the latter.

Demographics

Gates (2012: 102–106)[7] lists the following demographic information for 5 rGyalrong languages. Altogether, there are about 85,000 speakers for all 5 languages combined.

Language Speakers Villages Dialects Alternate names Locations
35,000–40,000 57 7+ rGyalrong, kəru, roŋba almost entirely in Barkam County; NE Jinchuan County; NW Li County
rGyalrong, South-central 33,000 (out of 45,000 ethnic people) 111 3+ rGyalrong, roŋba Xiaojin, Danba, and Baoxing Counties
4,000–5,000 19 3 townships in NE Barkam County, namely Lóng'ěrjiǎ, Dàzàng, and Shā'ěrzōng
3,000 10 stodpaskʰət Caodeng/Tsho-bdun (WT Tshobdun) Township, Barkam County
6,000+ 28 stodpaskʰət Barkam, Rangtang, Seda, and Aba counties

Morphology and Syntax

In contrast to much of Sino-Tibetan, Gyalrong languages have a complex morphology; Japhug is polysynthetic. They tend to be prefixing, with Japhug being strongly so, with nine possible slots in its prefix chain. The Gyalrong verb distinguishes singular, dual, and plural numbers. While some parts of the Gyalrong prefix template are likely quite old, at least four slots in the prefix chain have been recently innovated.[8]

Syntactically, Gyalrong languages have SOV basic word order, and have been so for quite a while, Jacques argues. This combination of SOV word order with prefixing tendencies is typologically quite rare, although it is found also in Ket and various Athabaskan languages.[8]

References

Further reading

External links

Notes and References

  1. Lai. Yunfan. Gong. Xun. Gates. Jesse P.. Jacques. Guillaume. Tangut as a West Gyalrongic language. Folia Linguistica. Walter de Gruyter GmbH. 54. s41-s1. 2020-12-01. 1614-7308. 10.1515/flih-2020-0006. 171–203.
  2. Prins, Marielle. 2011. A web of relations: A grammar of rGyalrong Ji omùzú, p. 18.
  3. Book: Bennett, Daniel . Rgyalrong Conservation and Change: Social Change on the Margins . 2014 . Lulu Press . 978-1-4834-1951-0 . 24 . en.
  4. Book: Li, Mao 李茂 . Jiāróng zàngzú mínsú zhì . Li . Zhongjun 李忠俊 . 2011 . Zhongyang minzu daxue chubanshe . Beijing . 44 . zh . zh:嘉絨藏族民俗志.
  5. Book: Gates, Jesse P. . Situ in Situ : Towards a Dialectology of Jiarong (rGyalrong) . 2014 . Lincom Europa . 978-3-86288-472-8 . München . en.
  6. Encyclopedia: Rgyalrong Language . Encyclopedia of Chinese Language and Linguistics . Brill . Leiden . Jacques . Guillaumes . 2017 . 3: Men–Ser . 583 . en.
  7. Gates . Jesse P. . Situ in Situ: Towards a Dialectology of Jiāróng (rGyalrong) . 2012 . M.A. . Trinity Western University . en . Academia.edu.
  8. Jacques . Guillaume . 2013 . Harmonization and Disharmonization of Affix Ordering and Basic Word Order . Linguistic Typology . en . 17 . 2 . 187–215 . 10.1515/lity-2013-0009 . 55555480.

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