4 posts tagged “sino-tibetan”

I'm not spending nearly as much time on Tangut as I hoped I would when I started this blog. But that's okay, there are many other very interesting languages I post regularly about. But recently I have found myself a Tangut Dictionary[1], so I can finally properly commence my translation endeavours. I decided I'd first start making word-per-word analyses of sentence I already have someone else's translation of.
Here then are some of the results so far:

Tangut1

A quick searched turned out that there does not seem to be an ablauting form of this stem. Therefore the meaning technically speaking is ambiguous. Obviously though, it's far more sensical that it means 'Someone grabbed my hand'  rather than  'my hand grabbed someone'.

·jij This is the genitive-absolutive suffix. When it's placed between two objects, it will create a possessive construction. While, when it's just placed after a noun phrase, it's the marker of the absolutive (Subject of intransitive verbs, object of transitive verbs). I'm quite sure the genitive use is limited to not be used as the subject of a transitive verb. There the relation would just be expressed by juxtaposition of two nouns. But don't pin me down on that, we'll see about this later.

dzjwo gjɨ It's interesting to see that this subject of a transitive verb does not take the ergative marker. The ergative marker is often elided, and the formation gives the impression that it might be artificial. More about that later.

[1] Tangut Dictionary

[EDIT] O and I almost forgot, happy new year to everyone who's reading!

All right, I dug up a table of the different syllables that exist in the Chinese language.* And I figured now would be as good a time as any to reduce the horribly unphonemic pinyin to the truely underlying phonemes.

I was surprised to find out that most gaps are easily explicable, and that Chinese only has two phonemic vowels: a and e/o. I named e/o E, it seems that o occurs when it is near labials.

Now according to my theory, every word is made out of this phonemic structure:
C-Y-V-(Y/N)

Where C is the initial consonant.
Y is the glide y or w
V is the vowel a or e.
and N is the nasal n or ng.

All of these parts can be either there, or not, as long as there's at least one element, it'll be a valid syllable (although some are restricted)

Now there's some interesting things to be seen.
Labial+w initial clusters don't exist except when not followed by a vowel. Which is easy enough to understand due to the labial nature of that glide. Besides that, it's interesting to notice that the c, ch, s, sh, z, zh and r don't occur when there's no glide on second position.

The only problem I had was getting rid of the words with ü, like nü. Right now I have that one as /nyay/ which is almost definitely wrong I can't think of any good reason why a phonemic /nyay/ would display [ny] phonetically. Nevertheless, the  ü  glides  are much too small of a class to actually be phonemic, or so I'd like to think. It is of course possible.

I was delighted to see that j/q/x were just allophones g/k/h in front of front vowels and the y glide.

now there's the word final r. that comes from enclitic er. I think that this might phonemically be /ra/ but I'll have to look into it.

Now I'll provide a little pdf, which will need some explanation. The first three pages are pretty much the pinyin spelling, but compressed into the phonemic system which I think looks right. The next three pages contain the same table, but this time with my proposed phonemic spelling. the purple background entries are the ones I'm least sure about.

Please enjoy, and this is probably very confusing, I'll try to structure it more later on.

http://members.home.nl/marijnvanputten/chinphon.pdf

*out of this terrible habit of mine, whenever I refer to Chinese, I mean mandarin Chinese, which is the only Chinese language I'm remotely familiar with. Please excuse this perpetual misnaming.

Ninja Edit:

It seems like I'm not the only idiot who came up with the two vowel system:
http://xiang.free.fr/leiden-en.pdf
See page four of this article.

I'm not really sure whether I should be happy or whether I should cry. On the one hand, it's amazing that I found this myself in one day, without any prior knowledge of this research, on the other hand, I did not find a breakthrough new theory. Haha. Oh well. They do still analyse that darned ü to exist though. I'd like to have that out of the way. But signs indicate that I probably cant. Oh well.

I'll soon make a full sketch of the Mandarin Phonology the way I see it.

Just to keep up the pa ce in talking a bit more about Tangut, I have decided to do a small sentence analysis from a passage of the Lotus Sutra. It's not a direct translation from Sanskrit, but rather a translation from Chinese, which will soon become apparent.

This is what the (short) Sentence looks like:

Sentence

This sentence consists of 3 phrases. I'll discuss them induvidually.

Phrase1

This is the subject of the sentence. It means 'Bodhisattva of Inexhaustible Intent' This is a direct translation of the name that the Chinese use:
無盡意菩薩 non-exhaustible-intent-bodhi-sattva. The Tangut use a slightly different order and have intent-non-exhastible-bodhi-sattva. Note that there is no case marker, although technically it could have one. Since it's a transitive sentence this would be the Ergative case. But the Ergative is not often marked, and especially not when the only other noun phrase in the sentence already has the Gentive-Absolutive (which it does).

The following is the second phrase: (sorry for not getting the pictures in uniform sizes)

Phrase2

This simply reads Buddha+absolutive.  The absolutive also functions as a marking of the genitive, and sometimes even as a marking of the dative.  Tangut only marks this case marking and the ergative, where the ergative even seems to be constructed (The characters of the ergative mean something like: "He who does the action"). So the use of the limited amount of case markers is quite wide.



The last phrase is the verb phrase, this is also the typical order of words: SOV, which shouldn't come as a surprise to you if you're known with Sino-Tibetan languages, unless you only know Chinese, which is SVO (though there are dialects with a stronger SOV tendency than Mandarin if I'm not misaken).

This is the last phrase:

Phrase3

This reads word-say `to say words'. Although technically 'word' would be the the Object of the sentence, here it is definitely to be taken as part of the verb, rather than two loose words. Note that there is no agreement. In the 3rd person there's never any agreement in number or person. Or rather, the absence of a suffix marks the 3rd person, while suffixes mark the first and second person.

There is some indication of the subject agreement though. There are two characters for the verb `speak' in Tangut. One is the so called `Theme 1' and the other one is `Theme 2'. This is in fact the same word, but with a different vowel, or rhyme. For `speaking' Gong reconstructs tshjij-1 for the first theme. And tshii-2 for theme 2. These vowel changes also have to do with the verbal agreement. The 3rd singular/plural agreement used Theme 1.

Altogether this sentence means: "The Bodhisattva of Inexhaustible intent said to the Buddha:".

That's an open ending. Tomorrow I'll probably discuss what will follow.

When I started this blog, I intended to write a lot about my pet project: the Tangut language. After I started my blog, I found out that I suddenly had a lot of idea's on Indo-European, and due to my study this overshadowed anything I was doing with Tangut at the time.

But now I decided I would finally like to at least make a small start on telling a bit about this incredibly interesting language. All of this is self study, with my sources mostly taken from the internet, some inaccuracies might occur, although I doubt you'll notice much of it in this introduction.

Tangut is the Russian name (Тангут) used for the language which is otherwise known by it's Chinese name Xī-Xià (西夏). For simplicity's sake I'll stick with Tangut. The language was spoken in the Tangut Empire, which was situated North West of China.

The language is a Qianic-Tangut language, which is a branch of the Tibeto-Burman languages (Ignoring any of George van Driem's rather controversial theories on what the Sino-Tibetan language family looks like). The language in itself isn't that remarkable, it's much like it's related languages, and anyone familiar with Tibeto-Burman languages wont be surprised to find it's a Ergative-Absolutive language, with a SOV word order and, typical to its branch of Languages, marks the direction of action as a prefix to the verb.

What is  very exciting though, is its script. Tangut has a completely ideographic script* much like the Chinese script, and it has over 6000 characters to write the language. To me, Tangut is one of the most elegant and beautiful scripts that I've ever seen, although it's also a nightmare, due to lack of clear definition of the phonetics behind Tangut, and because the grammar isn't too well suited for an ideographic script like this.

My Icon that I use actually is a Tangut word, meaning 'I', and is also a suffix in verbal agreement. I've been working on a dictionary, which isn't coming along very quickly, but I am progressing bit by bit.

The reason why I've never posted about this language before, is also because it is hard to find example sentences. Not easy ones, or ones without any problems in explaining which character means what. Nevertheless I hope to post up some interesting information about a couple of sentences in Tangut soon.

For more information see:
http://www.omniglot.com/writing/tangut.htm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tangut_Empire
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tangut_Language

*I've called it Ideographic Script, though ideo-phonetic, or semanto-phonetic script might be better.