3 posts tagged “tibeto-burman”
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:
|
dzjwo2 |
gjɨ |
ŋa2 |
·jij1 |
lạ1 |
kjɨ1 |
zow2 |
ŋa2 |
|
person |
one, indef. |
I, me |
gen-abs |
hand |
perfective |
grab |
1sg |
'Some person grabbed my hand'
Grammatical notes:
kjɨ is a perfective prefix connected with the verb zow. There's 6 of these prefixes, which one belongs to which verb is mostly lexically fixed. Apparently there's some indication that it used to be an indication of direction (which is still seen in some of Tangut's sister languages like Qiang).
This 6 prefix system is also seen with the Optative prefix, of which one day we'll surely see more. But it's very rare.
ŋa is the agreement suffix, always placed directly behind the verb (tense marking can still follow). Note how this is the exact same character/sound as I. This should actually be seen as a verbal conjugation that happens to be homophonous to the pronoun rather than pronoun repetition. Agreement in Tangut is quite complex, but technically speaking it agrees to the pronoun in the sentence if there is one. But not only the suffix is part of the agreement, also the vowel of the preceeding verb ablauts giving extra accuracy. Not all verbs have ablaut though. I hope this is one of them.
Because it looks like a theme 2 verb. theme 2 with 1sg suffix means that first person is subject, and 3rd person is object.
While a theme 1 verb with a 1 sg suffix means first person is object and either 2nd or 3rd is subject.
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.
[EDIT] O and I almost forgot, happy new year to everyone who's reading!
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:
This sentence consists of 3 phrases. I'll discuss them induvidually.
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)
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:
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.
