Seminars

All seminars are held in the RCLT Reading Room.

Friday, 9th Dec , 2011, 11:00am to 1:00pm
Dr Hiroyuki Suzuki
University of Provence & LACITO (CNRS)&JSPS

Title:Phonological idiosyncracies of mBalhag Tibetan (Yunnan, China) —A dialect in a thousand years of isolation

Abstract:

mBalhag Tibetan is a dialect of Khams Tibetan spoken in Bala Hamlet in the western area of Nixi Village, Xianggelila County, Diqing Tibetan Autonomous Prefecture, Yunnan, China. Bala Hamlet is located inside a deep valley called Balagezong. According to the folk tradition, the inhabitants in this village came from nowadays Batang County around 1000 years ago, and have kept themselves isolated till the beginning of the recent tourism development. The mBalhag dialect has many characteristic features of its phonetics and phonology from the viewpoint of the Tibetan dialectology, e.g. /ì, Ð/ originating from *s and *z, and multiple sound correspondences with a single older form. It has not been unclear yet that these idiosyncrasies are a result of this dialect itself occurred in a thousand years of isolation or of another factor of the formation of it.

In order to clarify the process of the formation of the mBalhag dialect, I attempt to present a sketch of the idiosyncrasies of the mBalhag Tibetan with the traditional method of Tibetan dialectology, i.e. the comparison with Written Tibetan forms; as a next step, I try to compare the data of the mBalhag dialect with that of surrounding dialects of Khams Tibetan which belong to the rGyalthang and sDerong-nJol groups. The analysis shows that the mBalhag dialect possesses the characteristics shared with both of the rGyalthang and sDerong-nJol groups. How to interpret this fact is a question left for further studies.

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