The Tangwang Language-An Interdisciplinary Case Study in Northwest China

Dan Xu The Tangwang Language An Interdisciplinary Case Study in Northwest China The Tangwang Language [email protected] Dan Xu The Tangwang Language An Interdisciplinary Case Study in Northwest China 123 [email protected] Dan Xu Département Chine Institut national des langues et civilisations orientales Paris France ISBN 978-3-319-59228-2 ISBN 978-3-319-59229-9 (eBook) DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-59229-9 Library of Congress Control Number: 2017943174 © Springer International Publishing AG 2017 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are reserved by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. 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Printed on acid-free paper This Springer imprint is published by Springer Nature The registered company is Springer International Publishing AG The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland [email protected] Preface The Tangwang language was first reported by Chen Yuanlong (Ibrahim 1985) in the Minzu yuwen [Minority languages of China]. Two decades later, the Tangwang language started attracting the curiosity of many researchers. My French colleagues Alain Peyraube, Redouane Djamouri, and I have participated in two projects funded and supported by the French government: ANR-07-BLAN-0023 “Language con- tact and linguistic change: the case of Chinese and Altaic” led by Djamouri, then ANR-12-BSH2-0004-01 “Do languages and genes correlate?—A case study in Northwestern China” directed by myself. In 2014, my book Tangwanghua yanjiu [Studies of the Tangwang language] was published in Chinese by Minzu chubanshe [The Ethnic Publishing House]. However, this work is not accessible to scholars who do not read Chinese but are interested in language contact and language mixing. Languages inside China are still less known by linguists outside of China. Eventually I decided to provide a simplified version in English instead of a translated one. In the present volume, Chaps. 3–5 summarize the main results of Chaps. 2–4 which make up 244 pages in the Chinese book. From 2014 to 2016, our interdisciplinary research has advanced significantly, collaborating with genetic researchers. Chapters 1, 2, and 6 present new and current findings with different approaches. Some results have been published in scientific journals, and others will appear very soon. The aim of the book is clear: it attempts to combine different domains combining human sciences and natural sciences to break down the barriers between these two fields. Despite difficulties encountered in the reconstitution of languages and genes, it is amazing to read so many articles published by biologists and archeologists in different scientific journals on the coevolution of genes and languages. Linguists seem to be too prudent and careful to avoid making mistakes. If we work on linguistic data together with archeological and genetic evidence, we may be able to reconcile them to produce a more reliable picture of the history of different peoples and their languages. This book will not be limited to describing the language but will also attempt to explore the social context of the target language including genetic, historic, and anthropological approaches to better understand the Tangwang language. One of the major difficulties in human v [email protected] vi Preface sciences is quantification of data. The book has also made some tentative research into the methodology of data quantification, hoping to make linguistic conclusions verifiable. Thanks to grant ANR-12-BSH2-0004-01 by the French government, many Ph.D. students have contributed to the project of digitizing our data. Gratitude goes to Saiyinjiya Caidengduoerji (for Mongolian and Manchu-Tungusic groups), Barbara Kozhevina (for Turkic groups), Li Ting (for Tibetan languages), Liu Keyou, and Wang Cong (for Sinitic languages). I am also very grateful to Profs. Xie Xiaodong (Lanzhou University, Gansu) and Li Hui (Fudan University, Shanghai) who have given me great help in taking part in this project and providing me with genetic documents. I am indebted to Prof. Li Hui, who not only checked the paragraphs related to genetics, but also permitted me to reprint his laboratory’s graphs and figures and to use the laboratory’s statistics. Wen Shaoqing, Wei Lanhai, Wang Chuan-Chao, and Zhang Menghan have given me substantial assistance: helping me learn and understand the field of genetics and their work method. I have to express my recognitions to Chen Yuanlong (Ibrahim), the author of the first study of the Tangwang language. He gave me important information during my investigations, and his feedback and remarks about my book in Chinese on the Tangwang language were especially pertinent and constructive. I have had dis- cussions and exchanges with linguists such as Alain Peyraube, Redouane Djamouri, Laurent Sagart, Sun Hongkai, Huang Xing, Wu Anqi, and Yixiweisa Acuo, and their comments have been very helpful and valuable to this book. I would like also to express my warm gratitude to my teachers, Professors Jacques Legrand, Tumurbaatar, Tumenjargal, and Dr. Saiyinjiya Caidengduoerji for their Mongolic language teaching, and to Prof. Françoise Robin for Tibetan language teaching. I have learned a lot with them, and it is very beneficial for my research. My thanks also go to Craig Baker who has corrected my English with patience and efficiency. I owe so much to my family: Shiqi Song, Antoine Song, and Anna Song listened patiently to my questions about quantification of the data and offered me solutions from a mathematical perspective. Without the support and help of these people, this book would never have been published. It is evident that all faults are mine. Paris, France Dan Xu June 2016 [email protected] Contents Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . xiii 1 Language Admixture and Replacement in Northwestern China . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ......... 1 1.1 A Linguistic Area in Northwestern China . . . . . . . . . . . ......... 1 1.2 Molecular Anthropology Approach. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ......... 10 1.3 Correlation of Languages and Genes in the Mongolic Group . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 15 1.4 Admixture and Replacement . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 23 1.4.1 Plural Origins . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 23 1.4.2 Two Models of Language Replacement . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 26 2 Historical, Religious and Genetic Context of Tangwang. . . . . . . . . . . 29 2.1 Historical Documents on Tangwang . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 29 2.2 Linguistic Situation in Tangwang . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 35 2.2.1 General Situation. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 36 2.2.2 Body Parts, Birds and Insects . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 37 2.2.3 Loanwords from Different Sources . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 41 2.3 The Genetic History and Analysis of the Tangwang Population . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ......... 43 3 The Phonology of Tangwang . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 49 3.1 Initials . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 49 3.1.1 The Plosives . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 50 3.1.2 The Nasals . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 51 3.1.3 The Fricatives . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 53 3.1.4 The Affricates . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 55 3.1.5 The Lateral . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 57 3.1.6 The Approximants. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 57 3.1.7 The Medials . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 58 3.1.8 Discussion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 61 vii [email protected] viii Contents 3.2 Vowels . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 63 3.3 Tones . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 65 3.3.1 Tone Splits and Mergers . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 65 3.3.2 Tone in Tangwang . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 66 3.3.3 Accent/Stress in Tangwang . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 69 3.3.4 Discussion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 74 4 Tangwang Morphology . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 77 4.1 Word Building . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 77 4.1.1 N + Suffix [ʦɿ] . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 77 4.1.2 Reduplication . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 77 4.2 Case Marking in the Tangwang Language . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 79 4.2.1 Nominative and Accusative . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 79 4.2.2 Accusative and Dative. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 86 4.2.3 Ablative Case . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 87 4.2.4 Instrumental Case . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 90 4.2.5 Summary . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 92 4.3 Suffixes Borrowed from Mongolic Languages . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 93 4.3.1 Reflexive Possessive Suffix [nə] . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 93 4.3.2 Third Person Possessive [ȵi] . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 95 4.3.3 The Suffix [thala] . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 96 5 Tangwang Syntax . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 101 5.1 Word Order Typology and the Tangwang Language . . . . . . . . . . . 101 5.2 VO and OV in Tangwang . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 102 5.2.1 General Situation. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 102 5.2.2 VO Order . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 103 5.2.3 OV Order . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 104 5.2.4 VO and OV Are Both Possible . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 105 5.2.5 Adverbs and OV . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 109 5.2.6 Verb-Resultative Verb (VR) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 109 5.3 Influence of Standard Mandarin on Tangwang Syntax . . . . . . . . . . 110 5.3.1 Co-occurrence of ba and [xa] . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 110 5.3.2 Copula [ʂʅ] ‘to be’ . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 112 5.3.3 The Verb [ʂuə] ‘say’ and Quoted Discourse . . . . . . . . . . . . 114 5.4 Aspect . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 114 5.4.1 [liɔ] and [xa] . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 115 5.4.2 [tʂɛ] and [tʂə] . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 116 5.4.3 [kuə] . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 118 5.4.4 [li] and [liɛ] . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 120 5.5 Causative and Passive . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 121 5.5.1 [ki] as a Causative Marker . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 121 5.5.2 [ki] as a Passive Marker . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 122 5.6 Concluding Remarks . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 123 [email protected] Contents ix 6 About “Mixed Languages” . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 125 6.1 Mixed Language Studies . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 125 6.2 Lexical Versus Syntactic Borrowing . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 126 6.2.1 Lexical Borrowing . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 127 6.2.2 Syntactic Borrowing . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 132 6.3 Quantification of Mixing Degree . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 144 6.3.1 Comparison of Two Cases of Borrowing . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 145 6.3.2 Further Tests and Analysis . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 146 6.4 Discussion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 149 Annex: Story in Tangwang. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 153 References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 167 Author Index . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 177 Subject Index. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 181 [email protected] 2017 The Tangwang Language- An Interdisciplinary Case Study in Northwest China. Cham: Springer 184p. Chapter 1 presents the situation in the Gansu-Qinghai area, with a concrete corpus, indicating the existence of a linguistic area. The molecular anthropological approach will be presented to explain why this discipline is beneficial to linguistic research and how people can take advantage of it in this region. Recent genetic studies have been used in the target region. As Tangwang is influenced by Dongxiang (Santa), a member of the Western branch of Mongolic languages, four languages in this branch and genetic data relative to these four languages have been compared to study the (mis)match between languages and genes. It argues based on interdisciplinary perspectives that language replacement and admixture have occurred in this region. Two models of language replacement have been studied: the Elite Dominance Model (Renfrew 1987, Cavalli-Sforza 1997 among others) and the Cultural Dominance Model (Xu and Wen to appear in 2017). In the first model, populations are forced by a dominating group to change their language. This model tends to favor language replacement, speeding up the process of change. In the second model, a small governing group as well as a larger ethnic population accepts a neighboring language on a voluntary basis due to cultural, religious and other social and political factors. A bilingual situation facilitates code- switching and admixture, and it can end with language replacement. Chapter 2 describes the geographic, historic and religious context in which the Tangwang people live. This background is crucial to understanding the unique evolution of their language. Historical documents including those found in the Qing Dynasty archives (dating to the 18th century) have been exploited, as well as legends, family genealogies (oral and written), and other sources. The work has adopted an approach of proving an event not only with written documents but also with concrete material such as engraved steles, surviving temples, and ancestral remains. The chapter has taken biological research results to identify population migrations in the past. By comparing statistics from 1988, 1996 and 2010, it is shown that more and more people have begun to self-identify as Dongxiang. However, they were actually Hui (Muslims). Moreover, these Muslims were in fact Han (Chinese) people who converted to Islam at different periods. It is shown, through several case studies of vocabulary, that the Tangwang people’s ancestors mainly came from Northern China. Several words have followed a cyclic path: they were first loaned from Ancient Chinese into Dongxiang, and have now been introduced into Tangwang with a non-Han language phonetic form. In addition to historical and material evidence, results from genetic investigations have been included in this study. The Tangwang people have multiple origins, but their core came from Han (Chinese) people. Chapter 3 gives an extensive description and analysis of the Tangwang language’s phonological system. Tangwang has 23 consonants and 8 vowels. The system is purely Chinese, and it displays regular patterns of sound change just as in other Northwestern Chinese varieties, even though the Tangwang language has begun to lose its tones in monosyllable words among young Hui (Muslim). It is interesting to observe that Hui (Muslims) speakers first began to lose tones due to the influence of the Dongxiang people, while those who are not converts have preserved the tones but are in the process of losing them, and the degree of loss varies from Han (Chinese) people to Hui people (converted from Han). Languages which are losing tones are all concentrated in the Gansu-Qinghai border regions. We must ask why. The Han people are surrounded by Mongolic and Turkic people, and sometimes by Amdo people. These toneless languages have profoundly impacted the Sinitic languages in this region and distinctive tones have started to become ambiguous or even non-functional. This fact provides a strong counterexample to the traditional point of view that distinctive tones are obligatory in a language like Chinese. Chapter 4 treats the morphology of Tangwang, analyzing word formation, case marking, and some suffixes borrowed from Mongolic languages. The Tangwang language borrowed its case system from the Dongxiang language, while Chinese is a morphologically poor language. The most frequently used accusative/dative marker [xa] phonetically has nothing to see with the Dongxing language, nor with other Mongolic languages. The case system is from Mongolic languages but the phonetic form came from Chinese (see Xu 2015). One amazing phenomenon is that Hui people in Tangwang have borrowed some suffixes typically belonging to common Mongolic languages, whereas people who have not converted to Islam have not yet adopted these foreign elements. These borrowed suffixes from Dongxiang have been simplified in Tangwang. Some borrowed Arabic, Persian and Turkic words have entered the Tangwang language through the Dongxiang language. Syntax has been studied in Chapter 5 with a focus on word order. This is a core part of any language. In Tangwang, the word order is predominantly SOV (subject- object-verb), an order which is also found in Altaic and Tibetan languages, while SVO is also accepted in some cases (recall that the word order in Chinese is SVO). Actually the language of the Tangwang’s forefathers might have had SVO order. Traces of VO can be found mainly in VO compound words. This suggests that language change is still in progress. Under lateral pressure from Dongxiang and Chinese, some hybrid structures have started to appear which use grammatical constructions from two languages. This phenomenon is also attested in other locations in the Gansu-Qinghai area. The aspect system indeed came from Chinese but was colored by the Dongxiang language so that an existing aspect particle in Chinese shares syntactic properties with Dongxiang. The last chapter deals with some theoretical issues such as the degree of contact between languages and advantages versus limits of quantification. The degree of admixture will be discussed. Though tentative, this is an experiment towards quantified data comparison in language contact studies. It is confirmed that the Tangwang language is not yet a mixed language as several linguists have proposed. Statistics are drawn over two distinct types of borrowing, one on the lexical level and one on the syntactic level. It will be shown that lexical borrowing does not have the same impact on language admixture as syntactic borrowing does. Six language samples are chosen to be studied. Then these languages are compared with other languages on the phonological, morphological and syntactic levels. Twenty-two languages belonging to the Altaic language family and the Sino-Tibetan family are tested for ninety-six features. The conclusion is unequivocal: the result over three levels (phonological, morphological and syntactic) is similar to syntactic borrowing tests in classifying these languages. It argues that syntactic borrowing triggers language admixture, but not lexical borrowing, even if it is heavy.