Proceedings of the Twenty-eighth Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society, 2002
In Three Tibeto-Burman languages of Vietnam (2004) I outlined the Vietnam locations and situation... more In Three Tibeto-Burman languages of Vietnam (2004) I outlined the Vietnam locations and situations of three Northern Loloish languages-Phu Kha (Phù Lá), Xá Phó, and Lôlô. 1 In this paper I present data and analysis on the remaining TB groups of that country-the Côông, the Sila, the Lahu, and the Hani, all found in Lai Châu Province in the far northwest and all belonging to the Central and Southern sub-groupings of the Loloish language. Like the three Northern Loloish language, all these are found very near the border with China and all-except possibly Sila-are presumed to have ultimately come from the north. However, we are only beginning to understand the obviously complex language history that has led to many linguistic groups living in close proximity and the sequencing of migration and conflict that are woven into the intricate tapestry of M ng Te District. 2 Indeed, until now there has been very little known in general about these four languages aside from basic information about their home territory, numbers, and some cultural features. That is not to say that all these languages have been points of utter darkness. The Lahu and Hani languages of Thailand and China, for example, have been described and analyzed in great depth. The work of Matisoff 1973, 1978 is especially notable for Lahu, and Hansson 1989 and Li and Wang 1981 have published much on Hani. But information about the other two languages-the smaller groups, Côông and Sila-has been brief and incomplete. These places do not allow of a full statement about any of these languages, but I hope, nevertheless, to provide more details about all these languages and how they compare to language forms outside Vietnam, cf. also my website 3 for a tabulation of about 500 items taken from my field study of language of this area. In the following, I will first discuss Côông and Sila and then go on to Lahu and 1 The research reported on here has been sponsored by a 1995 grant NEH RT-21754-95 from the National Endowment for the Humanities and by the grants SBR 9511285 and SBR9729043 from the National Science Foundation to the author and Dr. Kenneth J. Gregerson all entitled "Languages of the Vietnam-China Borderlands". I wish also to acknowledge the assistance of Profs. Nguy n V n L i, Hoàng V n Ma, To V n Thang, who arranged and accompanied me on the field trips that led to the data and analysis here. Many thanks as well are due Pete Unseth, who spent many hours digitizing the data from my original tape recordings, and Tr n Thu n for help with some of the Vietnamese data. Most of all I wish to thanks Graham Thurgood who was able to unlock the system of tonal development in all of these languages. 2 Lai Châu province has the most complex linguistic situation of any place in Vietnam and much of that complexity is due to the number of groups in M ng Te. In addition to the Tibeto-Burman groups, one finds there White Thái farmers and the little studies Mon-Khmer grouping-M ng. 3 http://ling.uta.edu/~jerry/. 2. The Côông. The Côông people of M ng Te District live in five villages: Bo L ch (Can H Commune), N m Khao, N m P c (N m Khao Commune), Tác Ngá (M ng M Commune), and N m Kè (M ng Tong Commune). Their population was given as 1261 in the last official census 1989. The population is estimated to have reached 1560 by the year 2000 PV (1998:21). It is said that their ancestors originally came from China, but our informant, Mr. Lý V n Làng, about 55 years of age in June 1999, had no information about the time or source of this migration. Bradley (1977:68) states that the Côông probably fled China as a consequence of the Moslem uprisings in Yunnan Province during the 19 th century and the first decades of the 20 th century and then were resettled during the wars between the Burmese and Vietnamese into NW Vietnam. The Côông autonym is also a puzzlement. In EMPV (363) it states that the most widely used name is a toponym from one of their villages, Bo L ch, a White Thái designation meaning 'iron mine'. Thus the Côông refer to themselves in their own language as [sam 33 kho 33 (tsha 33 a 31)] 'iron mine people'. The [tsha 33 a 31 ] is used to designate 'people, group, ethnicity', such as [a 31 kha 33 tsha 33 a 31 ] 'Hani' and [za 33 z 33 tsha 33 a 31 ] 'Yao'. At N m Khao and N m P c the autonym [phui 33 a 31 ] is known but little used. It also resembles the name the Côông use for the Lahu [kha 55 ph i 33 ]. A number of people have also suggested the name Côông L Ma, which is said to refer to a place in China where they once lived. Bradley regards Côông to be a language closely related to Phunoi (1977:68, 1979, 1997), "In Vietnam, the Phunoi are called Côông, and speak a slightly different dialect…" Côông was first recorded by LeFèvre-Pontalis 1892, which we have not consulted. We, however, have been able to examine Bradley's word list. 4 In his description of Phunoi Bradley (1979:45-7) notes the existence of minor syllables, as the j in j-ba 33 'elephant', initial voiceless nasals /hm hn h hmj/, a voiceless lateral /hl/, and a voiceless palatal glide /hj/. Phunoi, moreover, has final consonants /-p-t-m-n/ and four tones described as high level, mid level, low level and low rising. The vowel nuclei are /i u e o ai a au/. Of the minor syllables, Bradley says (47) that the word for hand là also appears as a minor syllable [l ] in some compounds. 2.1. Distinctive features of Côông. The Côông of Vietnam has a high level tone (55), a mid-falling tone (31), and a 4 I was also able to listen to data recorded in the 70's in Vientiane, Laos by Jimmy G. Harris. There were about 1000 items in that list. Harris later trained this speaker how to write his language in a romanized script and how to organize a dictionary. 4. Lahu. There are three kinds of Lahu spoken in Vietnam: Yellow Lahu, Black Lahu, and White Lahu We were able to study only the Black Lahu of this area. The total Lahu population in 1989 was 5,319 and estimated by PV to have reached 6,600 by 2000. The Lahu have many names in M ng Te. The Black Lahu group often refer to themselves as Khucong or [khu 33 tsh 33 ]. They look down on their Yellow Lahu neighbors, calling them contemptuously [ne 53 tu 33 ] 'Jungle Spirits'. 6 According to the EMPV (354) the local White Thai majority term all the Lahu in M ng Te Xá Toong L ng, White Thai for 'Spirits of the Yellow Banana Leaves'. Other scornful exonyms are Xá Qu meaning 'Devil Savages'. In addition to these names the Lahu have distinctive monikers for each of their subgroups: (1) La H S or Yellow Lahu (living in the two communes Pa V S and Pa as well as in the villages of Là Pé, Nhu Tè, and Hóm Bô of the Ca L ng Commune, (2) La H Na or Black Lahu (living in the village of N m Phìn, as well as N m Khao, N m C u, Phìn H , N m X of Ca L ng commune), and (3) La H Phung or White Lahu (living often together with the Yellow Lahu in the villages of Xà H , Ma, Pha Bu, Pa and Kh Ma of Pa commune as well as Hà Xe of Ca L ng commune), It is reported that the Lahu originally came from the J npíng area of Yúnnán Province, China. 4.1. Distinctive features of Lahu. Since Lahu has been so exhaustively described in Matisoff 1973 and 1988 and Bradley 1978, I will dispense with sketching is features and simply note that it has the following inventory of initial consonants /p t t k q ph th t h kh qh b d g m n f h v j l/ and vowels /i u e o a /. The seven tones for Vietnam Black Lahu are 33, 35 53, 31 212, 53 and 31. 4.2. Comparative comments. The Lahu of M ng Te speak a language that differs some from the Black Lahu recorded in Matisoff 1988 and the Zàngmi ny y y n hé cíhu 1991 in many respects. These differences seem focused mostly in the lexical domain. One major difference is the variation of velar and uvular stops.
Proceedings of the Twenty-eighth Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society, 2002
In Three Tibeto-Burman languages of Vietnam (2004) I outlined the Vietnam locations and situation... more In Three Tibeto-Burman languages of Vietnam (2004) I outlined the Vietnam locations and situations of three Northern Loloish languages-Phu Kha (Phù Lá), Xá Phó, and Lôlô. 1 In this paper I present data and analysis on the remaining TB groups of that country-the Côông, the Sila, the Lahu, and the Hani, all found in Lai Châu Province in the far northwest and all belonging to the Central and Southern sub-groupings of the Loloish language. Like the three Northern Loloish language, all these are found very near the border with China and all-except possibly Sila-are presumed to have ultimately come from the north. However, we are only beginning to understand the obviously complex language history that has led to many linguistic groups living in close proximity and the sequencing of migration and conflict that are woven into the intricate tapestry of M ng Te District. 2 Indeed, until now there has been very little known in general about these four languages aside from basic information about their home territory, numbers, and some cultural features. That is not to say that all these languages have been points of utter darkness. The Lahu and Hani languages of Thailand and China, for example, have been described and analyzed in great depth. The work of Matisoff 1973, 1978 is especially notable for Lahu, and Hansson 1989 and Li and Wang 1981 have published much on Hani. But information about the other two languages-the smaller groups, Côông and Sila-has been brief and incomplete. These places do not allow of a full statement about any of these languages, but I hope, nevertheless, to provide more details about all these languages and how they compare to language forms outside Vietnam, cf. also my website 3 for a tabulation of about 500 items taken from my field study of language of this area. In the following, I will first discuss Côông and Sila and then go on to Lahu and 1 The research reported on here has been sponsored by a 1995 grant NEH RT-21754-95 from the National Endowment for the Humanities and by the grants SBR 9511285 and SBR9729043 from the National Science Foundation to the author and Dr. Kenneth J. Gregerson all entitled "Languages of the Vietnam-China Borderlands". I wish also to acknowledge the assistance of Profs. Nguy n V n L i, Hoàng V n Ma, To V n Thang, who arranged and accompanied me on the field trips that led to the data and analysis here. Many thanks as well are due Pete Unseth, who spent many hours digitizing the data from my original tape recordings, and Tr n Thu n for help with some of the Vietnamese data. Most of all I wish to thanks Graham Thurgood who was able to unlock the system of tonal development in all of these languages. 2 Lai Châu province has the most complex linguistic situation of any place in Vietnam and much of that complexity is due to the number of groups in M ng Te. In addition to the Tibeto-Burman groups, one finds there White Thái farmers and the little studies Mon-Khmer grouping-M ng. 3 http://ling.uta.edu/~jerry/. 2. The Côông. The Côông people of M ng Te District live in five villages: Bo L ch (Can H Commune), N m Khao, N m P c (N m Khao Commune), Tác Ngá (M ng M Commune), and N m Kè (M ng Tong Commune). Their population was given as 1261 in the last official census 1989. The population is estimated to have reached 1560 by the year 2000 PV (1998:21). It is said that their ancestors originally came from China, but our informant, Mr. Lý V n Làng, about 55 years of age in June 1999, had no information about the time or source of this migration. Bradley (1977:68) states that the Côông probably fled China as a consequence of the Moslem uprisings in Yunnan Province during the 19 th century and the first decades of the 20 th century and then were resettled during the wars between the Burmese and Vietnamese into NW Vietnam. The Côông autonym is also a puzzlement. In EMPV (363) it states that the most widely used name is a toponym from one of their villages, Bo L ch, a White Thái designation meaning 'iron mine'. Thus the Côông refer to themselves in their own language as [sam 33 kho 33 (tsha 33 a 31)] 'iron mine people'. The [tsha 33 a 31 ] is used to designate 'people, group, ethnicity', such as [a 31 kha 33 tsha 33 a 31 ] 'Hani' and [za 33 z 33 tsha 33 a 31 ] 'Yao'. At N m Khao and N m P c the autonym [phui 33 a 31 ] is known but little used. It also resembles the name the Côông use for the Lahu [kha 55 ph i 33 ]. A number of people have also suggested the name Côông L Ma, which is said to refer to a place in China where they once lived. Bradley regards Côông to be a language closely related to Phunoi (1977:68, 1979, 1997), "In Vietnam, the Phunoi are called Côông, and speak a slightly different dialect…" Côông was first recorded by LeFèvre-Pontalis 1892, which we have not consulted. We, however, have been able to examine Bradley's word list. 4 In his description of Phunoi Bradley (1979:45-7) notes the existence of minor syllables, as the j in j-ba 33 'elephant', initial voiceless nasals /hm hn h hmj/, a voiceless lateral /hl/, and a voiceless palatal glide /hj/. Phunoi, moreover, has final consonants /-p-t-m-n/ and four tones described as high level, mid level, low level and low rising. The vowel nuclei are /i u e o ai a au/. Of the minor syllables, Bradley says (47) that the word for hand là also appears as a minor syllable [l ] in some compounds. 2.1. Distinctive features of Côông. The Côông of Vietnam has a high level tone (55), a mid-falling tone (31), and a 4 I was also able to listen to data recorded in the 70's in Vientiane, Laos by Jimmy G. Harris. There were about 1000 items in that list. Harris later trained this speaker how to write his language in a romanized script and how to organize a dictionary. 4. Lahu. There are three kinds of Lahu spoken in Vietnam: Yellow Lahu, Black Lahu, and White Lahu We were able to study only the Black Lahu of this area. The total Lahu population in 1989 was 5,319 and estimated by PV to have reached 6,600 by 2000. The Lahu have many names in M ng Te. The Black Lahu group often refer to themselves as Khucong or [khu 33 tsh 33 ]. They look down on their Yellow Lahu neighbors, calling them contemptuously [ne 53 tu 33 ] 'Jungle Spirits'. 6 According to the EMPV (354) the local White Thai majority term all the Lahu in M ng Te Xá Toong L ng, White Thai for 'Spirits of the Yellow Banana Leaves'. Other scornful exonyms are Xá Qu meaning 'Devil Savages'. In addition to these names the Lahu have distinctive monikers for each of their subgroups: (1) La H S or Yellow Lahu (living in the two communes Pa V S and Pa as well as in the villages of Là Pé, Nhu Tè, and Hóm Bô of the Ca L ng Commune, (2) La H Na or Black Lahu (living in the village of N m Phìn, as well as N m Khao, N m C u, Phìn H , N m X of Ca L ng commune), and (3) La H Phung or White Lahu (living often together with the Yellow Lahu in the villages of Xà H , Ma, Pha Bu, Pa and Kh Ma of Pa commune as well as Hà Xe of Ca L ng commune), It is reported that the Lahu originally came from the J npíng area of Yúnnán Province, China. 4.1. Distinctive features of Lahu. Since Lahu has been so exhaustively described in Matisoff 1973 and 1988 and Bradley 1978, I will dispense with sketching is features and simply note that it has the following inventory of initial consonants /p t t k q ph th t h kh qh b d g m n f h v j l/ and vowels /i u e o a /. The seven tones for Vietnam Black Lahu are 33, 35 53, 31 212, 53 and 31. 4.2. Comparative comments. The Lahu of M ng Te speak a language that differs some from the Black Lahu recorded in Matisoff 1988 and the Zàngmi ny y y n hé cíhu 1991 in many respects. These differences seem focused mostly in the lexical domain. One major difference is the variation of velar and uvular stops.
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