A Grammar of Qiang: With Annotated Texts and Glossary (Mouton Grammar Library)
Randy J. Lapolla,Chenglong Huang | 1900-01-01 00:00:00 | de Gruyter Mouton | 445 | Education
This book is a full reference grammar of Qiang, one of the minority languages of southwest China, spoken by about 70,000 Qiang and Tibetan people in Aba Tibetan and Qiang Autonomous Prefecture in northern Sichuan Province. It belongs to the Qiangic branch of Tibeto-Burman (one of the two major branches of Sino-Tibetan). The dialect presented in the book is the Northern Qiang variety spoken in Ronghong Village, Yadu Township, Chibusu District, Mao County. This book, the first book-length description of the Qiang language in English, is the result of many years of work on the language, and is as typologically comprehensive as possible. It includes not only the reference grammar, but also an ethnological overview, several fully analyzed texts (mostly traditional stories), and an annotated glossary.
The language is verb final, agglutinative (prefixing and suffixing), and has both head-marking and dependent marking morphology. The phonology of Qiang is quite complex, with 39 consonants at seven points of articulation, plus complex consonant clusters, both in initial and final position, as well as vowel harmony, vowel length distinctions, and a set of retroflexed vowels. The grammar also is complex, with a paradigm of eight direction marking verbal prefixes, and two paradigms for person marking, one for actor, one for non-actor, and a variety of other verbal prefixes and suffixes, as well as definite and number marking on nouns. Noun phrases take classifiers and relational pospositions as well.
Reviews
Dr. Lapolla and Chenglong Huang have done every linguist, anthropologist and historian that is interested in the so-called "Qiangic" branch of the Tibeto-Burman family a huge favor through this unpresedented work. In a very thorough manner these first-class linguists give you a flavor for the Qiang variety spoken in Ronghong. Apart from being a excellently detailed grammar for the Sino-Tibetan linguistics specialist, LAPOLLA and HUANG also briefly discuss the Qiang's location, culture, architecture, food, clothing, kinship relations, religion, mobility, and livelihood for the Asian studies or history generalist. It is pointed out again that these people are difficult to label, partly due to the political agenda of the Chinese. "Qiang" is the ethnonym that the Chinese have given them, not they themselves originally chose. "The majority of Qiang speakers, roughly eighty thousand people, are members of the Qiang ethnicity, and the rest, approximately fifty thousand people, are a subgroup of the Tibetan ethnicity. These ethnic designations are what they call themselves in Chinese. In Qiang they all call themselves /rme/ or a dialect variant of this word. Not all members of the Qiang ethnicity speak Qiang, and as just mentioned, not all of those who speak Qiang are considered members of the Qiang ethnicity" (pg. 20).
The "Text" section also includes some entertaining folk stories by the Qiang (such as "The Story of the Lazy Man" and "The Creation of the World") that include a Qiang/English interlinear version and an English free translation. "The Story of the Lazy Man" includes a humorous section about an (Qiangic?) emperor who loses his expensive parrot but finds it while using the toilet in the Han Chinese area! These are wonderful stories for Qiangic studies (maybe even for Sino-Qiangic relations?) and for the general world of the folklore student/scholar.
However, obviously not all the answers are here for the "Qiangic question." Of course one grammar that is produced on the basis of one village cannot suffice for the diversity that is found among not only the other Qiangic languages, but the great variety within Qiang itself. Extensive research is still needed to understand this facinating sub-field within Tibeto-Burman linguistics. But it is a step in the right direction, and a monumental one at that.
If you are interested in things Qiangic, or any of the world's endangered ethnolinguistic peoples for that matter, this is a must for you.
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