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A GRAMMAR OF MANGGHUER Mangghuer is a Mongolic language spoken by approximately 35,000 people in China’s northwestern Qinghai Province. No grammar of Mangghuer has ever been published in any language. This book is a systematic, typologically-oriented gram- matical description, based primarily on narrative text data. Historical discussions emphasize the extensive effects of language contact on Mangghuer, which has been heavily influenced by neighboring Chinese and Tibetan languages. The book’s primary importance is as a typologically-oriented grammatical descrip- tion of a little-known language. It also makes a significant contribution to compar- ative Mongolic studies and to the characterization of language contact processes in the Qinghai-Gansu Sprachbund. Keith W. Slater is a member of SIL International’s East Asia Group. He holds a PhD in Linguistics from the University of California, Santa Barbara. ROUTLEDGECURZON ASIAN LINGUISTICS SERIES Editor-in-Chief: Walter Bisang, Mainz University Associate Editors: R.V. Dhongde, Deccan College, Pune and Masayoshi Shibatani, Kobe University Asia is the world’s largest continent, comprising an enormous wealth of languages, both in its present as well as in its eventful past. The series contributes to the under- standing of this linguistic variety by publishing books from different theoretical back- grounds and different methodological approaches, dealing with at least one Asian language. By adopting a maximally integrative policy, the editors of the series hope to promote theoretical discussions whose solutions may, in turn, help to overcome the theoretical lean toward West European languages and thus provide a deeper understanding of Asian linguistic structures and of human language in general. VIETNAMESE–ENGLISH BILINGUALISM Patterns of code-switching Ho-Dac Tuc LINGUISTIC EPIDEMIOLOGY Semantics and grammar of language contact in mainland Southeast Asia Nick J. Enfield A GRAMMAR OF MANGGHUER A Mongolic language of China’s Qinghai-Gansu Sprachbund Keith W. Slater A GRAMMAR OF MANGGHUER A Mongolic language of China’s Qinghai-Gansu Sprachbund Keith W. Slater First published 2003 by RoutledgeCurzon 11 New Fetter Lane, London EC4P 4EE Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada by RoutledgeCurzon 29 West 35th Street, New York, NY 10001 © 2003 Keith W. Slater All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. The publisher makes no representation, express or implied, with regard to the accuracy of the information contained in this book and cannot accept any legal responsibility or liability for any errors or omissions that may be made. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress ISBN 0–7007–1471–5 This edition published in the Taylor or: Ungrammatical form $ Syllable boundary ( ) Optional element or: (in gloss) Meaning inferred from context [ ] Phonetic transcription xviii ABBREVIATIONS AND SYMBOLS 1 1 BACKGROUND This book is a descriptive study of the Mangghuer language. Referred to in previous linguistic literature as the Minhe County dialect of the Monguor, Tu, or Tuzu language, Mangghuer is spoken primarily in Qinghai Province, in northwest China. The study is primarily synchronic, detailing aspects of the Mangghuer phonolog- ical, morphological and syntactic systems, with much attention given to the patterns of natural discourse. However, I have also tried to set the synchronic structures of Mangghuer against the backdrop of history, examining the relationship between Mangghuer and related Mongolic languages, as well as the profound influences ofnon- Mongolic languages, which have led to some dramatic shifts from Mongolic features to those of other language families. These effects of language contact will constitute a secondary thrust of the description and analysis, and will be explicitly examined in Chapter 8, where I consider the relationship of Mangghuer to other Mongoliclanguages. The book is a substantially revised version of my 1998 University of California, Santa Barbara doctoral dissertation, Minhe Mangghuer: A Mixed Language of the Inner Asian Frontier. Since the former version has not been widely circulated, I will not elaborate here on the nature of the revisions, except to point out that I now see Mangghuer not as a mixed language, but as a clear member of the Mongolic language family, albeit one which has undergone extensive contact-induced change, as the current title suggests. The reasons for this conclusion should be apparent throughout the book’s historical sections, and particularly in the discussion of the final chapter. To begin the book, this initial chapter serves to describe some of the background factors which have shaped the Mangghuer language and my description of it. Before launching into a description of the structures of Mangghuer, and an account of their historical development, I want to begin by describing the scholarly context into which this account falls, as well as the linguistic and sociocultural context in which Mangghuer speakers have developed their language. Section 1.1 presents background of a linguistic nature, including an introduction to the structural features of Mangghuer and some discussion of the history of scholarly work on Mangghuer and closely related languages, as well as some introduction to the Qinghai-Gansu Sprachbund, in which Mangghuer is one of several participating languages. Section 1.2 outlines sociocultural and geographical factors relevant to the development of the Mangghuer language. Finally, section 1.3 gives some brief orientation to the goals, philosophy and methods of this study, as well as a descrip- tion of the sources of data which I have used. 2 1.1 LINGUISTIC OVERVIEW 1.1.1 Typological summary Morphosyntactically, Mangghuer shares most of the typical characteristics of Mongolic languages. It is an agglutinative, exclusively suffixing language with SOV basic word order. Mangghuer exhibits generally head-final morphosyntactic behavior: objects always precede the verb; most nominal modifiers, including relative clauses, precede their head noun; and the language has postpositions. Phonologically, though, Mangghuer most strongly resembles Sinitic. It has simple syllable structure, with a very restricted set of coda consonants and few onset clusters, and its inventory of phonemes and syllable types almost exactly mirrors that of nearby Chinese dialects. However, Mangghuer has a stress system, rather than the tone system typical of Sinitic. An informal frequency count found 15 percent of the lexical items in a narrative text to be Sinitic borrowings, with the vast majority of the remainder being of Mongolic extraction. In a wordlist, however, the percentage of Sinitic loans rises considerably, perhaps to over 50 percent; once again, the remainder are overwhelmingly Mongolic. 1.1.2 Genetic classification Mangghuer has always been considered to fall within the Mongolic language family. While one focus of this book is to demonstrate that a genetic classification ofMangghuer must acknowledge and exclude many non-inherited features, it is nonetheless fairly clear that many features of the language have indeed been inherited in direct fashion from Mongolic. A recent statement on Mongolic family relatedness is that of Binnick (1987). Binnick notes two conflicting models of genetic affiliation within earlier Mongolic studies: one promoted by Poppe (1955, 1965) and Doerfer (1964); and another developed by scholars in the former Soviet Union. The differences between these two models need not concern us here (but see Chapter 8). One thing that they share, however, is the inclusion of Monguor as one language of the Mongolic family. The same may be said of linguists working in China, where the term Tuzuyu (.nullnonmarkingreturn ) is used with approximately the same range of meaning as Monguor has in the West. Chinese linguists referring to the language of the Tuzu usually note that this language has two major dialects, spoken in geographically distinct locations. For instance, Zhaonasitu (1981:2, my translation) says: There are significant differences within the Tuzu language, but it is divided into two dialect regions. The Tuzu speech of Huzhu, Ledu and Tianzhu belongs to one dialect, and the Tuzu speech of Minhe belongs to a different dialect. We differentiate by calling them the Huzhu dialect and the Minhe dialect. There are many differences between the two dialects; most of these differences appear in the phonology, and secondarily also in lexicon and grammar. 1.1 LINGUISTIC OVERVIEW 3 It turns out that these “differences” are quite fundamental, and that native speakers of the two Monguor varieties actually report being unable to communicate with each other (without resorting to, for example, Chinese). I will point out many formal differences between these two linguistic systems in this book; the reader is also referred to Slater (forthcoming) and Georg (forthcoming); a comparison of these two articles will reveal some of the more obvious systematic differences. Why, then, have the two “dialects” of Monguor been considered a single language? Without doubt, the two linguistic systems share a great number of features, and I will conclude in Chapter 8 that these two Mongolic varieties constitute a valid genetic subgroup within the family. However, it appears that the major reasons for the as- sumption that these two varieties constitute a single language are sociocultural, rather than linguistic. In fact, I have never seen a linguistically-based argument for their unity as a single language. Rather, it appears that previous analysts have followed the lead of the political and social groupings generally recognized in eastern Qinghai, where the Monguor (Tuzu) of Minhe County and those of Huzhu County are con- sidered members of a single ethnic group, and where the two communities have apparently been subsumed under identical political classifications since (at least) the beginning of the Ming Dynasty (see the historical discussion below, from section 1.2.1 onwards). This is understandable, since until now there has been very little published description of Minhe Monguor, and comparison was therefore impossible. The only previously published claim (of which I am aware) that the Minhe and Huzhu varieties of Monguor in fact constitute separate languages is Sinor (1952:373), where “Monguor” and “San-ch’uan” (.nullnonmarkingreturn ‘three rivers’ or ‘three plains,’ ageographic feature and place name of southern Minhe County) are listed as two separate lan- guages; the author, however, does not explain how this conclusion was reached. As I have already noted, the linguistic evidence supports the claim that Huzhu Monguor and Minhe Monguor are in fact distinct languages. In this book, I will refer to the two “Monguor” varieties by the local pronunciations of the names these groups use for themselves. The name Mangghuer will be used to refer to what has previously been called Minhe Monguor, while the Huzhu Monguor variety will be referred to as Mongghul. Further discussion of these names is given in 1.2.1, below. Both Mangghuer and Mongghul belong fairly clearly to the Mongolic language family, as previous authors have claimed. In Chapter 8, we will make some initial exploration of the issue of the genetic subgroupings into which these two Mongolic languages fall. The book has two separate indexes: an index of Mangghuer forms discussed in the book; and an index of subjects. 1.1.3 Previous linguistic studies 1.1.3.1 Mangghuer Aside from this book, the only work to date which attempts to provide a substantial characterization of Mangghuer linguistic structures is Slater (forthcoming). The most ambitious previous investigation into Mangghuer grammar was that of Qinggeertai (1991b); this work is actually a grammar of the Mongghul language, but the author 1.1.3 PREVIOUS LINGUISTIC STUDIES 4 frequently closes discussion of a particular linguistic feature by presenting a few Mangghuer equivalents for the Mongghul examples he has given. Similarly, a brief phonological and morphological comparison is given by Zhaonasitu and Li (1982). Zhaonasitu (1981:86–92) also alludes to a few of the differences between the two varieties, but this treatment is extremely brief. Additionally, Zhu, Üjiyediin and Stuart (1999) examine a few morphological features of Mangghuer. Another work of relevance is Zhu, Üjiyediin and Stuart (1995), which presents a Mangghuer folktale, translated and parsed to the morpheme level. This work provides some helpful insights, but the brevity of the text presented results in the appearance of only a fairly narrow range of syntactic phenomena. Another, somewhat more detailed analysis of Mangghuer syntax and morphology, is presented in Zhu et al. (1997). Here, as with Qinggeertai (1991b), the discussion is arranged around the structures of another language, to which Mangghuer is simply compared. Nonetheless, the analysis of Mangghuer presented in this paper is couched in terms which are more familiar to linguists working outside of China, and it thus represents a more accessible introduction to the language than does most previous work. 1 These few works represent the whole of the linguistic analysis that has been pub- lished for Mangghuer, as far as I am aware. Clearly, much work remains to be done in adequately characterizing this language. In addition to these examples of linguistic analysis, there have recently appeared several works which include Mangghuer texts. Most important among these is Dpal- ldan-bkra-shis et al. (1996), which includes a large corpus of Mangghuer sentences, mostly translated from English, with Mongghul and English equivalents. Wang, Zhu and Stuart (1995), Wang and Stuart (1995), and Zhu and Stuart (1996) give the texts of several Mangghuer songs. Zhu, Üjiyediin and Stuart (1995), mentioned above, gives the text of a folktale, with English glossing. A large collection of Mangghuer folklore texts will appear, with English transla- tions and morpheme-by-morpheme glossing, in Z. Chen et al. (forthcoming); it isfrom this body of folktale materials that most of the examples used in this book will be drawn. Finally, Wang (forthcoming) will be the first published dictionary of Mangghuer. 1.1.3.2 Other Qinghai-Gansu Mongolic languages A brief summary of publications concerning other Mongolic languages of the Qinghai- Gansu region is in order here. I will not summarize work on all Mongolic languages, but only on those which are also spoken in the Qinghai