Sociohistorical Linguistics in Southeast Asia

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 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.

Sociohistorical Linguistics in Southeast Asia: New Horizons for Tibeto-Burman Research in Honor of David Bradley, 2017

Working at the forefront of Tibeto-Burman linguistics, Professor David Bradley’s exceptional expertise lies in his ability to blend comparative diachronic research with distinctions drawn from the sociology, anthropology, geography and descriptive-typology of language to open up new insights into hundreds of linguistic varieties and language relationships throughout the Southeast Asian macroregion. It is with great pleasure that we present this collection of original papers to celebrate his achievements and contributions, both to the science of language and to scholarship on Tibeto-Burman languages, over the past 40 years. In addition to positions of distinction held within his own university over the years, Professor Bradley is UNESCO team leader for research on language endangerment in East and Southeast Asia, Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences in Australia, Fellow of the Australian Academy of Humanities, and current President of the Comité International Permanent des Linguistes (CIPL). In what follows, we provide a brief background sketch of David’s life and work, highlighting his academic achievements and relating the contents of the chapters that follow to his research themes.

Proceedings of the Twenty-Eighth Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society, 2002

... Special Session On Tibeto-Burman And Southeast Asian Linguistics. Patrick Chew (ed.). PDF.

1996

The basic goal of the STEDT project is to collect and evaluate as much lexical and etymological data as possible on the hundreds of Tibeto-Burman languages, the only proven relatives of Chinese. In order to make this vast task feasible -and more interesting -we are proceeding according to semantic field, trying to reconstruct the roots of the proto-lexicon in semantic groups. Ultimately we hope to end up with something approaching a thesaurus of Proto-Sino-Tibetan. The first volume of STEDT, Body-part Nomenclature, is well under way, and will come to some 1500 pages in hard copy. Now that our methodological problems have largely been solved, and our database software has been customized and made more sophisticated, future volumes should appear at an accelerated pace, and are being planned for such semantic areas as animal names, natural objects, kinship terms, numerals, psychological verbs, verbs of manipulation, etc. In addition to this primary etymological effort, the STEDT staff is producing a series of monographs intended to serve as useful reference tools for the field of Sino-Tibetan linguistics as a whole. The first monograph, an extensively indexed bibliography of papers delivered at the annual Sino-Tibetan Conferences, was published in a limited way in 1989 as the Bibliography of the International Conferences on Sino-Tibetan Languages and Linguistics I-XXI (LaPolla and Lowe 1989). Dr. John B. Lowe substantially revised and updated the work and a second "Silver Jubilee" edition, current to the 25th conference, was published in 1994 as Bibliography of the International Conferences on Sino-Tibetan Languages and Linguistics I-XXV (LaPolla and Lowe 1994). The present work is an update of "Languages and Dialects of Tibeto-Burman, an alphabetic/genetic listing, with some prefatory remarks on ethnonymic and glossonymic complications" in John McCoy and Timothy Light's Contributions to Sino-Tibetan Studies (Leiden: Brill, 1986). A third monograph, Phonological Inventories of Tibeto-Burman Languages, is forthcoming. In the development of this monograph, the first wave of revisions, improvements and complications was carried out by Stephen P. Baron. Laurel Sutton and John B. Lowe also made substantial revisions. Most of the work involved in producing the present version was accomplished by Dr. Lowe during 1993-95, in windows of opportunity sandwiched among his multifarious commitments as student, programmer, and consultant. He received assistance at one time or another from Leela Bilmes, Jonathan Evans, Zev Handel and Matthew Juge. With all these additions and corrections, the language list has become an extraordinarily large and complex document. There surely remain omissions, imperfections and inconsistencies. It is our hope that colleagues will offer their criticisms and corrections so that we may continue to improve the list. We intend to publish a revised edition every few years, and will eventually make the data available for purchase on Macintosh disks and over the World Wide Web.

Approaches to Language and Culture

In the early decades of the twentieth century, Franz Boas argued for the central importance of language to an understanding of culture. Specifically, Boas noted that certain aspects of linguistic structure, such as grammatical categories, rarely become objects of conscious reflection. Because of this, he proposed, these aspects of language provide a window onto primary ethnological phenomena (or "fundamental ethnic ideas"; see Stocking 1966, Silverstein 1979). In contrast, aspects of custom and tradition more available to conscious reflection are subject to secondary explanation and reanalysis, and get caught up in higher-order subjective schemes of social evaluation (as, e.g., "high", "popular", "traditional", "noble" and so on, see Sapir 1924). In recent years, linguistic anthropologists have focused on differences in the degree to which cultural phenomena are available to conscious awareness, finding here not a reason to privilege some kinds of data over others but rather a central mechanism of cultural dynamism. In what follows, we explore these issues at the heart of the language/culture relationship and some of the associated complexities of current semiotic theory through a consideration of the language-culture nexus in two settings in mainland Southeast Asia: historical developments in twentieth century Vietnam and contemporary life in rural communities of lowland Laos. We evaluate the implications of these case studies for directions in linguistic anthropology broadly, as well as for research on language and culture in mainland Southeast Asia. https://www.degruyter.com/document/doi/10.1515/9783110726626/html

Lingua, 112 (2): 79-102., 2002

Tibeto-Burman is one of the world's greatest language families, second only to lndo-European in terms of populations of speakers. Advances made in the course of the decade have led to a major paradigm shift in Tibeto-Burman historical linguistics and phylogeny. The numerous contributions to the field in the 1990s are reviewed in a statement on the current state of the art.

1998

The Languages and Linguistics of Mainland Southeast Asia , 2021

The Mainland Southeast Asia Linguistic Area, 2019

Thomason and Kaufman’s 1988 book Language contact, creolization, and genetic linguistics had a stimulating effect on the fields of comparative and descriptive linguistics and inspired a number of studies on various topics related to language contact: the relationship between typology and language contact; the effect of language contact on a language’s genetically inherited characteristics, and work on mixed and endangered languages. More generally speaking, the increased availability of data relating to language contact has enabled widerranging discussion on the nature of language contact and its consequences (see Hickey 2010 for a more detailed account of these subjects). Within this landscape, our book lies at the crossroads of the following themes: (1) vulnerable and endangered languages, since some of the languages described here are minority languages losing ground under the linguistic influence of dominant neighbouring languages (see chapters on Cham, Wa); (2) areal typology, ...