Japhug is a
Gyalrong
Gyalrong people (Tibetan: རྒྱལ་རོང, Chinese:嘉绒), also called Jiarong, rGyalrong, are speakers of the Qiangic Gyalrong language who live in the southern part of Ngawa Tibetan and Qiang Autonomous Prefecture of Sichuan, China. Th ...
language spoken in
Barkam County
Barkam or Markang or Muerkvua is a county-level city in Ngawa Tibetan and Qiang Autonomous Prefecture, in the northwest of Sichuan province, People's Republic of China. The city seat is the town of Barkam.
Administrative divisions
Barkam has fo ...
,
Rngaba,
Sichuan,
China
China, officially the People's Republic of China (PRC), is a country in East Asia. It is the world's most populous country, with a population exceeding 1.4 billion, slightly ahead of India. China spans the equivalent of five time zones and ...
, in the three
townships of Gdong-brgyad (, Japhug ), Gsar-rdzong (, Japhug ) and Da-tshang (, Japhug ).
The
endonym
An endonym (from Greek: , 'inner' + , 'name'; also known as autonym) is a common, ''native'' name for a geographical place, group of people, individual person, language or dialect, meaning that it is used inside that particular place, group, ...
of the Japhug language is . The name Japhug (;
Tibetan
Tibetan may mean:
* of, from, or related to Tibet
* Tibetan people, an ethnic group
* Tibetan language:
** Classical Tibetan, the classical language used also as a contemporary written standard
** Standard Tibetan, the most widely used spoken dial ...
: ''ja phug''; ) refers in Japhug to the area comprising Gsar-rdzong and Da-tshang, while that of Gdong-brgyad is also known as (Jacques 2004), but speakers of Situ Gyalrong use this name to refer to the whole Japhug-speaking area.
Phonology
Japhug is the only toneless Gyalrong language. It has 49 consonants and seven vowels.
Consonants
The phoneme /w/ has the allophones
²and
The phoneme is realized as an
epiglottal fricative in the coda or preceding another consonant.
The
prenasalized consonants are analyzed as units for two reasons. First, there is a phoneme /ɴɢ/, as in /ɴɢoɕna/ "large spider", but neither /ɴ/ nor /ɢ/ exist as independent phonemes. Second, there are clusters of fricatives and prenasalized voiced stops, as in /ʑmbri/ "
willow", but never clusters of fricatives and prenasalized voiceless stops.
Japhug distinguishes between palatal plosives and velar plosive + j sequences, as in /co/ "valley" vs. /kjo/ "drag". These both contrast with alveolo-palatal affricates.
There are at least 339 consonant clusters in Japhug (Jacques 2008:29), more than in
Old Tibetan or in most
Indo-European languages. Some of these clusters are typologically unusual: in addition to the previously mentioned clusters of fricatives and prenasalized stops, there are clusters where the first element is a semivowel, as in /jla/ "
hybrid of a yak and a cow".
Vowels
Japhug has eight vowel phonemes: , , , , , , and . The vowel is attested in only one native word ( "fish") and its derivatives, but appears in Chinese loanwords.
Grammar
Jacques (2008) is a short grammar and Jacques and Chen (2010) a text collection with interlinear glosses. Other studies on morphosyntax include Jacques (2010) on
direct–inverse marking, Jacques (2012a) on valency (
passive,
antipassive
The antipassive voice (abbreviated or ) is a type of grammatical voice that either does not include the object or includes the object in an oblique case. This construction is similar to the passive voice, in that it decreases the verb's valency ...
,
anticausative,
lability etc.), Jacques (2012b) on
incorporation
Incorporation may refer to:
* Incorporation (business), the creation of a corporation
* Incorporation of a place, creation of municipal corporation such as a city or county
* Incorporation (academic), awarding a degree based on the student having ...
and Jacques (2013) on
associated motion
Associated motion is a grammatical category whose main function is to associate a motion component to the event expressed by the verbal root.
This category is attested in Pama–Nyungan languages, where it was first discovered (Koch 1984, Wilkin ...
.
References
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{{Languages of China
Qiangic languages
Languages of Sichuan
Non-tonal languages in tonal families