Nam is an unclassified extinct language preserved in
Tibetan transcriptions in a number of
Dunhuang manuscript
Dunhuang manuscripts refer to a wide variety of religious and secular documents (mostly manuscripts, but also including some woodblock-printed texts) in Chinese and other languages that were discovered at the Mogao Caves of Dunhuang, China, durin ...
fragments. The manuscript fragments are held at the
British Library
The British Library is the national library of the United Kingdom and is one of the largest libraries in the world. It is estimated to contain between 170 and 200 million items from many countries. As a legal deposit library, the British ...
and the
Bibliothèque nationale de France
The Bibliothèque nationale de France (, 'National Library of France'; BnF) is the national library of France, located in Paris on two main sites known respectively as ''Richelieu'' and ''François-Mitterrand''. It is the national repository ...
.
Classification
According to Ikeda Takumi, the research of
F. W. Thomas
Frederick William Thomas (21 March 1867 – 6 May 1956), usually cited as F. W. Thomas, was an English Indologist and Tibetologist.
Life
Thomas was born on 21 March 1867 in Tamworth, Staffordshire. After schooling at King Edward's School, Bir ...
, published in 1948, concluded that Nam "was one of the old ''
Qiang anguages' spoken around the Nam mountain range near
Koko nor in
Qinghai province
Qinghai (; alternately romanized as Tsinghai, Ch'inghai), also known as Kokonor, is a landlocked province in the northwest of the People's Republic of China. It is the fourth largest province of China by area and has the third smallest pop ...
", associated with a country called ''Nam tig'' which is mentioned in some historical records. However, Ikeda further states that Thomas' conclusions were widely criticized.
''
Glottolog
''Glottolog'' is a bibliographic database of the world's lesser-known languages, developed and maintained first at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany (between 2015 and 2020 at the Max Planck Institute for ...
'' accepts that it was at least
Sino-Tibetan
Sino-Tibetan, also cited as Trans-Himalayan in a few sources, is a family of more than 400 languages, second only to Indo-European in number of native speakers. The vast majority of these are the 1.3 billion native speakers of Chinese languages. ...
.
Lexicon
Wen (1981: 18–19) lists the following basic vocabulary items, which have been taken from Thomas (1948: 399–451).
References
Further reading
*
Chén Zōngxiáng 陳宗祥 (1994). 〈敦煌古藏文拼冩的“南語”手卷的名稱問題〉Dūnhuáng Gǔzàngwén pīnxiěde 'Nányǔ' shǒujuànde míngchēng wèntí
he identity of the Dūnhuáng 'Nam language' scroll transcribed in Old Tibetan《四川藏學研究》Sìchuān Zàngxué yánjiū 2. 中國藏學出版社 Zhōngguó Zàngxué chūbǎnshè, 164–180頁．（筆名爲寶羊與王建民合冩）
* Chén Zōngxiáng 陳宗祥 (1997). 〈敦煌古藏文拼冩的“南語”手卷的有關地名考釋〉Dūnhuáng Gǔzàngwén pīnxiěde 'Nányǔ' shǒujuànde yǒuguān dìmíng kǎoshì
xplanation of the places names in the Dūnhuáng 'Nam language' scroll transcribed in Old Tibetan《四川藏學研究》Sìchuān Zàngxué yánjiū 4．四川民族出版社 Sìchuān mínzú chūbǎnshè. 684–698．
*
*
Lalou, Marcelle (1939). “Sur la langue « nam ».” ''Journal Asiatique'' 231: 453.
*
*
* Thomas, Frederick William (1948).
Nam, an ancient language of the Sino-Tibetan borderland'' London: Oxford University Press.
*
*
Wén Yòu 聞宥 (1981)
〈論所謂南語〉Lùn suǒwèi Nányǔ (On the 'Nam' language)《民族語文》 Mínzú yǔwén 1: 16–25.
Languages attested from the 1st millennium
Unclassified Sino-Tibetan languages
Unclassified languages of Asia
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