 All right. Welcome, everyone. My name is Nate Sims. I'm very happy to be here to give this presentation introduction to the Irma or Chiang language. So, kind of a roadmap of what I'd like to cover in this presentation is to give a introduction to the speakers of this language. This is a discussion of the sociolinguistic situation for the people who speak it, and then the rest of the time to talk a little bit about the structure of the language itself. So we'll discuss a bit of the phonology, the sound system of the language, covering briefly the consonants, the vowels, what is the nature of the syllable in the language and also the role of tone in the language. And after that, to talk a little bit about the larger structures, some of the more interesting structures of the language are the verbs and the verbal morphology. So we'll talk a bit about the spatial prefixes, a little bit about this idea of associated motion, and to give you not a full account of the verbs but just an appreciation for this kind of intricate and complicated part of the language. That's what I wanted to say about the nouns, and so we'll talk a bit about the verbs. Okay, so Irma, the Irma language is also called Chiang, I'll talk about that here in a minute, but it's part of the trans Himalayan language family, meaning that it is related to Chinese to Tibetan, and also to Burmese. Those are probably the major languages that maybe some of you all are familiar with. Within that family tree is probably closest related to Burmese. I think it's not definitive yet. There's still some work being done in the history of the language, but probably fair to say that of those three major languages is closest related to Burmese. So it's spoken within what is now Sichuan province and the People's Republic of China, principally along the Min River. So we see this arrow here on the screen. Let's see if I can do this. Yeah, yeah, so up along the Min River in between, kind of wedged in between the Sichuan basin and the Tibetan Plateau. So I'll talk a little bit more about the situation for the language. There are probably about 100,000 speakers of the language it's hard to gauge exactly but I think that's a fair estimate. So it's a, you know, relatively large number of speakers. And there's some issues we're discussing about who the people are that speak this language. So there's a Chinese term, Qiang, spelled Q-I-A-N-G, with this character here to the left. And this is a very old term. So even in some of the earliest Chinese writings, this ethnonym occurs, and it probably meant anyone to the west of Chinese territorial control at that time. So another term is the Western Qiang. And this term is very old. It probably was more broadly used for different peoples in the western regions. And with the founding of the People's Republic of China, there came to be a classification of all the peoples within China, and it was fixed at 56 different ethnicities. And so Qiang is one of these 56 different ethnicities. Ermah is the term that Qiang people call themselves, or a variant of this word. Sometimes it's ma, sometimes mer, sometimes ermah or zhme. There are many different dialectal variants, but ermah is kind of used to encompass all of these different terms that people call themselves. Traditionally, they were agriculturalists who lived in these kind of deep valleys along the Min River, so they're not pastoralists, although some people kept yaks and goats and still do today, but mostly subsistence agriculturalists. And there's a kind of split within the people who speak the ermah language between those that are classified by the Chinese government as Qiang and those that are classified by the Chinese government as Tibetan. And this is primarily has to do with religion. So the people who follow Tibetan Buddhism, closer to the Tibetan plateau in the northwest have been designated Tibetans. And the people who are non-Buddhists or animists or shamanists in the southeast are the Qiang nationality. So it's something of a kind of India-Pakistan situation for this split. So, you know, people have different ideas. Some people who are Tibetan ethnicity, they recognize that we speak the same language as the Qiang people next door to us. And some people say actually, no, that's a separate language. So there's it's a very kind of contentious issue that you can find varying opinions on all sides of this, but primarily a split between about half of the speakers who are considered Tibetan, half of them are considered Qiang. In any case, there's the language is endangered because of increasing influence of mainly Mandarin. So there's extensive bilingualism with Mandarin. I have not really I've been, you know, going to this area for some time and been involved with Qiang language and ermah language documentation since about 2006 and most everyone I've met speaks some level of Chinese. So Chinese is really gaining in popularity and Qiang or ermah is on the decline generally. There's some writings for people who are interested by an anthropologist named Wang Mingke, who was written about the history of this kind of contentious designation of people as either Tibetan or Qiang ethnicity. So here on the map on the screen we see Sichuan province outlined and then in the yellow region, this is the Aba prefecture of Sichuan province in the northwest. The red area here is Mao County. That's where the majority of Qiang ethnicity or mass speakers live. It's kind of the most condensed place where people live that speak Qiang. So today we'll be talking about one dialect within Mao County, which is the Yonghe Township dialect. So I have kind of the structure of Yonghe Township within Mao County within the prefecture in Sichuan province here at the bottom. This is kind of just to give an idea of what is around this area. It's a very nice graphic from Gongxun, a person who's worked on the Jiarongic languages in Sichuan. And so you see Qiang here towards the southeast, neighboring the Jiarong languages and also Amdo Tibetan to the north and then Chinese to the south. So this graph is also nice because it illustrates that there's been a lot of work done on the neighboring languages in terms of their internal structure and subgrouping, but not so much on Qiang. So there's really not as much that we can say for certain about the dialect situation, but here's a rough introduction to the dialects of Erma. So we have in this red circle, what is typically typically called Northern Erma. And within this circle, the dialects are pretty homogenous people can understand each other. If they're well intentioned within this area generally maybe at the borders, the stream extreme edges maybe not so much, but it's thought to be kind of a later expansion. Historically because it's more internally homogenous. You see the blue circles or what is called Southern Erma, and they're less internally homogenous so people from these different areas within the blue circles may or may not be able to communicate effectively with each other in Erma. And most of the time they would use Chinese as a language to communicate with each other. This yellow line here shows the division between where people to the Northwest are considered Tibetan, and to the southeast of that yellow line considered Qiang. And so we see that the ethnic boundary is is one that corresponds with the county line, but not necessarily with the dialectal division. So today we'll be talking about the Yonghe dialect, which is the dialect I've done. The most research on and have been friends with speakers of this dialect for some time now. It's the eastern most dialect of Erma so it's interesting in that respect, and hasn't really been studied as much as some of the the West Northwestern dialects. So this is just a picture of my friend's grandmother whose family has taught me about Chiang I went to Chinese public school and in middle school became friends with my friend whose family spoke Yonghe Chiang or Yonghe Erma. And this is the traditional attire for women in this area. It's unique to this valley so we might imagine in another political context that it would be considered maybe it's its own language, or that the these people would be considered a separate ethnicity. You know they only really identify with other people from the valley, and not so much with the other or my speaking people so it's a it's a unique kind of subculture within Mal county is this Yonghe Valley. To give an idea just about a little bit more about the socio linguistic situation I have this map here with the help of Google. So the red dots here represents villages within the Yonghe Valley, where Erma is no longer spoken by either old people or young people just people speak Chinese exclusively. The yellow or orange circles here represent villages where Erma is still spoken, but not by children so only in these kind of far north of more remote villages represented with the orange triangles. Do you see places where Erma is still spoken by children is still being acquired and been used more in daily life so you see this is kind of a microcosm for the whole area. In that Chiang or Erma language uses on the decline and being replaced with Chinese. It's also the case that the more remote villages are more economically challenged. And so there's a negative connotation or a stereotype sometimes with people who speak. Erma as being, you know, let the having less access to education and being backwards in some way so that's it also contributes to the decline of the language in that situation is rather unfortunate but that's that's the case for the Yonghe Valley in any ways. All right. Let's talk about the structure of this particular dialect all I'm going to say is, you know, restricted to just this one dialect, although there's some similarities with others. So we'll start with looking at the consonants for this dialect to see their large number of consonants with different consonants at many places of articulation. Bilebial, alveolar, retroflex, palatal, velar and glottal. A large number of fricatives, which is somewhat typologically unusual, but not necessarily for for this region. So we'll just talk a little bit about this, this three way distinction for the, for the obstruents so that the distinction here between. Ba pa ba, da ta da, and for the velars ga ka ga. For the Africans, you have a parallel distinction, za za za, ja cha ja, and ja cha ja. So this is a this three way distinction that's found in most Erma dialects. So here is actually the absence of uvular sounds, uvular sounds like ka and ka are found in a lot of the neighboring dialects but not not in this dialect so my suspicion is that that's a kind of influence of Chinese and that this is a loss in this dialect so you see a fairly robust consonant inventory with these three way of voicing distinctions. For the vowels, you have a somewhat asymmetrical vowel system, eight different vowels with the primary vowel distinction being between the front vowels and the back vowels, the front four vowels and the back four vowels. And we see this kind of pattern happen where vowels will change depending on their environment called vowel harmony. So we might see for this front back vowel assimilation for the vowels, where we have a in the first form here the verb is, yeah, to be good. If someone were to say still good, there's a continuity of aspect prefix, which marks continuation of that state so da yeah, still good. If we say need jih, da jih, still needs or ye to live, da ye, and then chü to pick, da chü. So these all have this front vowel ah, for the back vowels for verbs that start with a back vowel like na, lo di, wu and la de, we have the back vowel on the prefix so da na, da lo di, da wu and da la de. So this is an area of interest in the language that the vowels change, especially for the prefixes, depending on the vowel of the verb stem. So this is the continuity of aspect prefix we'll talk a little bit more about the verbs here in a minute. Back to the sound structure. This is the layout for the syllable structures that we find in the language. It's relatively simple and straightforward. We have five different types of syllables. The first type consonant vowel. So this verb ha to be free or to be leisurely. Number two, you can have a consonant, a glide, and then a vowel, so hua to sell. We can have some instances where we have closed syllables, but only in rare instances that are actually, in all cases, borrowing from Chinese where you can have a nasal code to the syllable, ha ta to call someone, and then huan ta to change. So these are borrowing from Chinese han and huan. You can also have a consonant coda, which is a glide, and only in some derived cases. So this verb hua to sell. If there's a certain evidential marking that comes at the end of the verb, then you would say huai. It's something like, it's, it's Mark's degree of certainty, but it's the same verb with a glide coda so this is actually simple consonant invent or syllable template, compared to language like Tibetan, or some of the gyarongic languages which have very large inventories of possible So what's the reason for this? Mostly simplification. So we see, if we compare Yonghe with other or Ma dialects, we see that they've lost the complex onset. So we have the shpe type onsets from Ronghong, which is more conservative. Those correlate with the fricative onset in Yonghe. So shpe, fa, shpe, fa, shpa, fa, and so on. And then the voiced complex onsets in Ronghong correspond with the voiced counterpart in Yonghe. So zhba corresponds with rh, zhbu corresponds with rh. So there's a reduction in complexity that's led to this kind of simple syllable template. We see all the also with the loss of codas so there's there's only open syllables in the language if we compare it with a language like Tibetan, which preserves the consonant codas of earlier stages. We see that these have been lost in Yonghe in a predictable way. So for these, the last four words on this in this table, the Tibetan forms and the pre Tibetan forms have K as the Koda, and this has been lost in Yonghe. And with the reflex of a rising tone, so certain syllable types that were complex have become more simple, but there's been a compensatory development of a tonal contrast. So we see a high tone for these first four words in Yonghe that have no obstructive codas in Tibetan. And then for the last four words, we have the Koda in Tibetan. And this corresponds with a rising tone in Yonghe. So I think there's more work to be done on this to say for certain but there's kind of promising line of inquiries see okay where have the codas been lost and what is the influence of those on the syllables. Okay. All right, so we still have some time to talk about the verb. And it's typologically in a glutinative language. So you find strings of affixes, both prefixes and suffixes that come on either side of the verb stem, which add meaning to the verb. So we have the stem here is would be this core part of the verb. We can have up to three prefixes, an orientational or spatial marking prefix, a negative prefix, the continuity of aspect prefix which we've already seen. And a set of suffixes as well which I probably won't have time to talk about so we'll talk mostly about the prefixes here. Although there's the causative marking suffix and associated motion suffix so adds an element of motion come and come or go essentially to the verb. There's an applicative marking suffix, which adds an arguments to the to the verb. So instead of, you know, to do something versus to do something for someone. So that would be the difference of the applicative, and then there's person marking and evidential marking which we won't discuss today. Okay, so let's take the first category of the verb, which are these orientational prefixes. And within that category there are eight different markers so we have upwards, downwards, upriver, downriver, in, inwards, upwards, towards and away. So we're going to organize into four different axes, having to do with up down, up or downriver containment and then towards and away. So some verbs that the prefixes again we see this issue of vowel harmony so the prefix form will change depending on the verb as well so that was the case for the continuity aspect prefixes, and also for these. So this is just the inwards prefix, when it occurs with different verbs there's up to five different vowel qualities that the verb can have. And so one of the interesting things about this use of the orientational prefixes is that it's similar to in English we have phrasal verbs like listen, listen up or quiet down. The analogy here would be it's as if you know the language has that kind of tendency to use direction with the verbs, but then it kind of went totally bananas and just became totally obligatory where every verb has a specific direction that it occurs with in different aspects so it's something that has to be learned when you learn the language. Okay, to listen or to hear that takes the inwards prefix. So some of them are intuitive, and some of them are not so intuitive and just have to be learned. Okay, so with some verbs, they can take all eight different directions. So this motion verb like fly in the past tense. So effectively the past tense, it has to take a prefix and it has to take one of these eight so flew up flew down, or so on. And then for some verbs, the verb can't take all of the prefixes, but can take a subset of those. So we see these cases are somewhat interesting. So they need to be learned. They need to be learned. So you have a pair like top, which is the upwards prefix. It means to bloom of a flower. The downwards prefix means for the stars to come out at night. So there's some connection there. But the difference in prefix actually gives a different meaning to the verb, somewhat like English, listen in versus listen up, you might think of it that way. So we have a verb like who when when it's used with the upwards prefix means to win. And with the downwards prefix means to lose. So there's some metaphorical import of these prefixes. And then something like to say with the upwards prefix does that to tell someone as the downwards prefix to explain so there's kind of a top to bottom metaphor there as well to talk down to someone or to explain to them. So this is a very kind of complex element of the language, not only because you have to learn which prefix goes with which verb, but also what the pattern is for changing the vowel of the prefix depending on the verb. So it's, that's kind of the key issue, if you were to set out to learn to speak or mile would be figuring out these prefixes. Let's see so I have some time here to talk about some of the more complex of verbs now that we have some idea of what the different components of them are, we can talk about some of these maximally complex verbs, which would correspond to kind of sentences in English. So we have in number one. So you haven't gone, you haven't yet gone to wipe it down for them. And this would be, I'm going to be when you saw. Okay, this is from a text. And so is the downwards directional prefix. My is the negative prefix da is the yet contributes the yet meaning my day is the stem, meaning to wipe. So this is a verbal suffix which means go to do something for someone so you haven't gone to wipe it down for them yet. And then me is the second person marker. So, all of this meeting condensed into one verb, there's a particle at the end, which is kind of more of an particle so I have so you haven't done it yet. And then we have in number two, the sentence of mother had not yet gone to bring down the pig foot. So here we see this prefixes string what I wanted to point out. In this example, we have the same set of prefixes. Direction marker down negative marker, continued of aspect, and then the verb stem bring, but the entire string of prefixes and that and all my dog from the first ones. They all vary, because of the verb, because of the vowel of the verb stem, the first vowel of the verb stem. In the first example is a, and so all of the prefixes harmonize with that. And then for the second example, we see all the prefixes and met that harmonizing with this front vowel, due, or this front value. There's a split in the verb of the language where the prefixes behave one way and the suffixes behave another way so there's no vowel harmony for the suffixes we see this key occurs after the front vowel. Here I guess this is also a front vowel but there's the suffix need to go never undergoes any alternation, neither do any of the other suffixes so it's kind of the prefixes go together with the stem. And the suffixes are kind of tacked on to that. Oftentimes, the stem will have the first high tone in the word so it's kind of demarcated in that way where all the prefixes will be low up until the stem. And then the suffixes are actually more variable so sometimes the suffixes can have high tone or low tone, but the prefixes tend to operate as a unit so I'm with our mother and with that. One other thing to mention here is the relationship between the orientational prefixes and the suffix go right so in the example of the pig foot. It's not that this direction, orientational marker down applies to the motion of going so the mother didn't go down to get the pig foot, she brought down the pig foot and she went to go bring down the pig foot. And in this example is from a story in Chang traditional households, a pig feet and other cured meats are stored on the top level of the house and hung from the rafters. So, the mother would have actually gone up from the living room to go get the pig foot. So there's scope of the orientational markers doesn't really apply beyond the stem so there's kind of a, what I'm getting as a clear demarcation of the stems and the prefixes go together, and then the suffixes behave differently so in this case she would have gone up to go bring down the pig foot. And so the, the downwards marker here refers to the action of bringing, bringing it down but not the going. Okay. So, yes, this is, these are some, you know, the more complicated verb examples from the language, and not all verbs are this complex but this is, this is kind of the maximal complexity so very different from Chinese. Different from Tibetan, which has some agglutinative tendencies but not not as much as as our mom. So, hopefully I've given people an overview of the people who speak the language and some of the structure of the language so I think that is all I have prepared for today, and would like to thank you all for your time and express my gratitude to my friends for sharing their language and your time with me over the years. It's been a great privilege to be able to study this language. So I think that's all I'll say for now.