 Hello everyone, I'm Xiuya, and today I'm going to discuss the spatial concepts of ethnic minorities in Sichuan, so as you may already know that Western Sichuan is also known as a very, it also has a very particular name called as Sichuan ethnic corridor or Sichuan-Yunnan ethnic corridor, because this part of China is famous for its non-linguistic diversity. Today I'll show you the case of the Yiarong people, which I have been studying over the past few years. So you may find the spelling of the name Yiarong seem a little strange. Is that strange to you? It's not an English word, right? Actually, this name comes from the Tibetan transliteration, and the literal means the Yiarong, so the warm land of the queen, and historically this is a name that referred to the 18 Yiarong chieftains in Western Sichuan during the Ming and Qing dynasties called as Jiarong Shibatusi, so maybe some of you have already heard the name. And nowadays, most of the inhabitants in this area are identified as a distinct ethnic minority known as a Giarong Tibetan, although they are not the Tibetan in a strict sense. However, despite the Giarong people who are religiously and culturally influenced by the Tibetans, I would say that they, at least from the linguistic perspective, the Giarong people speak a group of languages known as the Giarong languages, which do not belong to the Tibetan subgroup in Sino-Tibetan, and I would say that the Giarong languages are only considered as very remote relatives of the Tibetan languages or the Tibetan dialects. So this map illustrates the geographic locations of the Giarong speaking zone, so I choose a neutral term in order to create some ambiguity between the Giarong Tibetan or Giarong people or Tibetan dialects, so let's just say it as Giarong speaking areas, so with this red spots, and we can see that this place is primarily concentrated in the parts of the two autonomous prefectures. So the first one is, sorry. Here, the Aba, Zhang, Zhu, Qiang, Lu, Zi, Zhou, the Aba Tibetan and the Qinglang Autonomous Perfection. And the second is the Gan Zi Tibetan Autonomous Perfection. So here the Gan Zi Tibetan Autonomous Perfection. So this is a geographic location of the Garong speaking zone for the Garong Tibetans. And this photo was taken during an interview with, of me with the local Garong people. So joined from my past field work experience, I would say that even if you can accurately transcribe and gloss every morphemes of the, of a Garong text, you may still encounter challenges in understanding the content. Why? So this is because in addition to the widely acknowledged phonological and morphological complexity of the Garong languages, these languages are also distinguished by their pervasive reference to the space and in a very distinct manner. So we can, we are considered that this manner is distinct at least from the adjacent Mandarin speakers or the Tibetan speakers. And I believe this characteristic could be related to one feature that is the local ecological environment. So here we have a photo. So the Garong people reside in the mountainous region in Northwestern Sichuan. So this photo depicts a typical Garong village. So you can see here we have many houses. We have many houses here and there is a very special building which is an ancient Braxton Chieftain's palace. So now it is a relic. So this photo represents a typical Garong, a typical type of Garong village nestled in the middle of the high mountains and often exceedingly difficult for outsiders to access. And now another photo. So the second picture displays a different style of Garong village situated at the foot of the mountain and alongside a river. So I believe you already noticed the prominent topographic feature in this area. So that is we have high mountains, deep valleys and swift rivers. So imagine that if you live in such kind of area, how would you locate yourself if you are in the high mountains or just inside in the foot of the mountain or near the river? So possibly you will not choose left, right, or front, back. So the local topography serves as the primary reference for the special concepts of the Garong people. So we have a figure on the left, which is the local landscape I showed you just now. And we have another figure on the right which illustrates the three axes abstract from the local landscape. So here we have shown the first one. We have a vertical one. So the vertical axis representing the verticality or the gravity that is up and down. And the second one is it can be roughly understood as the mountain inclination or the slope. So it's not difficult to imagine that we can have concepts like uphill or downhill. And the third one here, so it coincides with the river. So normally we would expect concepts like up river and down river. So let me just briefly summarize the three axes, the axes abstracted from the local landscape. So axis one represents the vertical dimension reflecting up and downward directions. So axis two roughly aligns with the mountain slope. Well, axis three corresponds to the local river, up river, down river. So another important feature of the three axes is that they are orthogonal to each other. So back to the vertical axis, we have the up down. So it's almost perpendicular to the horizontal plane that is our living space, right? So here we are in the horizontal plane and we have verticality, up and down. And on the horizontal plane, so our living space, we have two axes, axis two and three that coincide with the mountain and the river respectively. They are also perpendicular to each other like a cross, right? So to illustrate the functioning of these three axes, I will use one variety of the Guillemot language that is Brau-Arch as an example. The Brau-Arch Guillemot as an example. But now we encounter the first difficulty which lies in the grammar. So remember the three axes I mentioned just now, one, two, three. Each axis comprises two opposite orientations which I propose a few semantic labels. So we have for axis one, we have up and down. For axis two, we have up hill, down hill and so on. And I will explain this later. And for axis three, we have up river and down river. And each orientation opposition is lexicalized in morphines from different world classes. So we have here orientation nonce typically take, typically taking a up prefix. Atto, up, upwards, avi, or avu, downward. Atto, up hill, ari, down hill, au, anam, and so on. And we also have adverbs. So there are adverbs meaning towards, was a particular direction and it encodes this, the same direction as the noun. And we have verbal prefixes that are occurring before the verb stem, that we have two verbs. That tab means, for example, means go, upward, and that tot means to take something upward. So they are all expressed by the bike. So each orientation is lexicalized in, I would say a set of different, a set of morphines or an orientation set. So for the upward direction, we have a dot as a noun, store as an adverb, and as a verbal prefix, and that tab, that tot, and so on. We will see in later examples how this morphine served to indicate direction, but let us first focus on the semantics. So the three axis I mentioned just now, despite the label I used, are actually in many context polyphemies and should be adapted to the local topography. So these poses challenges when seeking a proper Chinese or English or something else, a proper translation. A typical example is axis two that I mentioned just now as coinciding with the mountain slope, but actually it is very polyphemious. It has multiple semantic realizations depending on the focus. So this part, so if we focus on the mountain hill, so axis two means uphill, downhill, but when we go down and reach the river, uphill, downhill, I don't think these semantics work. So instead of uphill, downhill, when we focus on the river, it's the same axis means this time, this bank or this shore and the opposite bank, opposite shore. So you may find a little strange. Up hill, downhill, this bank, that bank, they do not seem to have a certain connection to be connected under one axis, but upon a closer observation, it is not difficult to discern that all these semantics satisfy with one principle that is. So no matter where we are, so if we are in the mountain or we are close to the river, the axis two is always orthogonal to the river in axis three. So we have the axis three here, uphill river, downhill river, and we always have an axis that is perpendicular to the axis three. So if we are focused on the mountain slope, we have uphill, downhill, it is realized as uphill, downhill, but if we focus on the river, it is realized as this bank or the opposite bank. We can also focus on both the mountain and the river. So at this time, and this time axis two is realized as towards the mountain or towards the river, right? So the realization is always also going on to the river. So we start the game with the nominal forms from the axis two and axis three that coincide roughly with the river and the mountain. So below we have a table, this table in this table, we have two paradigms here. We have the paradigm for the orientation now that begins with the app prefix. And we have another paradigm for the possessive forms. So we have a possessive prefix here. We have the new as an example, which means my. So if we add this prefix to a nine, it means my something. So we have, I'm not sure what this is clear enough to show the color difference. So we have four points here, A, B, C, D and the four points represent the four orientations consisting of the axis two and three. So the river in axis is indicated in blue. Here it's in blue, C and D. So we can see for the points C and D we can see that there are two orientation nouns, Awu and Anna in the orientation, non-paradigm. So Awu and Anna mean upstream or up river direction and downstream direction respectively. And if we change to the possessive paradigm, we have the new prefix instead of the up prefix. So new means my side. So if imagine that I'm in the mountains. So adding the personal possessive prefix, new means my side facing towards the upstream direction and the new means my side facing the downstream direction. So maybe this English translation is awkward, but perhaps you have better suggestions, but let's just imagine the situation. And point A and B from the axis two are more intricate. So envision yourself on a mountain road. I have a simple sketch here. So this time we have A and B. So imagine you are here and we have a river just below. So just now I mentioned the river in axis, my side facing the upstream direction and my side facing the downstream direction. And now what about the A and B that is also going on to the river? How would you describe A and B in your own eyes? Any ideas? So we agree that A and B, at least we have two orientation nouns here. Ato and are they, what do they mean? Perhaps in order to be orthogonal to the river, we have maybe close to the mountain or close to the river because the river is just outside. And in such a situation, the side near to the mountain is also higher, right? Because the mountain goes higher. So it's also higher place, inner part, and also near to the mountain. And the B, the opposite orientation, it's maybe slower, right? And it's outside, right? It's closer to the river. So I propose the translation for Ato and are they? I'm sorry, Ato and are they? So A, Ato means higher interior side towards the mountain and are they lower in exterior side facing the river. So now let's look at the possessive paradigm. So we have a different stand, but there are the two possessive forms encode the same orientation. So Ngooshkarj with the Ngoo possessive is my side facing towards the higher interior side of the mountain and Ngoosjian. So opposite orientation means my side that facing the lower exterior side facing the river. Is that for that, it's okay? So just imagine you are here in the mountains. So we have a river that runs here from here to here. So we have up river, down river, and we have higher interior side close to the mountain and we have the lower exterior side facing towards the river. And this actually, this is the way with which Geron people would tell you about his or her locations in the mountains. And with this picture, so here we have a picture. So we abstracted from the local landscape. So we have a mountain slope here and we have the river just running of course below and we have the vertical dimension now in this. So in this slide, we will not talk about the vertical dimension, just focus on the axis two, the mountain slope and axis three, the river. So we have the four points A, B, C, D. So for this person, we can see that point A that I mentioned just now is the side facing, facing the higher interior part of the mountain coincides with his front, front side, right? And the lower exterior part towards the river coinciding with the back side and the C, sorry. Okay, C and D, up river, down river. So for English speaker, maybe you will use front, back, left, right. And I think perhaps for Mandarin speakers, also in this way, but for Geron people, instead of saying my left, my right, possibly they would say my front, my back, but it is more frequent to see that they will indicate their locations with my side facing towards the higher inner part of the mountain and my side facing towards the lower and exterior part of the mountain. And it took me, really took me a long time to get used to this way to express the locations. And one question for you that what if I turn around? What if this person turns around? So now we have another different, we have the second person here. So ABCD in your eyes represent which part or, so in the second picture, we have also have the four points ABCD and the four point remain unchanged. So the A point, the higher inner part of the mountain remains unchanged. A is also in the second picture is also the inner higher part of the mountain. And B also the opposite direction, the lower and exterior part towards the river. And the C, the N, N, N is they remain unchanged of river and the down river. So you may find that this system resembles the cardinal directions east, west, north, south. So the four points remain unchanged. What change is actually our, it's our location, right? But I would say there are still at least one difference from the cardinal directions east, west or north, south because in Guerron's spatial concept with the prefixation of the personal possessive, remember the prefix, it means my side. The personal angle is actually incorporated into the absolute reference, the local fixed bearing stress. And I'm not sure whether the English speakers here, they, you will say my east or my west. I'm not sure my north, my south, perhaps it's more natural to just say in the south or in the north, right? I'm not sure. But I think for Mandarin speakers, perhaps to say, or the Dongbian, my north, perhaps we need a special context, right? Normally we will say Dongbian or Xiebian. I'm not sure you have any. You can say, okay. Okay, thank you. Thank you. Okay, so the first, perhaps the first difference is that incorporating the personal angle to our absolute reference system. And the second is you will see later the difference from the system taking reference from local topography that they are different from east to west because east to west, north to south, they remain valid no matter where you are, right? We have, so if you are in Dublin, we have east, west, north, south is the same even if you are in, for example, New York, right? But in such kind of system taking reference from local topography, you will see in later slides that different, okay? So now let's descend the mountain and reach the river. So just now we were examining the case in the mountains and now we descend and reach the river. So the axis three, axis three, under our remain unchanged. And our always means upstream direction and under downstream direction. But axis two, so you may find the translation as higher part or lower part of interior exterior, they do not work here because we are near the river. We don't, it's not necessary to say, to precise the higher and lower part. Instead, axis two, although it remains also going to the river, but the meaning change. So at all, so the same orientation now, here at all. It means this bank or the bank where we live or the bank where our village is located and the opposite orientation now are it means the opposite bank. So you see up here, down here, lower, higher, they do not work here in this scenario near the river. And we have an example here. The spatial morphemes serve to describe the, so in this example, we have different spatial morphemes that serve to describe the swimming pathway of a water monster. So a water monster. So basically the monster, okay, so basically the monster swims like this way. So it's swimming first upstream and then it turn around and it swims downstream. So we will see how the general people describe such swim pathway. Okay, so the speaker here as in addition to the mountain river reference, the speaker as an additional reference that is a rock in the middle of the river. Here we have a rock, the rock of the middle. And this additional reference is reflected by the possessive prefix, word. So word is a sort of singular possessive means eats. So it basically refers to the eats means the rock, the side of the rock, a particular side or part of the rock. So we have corresponding to the adult. This bank where we live, we have a possessive form, which card means the side towards the bank where we live off the rock. So we have the additional reference for your rock and array opposite bank and we have the corresponding possessive form was jam. It means the side towards the opposite bank of the rock. So we will see how this works. The first line, jila-ren-gu, jila-ren-gu means the rock in the middle. Jila-ren-gu wushikaru-su-nan-ga. So the first half of the path is the monster swims in this way. So the monster, sorry, jila-ren-gu wushikaru, wushikaru, this part, right? So the side facing towards the bank where we live off the rock. So first in this side, in this side, the swimming monster swim, school and nanga means upstream. So it means the swimming monster swims upstream in the side facing our bank off the rock. Literally it can be translated in this way. And then the second line, we have array-ni wushikaru-nan-ga. Array, this part, the opposite bank. Mi means downstream in the direction of downstream direction. And we have the possessive form, wushikaru. Wushikaru means the side facing the opposite bank off the rock in the middle. So the swimming monster swim downstream in the opposite side facing the opposite bank. So in general, they would describe the pathway in this way, but I'm not sure for the Mandarin or English speakers, how would you describe such kind of, so we will perhaps see swimming monster swims upstream in this side, then it turns downstream in that side, but it's not as precise as the array-ni wushikaru-nan-ga. It's more precise, but for the Mandarin speakers, maybe, in this side, I have the other side, and the other side, I have the other side. Actually, this is a translation used by my informants. He indicated the other side, but actually it took me a very long time to know which side is this side and which side is that side. And so far, the situation, we examine the two situations. So one is in the mountains and the second one is near the river. And this situation pertains to the so-called local scale. What does the local scale mean? Actually, it means where the mountain and the river reference is function normally, right? We always have the local fixed bearings as a reference, we have the mountain, always here, and we have the river, always there. But how should these spatial-related morphemes be used if the fixed bearing fell to work? So what if a general speaker, for example, what if they are now in Beijing? How would they adapt this spatial-related morphemes to the topography of Beijing? Or what if they are in another village that where we do not have a local river, another village? Or what if, for example, what if a general speaker is inside our classroom? How would they use these spatial morphemes? So this is the next part of my talk. So first we will examine the mini world, the micro scale, that is, how the orientations are used inside a house or inside a building. So this image shows you a typical Geyron house. So let's just look at the most important part. So this part, the first floor. The first floor has a very specific name. It's Kier. Actually, the Kier shapes are the main leading space for Geyron people. And here we will see the spatial orientations are used independently of local topography and yet somehow fossilized. So this is, imagine, this is inside the living space. This is in the Kier, inside the room. So in the center of the Kier, the living room, there is a typical tributary earth. And surrounded by four seats, each with its own name. So we have the first is Kaku. Kaku, so perhaps we can translate it as the innermost, honorific seat for elder members or for Lamas. Okay, then we have Peshkar, where firewood is added. So normally it is reserved for the male head of the household. And we have the Kati. Kati is a cooking area, typically used by women. And then we have the final Kali. Kali is a seat situated close to the entrance. And normally it is used by the children or other members. So there are four seats, each has its own name and let's examine the etymology of the name of the four seats. So among the four names we can recognize some orientation nouns that we have already seen discussed in previous slide. So the first Kaku, we have the second part Kaku that is etymologically related to our upriver direction. And for Kali, sorry, Kali is a, we have a new route that means Wiliya middle. And we have Keshkar. So you remember the famous Nushkar, the one that we have difficulty defining proper translation. So the Shkar means the higher interior side towards mountain or the bank. We're really, so we have a Shkar in Keshkar and we have Kati. So Kati, we find that there's a routine in other related Garong varieties as in the Jaipo Garong, we have Achi as orientation noun is downriver direction. So with the etymology, we can see that they do not seems to have a close relation with upriver downriver in this case, right? Or the side towards the mountain. But, so first we observe the fossilization of orientation nouns in the name of the seeds. And second in actual use. So each seed is also assigned with a particular orientation. So if we want to go to the place of Kaku, we would choose the direction for our destination of war upriver. And if we want to go to the Kali position, so the destination is referred to as a downriver direction by the prefix NER. So if we want to go to the Keshkar seed, so here we have Re and Na. So you can see we have a double fossilization. The first is the orientation nouns fossilized in the seed names. And in actual uses, we have a different logic that each seed is assigned with specific orientation. Okay, now I will show you the specific use. So the use of the four orientations in the living room is actually independent of geographic reality. Here is a documented house in Brawash. So we notice that the place Kaku, so just now I proposed the translation Kaku as the innermost honorific seeds. So Kaku is assigned with the upriver war direction, but you can see with this figure that the actual location upriver direction is here. So this is the river. So you can see that war is not related to the upriver direction in reality, right? So the logic here is that here, we first determine the position of Kaku based on which part do you know actually is based on the entrance. So Kaku is decided once we have the entrance. So Kaku must be located in the innermost part of the living room and in face of the entrance. And once we have Kaku, we have the Tali in the opposite direction and subsequently we can map the orthogonal system into the living room. So those are motivation awaits further investigation. This logic is shared by, I would say the most of the languages. So I think for the variety of chap hook, I think it is the same thing. So first we decide the entrance, then we decide the Kaku and we assign the upriver war direction to the place of, to the seat of Kaku. And now we will examine another case that local fixed bearings lost becomes invalid. So this is a macro scale that is to say we focus on a larger area, the orientation, how the orientations are used across the region or beyond. But this is a map that is not very good for, but this is a map of corresponding roughly to the present, the young speaking area. Okay, many toponyms. And the local references of the river and the mountain, absolutely, sorry, apparently they become invalid because we cannot use local mountain and local river to refer to the place data far away, far away from here. So therefore, we encounter, it is not difficult to imagine, we may encounter difficult situations or unpredictable situations, right? The picture, so for Broward speaker, the places here I use different colors to indicate different regions. So we first, let's check the turquoise part here. One, two, three, four, five. We have five places that are indicated in the turquoise. So Broward is here, so it's here. So this place is, the turquoise place, the place is indicating turquoise are connected by a river. So according to you, how would a Broward speaker locate, for example, this part in the upstream direction? So he will use up river direction for this place. So if a Broward speaker comes here, he would locate this place as in the down river direction and this is this place also up river. Okay, but what about the green and the purple places? They're not, so Broward is here. The purple places here are located in another river. And the green places here are here also connected by another river. It's not the local river that runs across Browards, right? And based on my third notes, a Broward speaker would use upward or uphill direction for the green and the purple places. So it is not evident, right? It is not predictable, I would say. And also I'd like to say that the location referred to by the upward or the higher place. Actually, these places are not necessarily have a higher elevation. For example, we have a place Chukchen here. Chukchen is here, the purple place. And I have my informant here in, I have my informant here near Chukche in Barkham. So my informant said that he would say that Chukchen is located in a higher place than Barkham. But actually Chukchen is about the same attitude about Barkham, but I don't know why Chukchen it is considered as a higher place in the eyes of local speakers. So this is actually an unpredictable case. And we have the red parts that is, the five places indicated in red color, they are located far away from here, the turquoise ones. So these place are all referred to as lower places. Perhaps it is related to the topography, but not necessarily. So the first, we can make a first hypothesis is that the places referred to by using the vertical dimension up, higher, or down, or lower place, perhaps they are seemingly considered more distant, right? Because the turquoise ones are referred to with the riverine axis is up river down river and it is quite obvious that this place are actually connected by a local river. But these places in green and in purple, they are not connected by this river and are considered as as far away from the speaker, at least in the eyes of the brother. And here I have a table summarizing the orientation used in different parts. So we have the turquoise ones, orientation are riverine. So these places, the inhabitants of this place, these places speak the Si Tu Giarong. And we have the green ones and it is this place were once governed by the Four Chieftains. So Si Tu Giarong, Si Tu comes from Chinese, Si Tu Si, the Four Chieftains. So they are the, I would say this place were once the political center in old days. And the green places and the purple places were governed by the Four Chieftains, but are considered away from the political center. And they, the green parts, the speakers here, they speak Northern Giarong and the purple parts, the speakers speak West Giarong Lake. The problem lies here. So Kruo Chiu, Chiu Chen, Li Xian and Zhang La, and so on. So these red parts, the inhabitants here, they are also Si Tu Giarong speakers, but in the old days, they were not governed by the Four Chieftains. They are governed by their own Chieftains. So we would say that perhaps there is, we can infer, we can infer the ethnic identity from the orientation projection. And now we change to a larger area. So here I added some black arrows around the Giarong speaking world, some famous places. And so let's first look at Chengdu and Yunnan. So I believe you all know Chengdu and Yunnan, or Chengdu and Yunnan are all considered as lower places referred to by the prefix Na. It is, I think it's easy to understand because not only the Han region are considered as located in the lower parts, right? And the more complicated case concerns the Tibetan speaking area. So first we have some Ando places. We have Qinghai and Mizolki. So the two places are referred to as upriver direction used by the prefix Wu. But as you can see from this figure, we cannot see a clear connection between the two places and the river, right? And actually the local river for our speaker runs from east to west. Clearly, Qinghai and Mizolki are not in the upriver direction in reality. And the Shasa, which is further and Shasa is considered as a higher place. And I think this would be logical because Shasa is apparently higher than all the places mentioned here. So however, they are also, sorry, here is an unpredictable case, it's not predictable because India is also considered as in the upriver war direction. So India, I think maybe we have India here because it's too far away. Apparently India is not in the same direction as Mizolki and Qinghai. So why, I don't have the answer for now, but I think maybe we can have, this should be explained in with more data. So I will conclude my talk here. But today I only presented a small part of the grammar of space in Giarong with the flowers, Giarong as example. Yet I believe it is sufficient to demonstrate that the complexity and uniqueness, it is also not worthy that these languages feature other spatial references in addition to the topography based. So we also have the object centered reference such as front, back, up, down and the person centered left and the right and so on. But I would say that it seems that they have a hierarchy in choosing these different references. Topography centered references as a most prevalent. So it is the most frequently encountered followed by the object centered ones like up, down, front, back and concepts like left and right are very, very infrequent. And I would say I only encountered the use of concepts of left and right in very specific context that is right hand and, sorry, left hand and right hand with the Giarong speakers. So perhaps we can explore the motivation behind this in the future. So why they have such a hierarchy, right? Or perhaps we can have a hypothesis that if for the speakers live in an area with specific topography, they tend to use topography based references. And so such kind of hypothesis but this is left for future investigation. And finally, due to the phenomenon of fossilization, I think this study could pave the way for future collaborative research in anthropology and history, enabling inference regarding early migration and the ethnic identity through spatial projection. So thank you very much.