 Hello, my name is Justin Watkins. I'm Professor of Burmese at SOAS in the University of London and I'm going to give you a short talk today on the WAH language, also known as Barao, a language of China and I've been invited to do so by Nathan Hill, Director of the Trinity College Dublin Mission Studies. Okay, so WAH is an Austro-Asian language and as such is in the minority, most of the languages spoken in China are Tibetan Burmese languages, relatives of Chinese and Tibetan. Monkmeh is a language family where the largest concentration of languages are found in Peninsula, Southeast Asia as you can see on this map and the WAH languages are the larger and orange blob in that small collection of languages, one branch of Austro-Asian of Monkmeh known as the Palauanian languages and most of the Palauanian languages are spoken in Myanmar and China, Northern Laos as well. Okay, so WAH speakers are located in the in what default called the WAH corridor, so the area, the geographical area between the Salwin and Nekong River, this area straddles the southwestern Chinese province of Yunnan, the Shans state of the Northeast of Burma, and the WAH are thought to be the autochthonous inhabitants of the area, it's likely that speakers of Northern Monkmeh languages were settled in the area earlier than speakers of Tibetan Burma and Taikadao, so we go back to the map and the impression you get is that Monkmeh languages, certainly the smaller Monkmeh languages, so leaving aside Cambodian and Vietnamese, are the remnants of the population, a larger population or more widespread population speaking Monkmeh languages who have been displaced by the arrival of speakers of Thai, Thai languages, speakers of Myanmar and other Tibetan Burma languages. So let's go on. The standard variety of WAH is known as Barak and is based on, and that's based on the variety spoken in the village of Yen Shui, in Chinese, Aishwai, in Burin WAH. There are about 1.2 million speakers, including Barak and other varieties in the language, and it has to be said that WAH is a complex cluster of many dialects, perhaps 40 or more, many of them undescribed or poorly described, lumped together or split wrongly, it's a confusing picture, but taking a slightly more lumping rather than splitting approach, two-thirds of the speakers of WAH are in China, about one-third in Myanmar, so a little over a million in total. So it's a significant language in Yunnan, most of the speakers are down near the border, but the WAH get around, and I won't be talking much about WAH society and politics in this talk, but if you go and read up, you'll find that there are interesting people with an amazing history, fiercely independent, they have a semi-independent state nestled next to the Chinese border, and in many ways are politically more affiliated to China than they are to Myanmar, but it's a complex and extraordinary picture. Recent migrations have seen WAH villages established in northern Thailand, there's WAH presence in Yangon, in Damji, Mandalay and other big cities in Myanmar, and also in Kunming, and across Yunnan province, there are WAH in Beijing, so they get around. Okay, I'm going to get linguistic and a bit more technical, straight away. So first of all, a little bit about how WAH has been written down. First thing is to say that it's not written all that much, and that there is a split orthography, so two parallel orthographies have been developed for WAH, one, and the two that I'm going to focus on are the two found in the WAH dictionary that I spent many years compiling with colleagues, which was published in 2013. And in that dictionary, we used official, the official WAH orthography, which is approved by the Literacy Committee of the United WAH State Party, so the authority that's in control in WAH state, the autonomous WAH area in Northern Shan State. And that was developed by improving on and developing the defective orthography used in an early 20th century translation of the New Testament, done by Vincent Young with WAH colleagues and others. And Vincent Young was unable to hear lots of the phonological contrast in WAH. They didn't mark breathy aspirates, you'll see a bit more about the sound system of WAH. Surely he couldn't hear the register contrast, so a quasi-tonal contrast of breathy and modal phonation. So that's not marked. And final glottal consonants and final h's, final glottal stops not marked. So there's a lot of syllables that are, that sound different, but written the same in the original New Testament orthography. And over the years, the WAH on the Nymar side of the border where this is, both this orthography is used, and Christian WAH and people associated with the descendants of that translation of the New Testament, then cast around to find improvements. So ways of marking final glottal consonants, ways of marking the register contrast, we'll see a bit more about that later. Anyway, on the other side of the border in China, after the establishment of the People's Republic of China in 49, so in the 1950s and onwards, linguist anthropologists were commissioned, they were sent from Beijing to the four corners of the Republic, the People's Republic to describe and develop writing systems for many of China's minority languages, including WAH. And what they did after a slightly unusual prototype writing system had been developed, which was more suitable for linguists, really, they developed a writing system for WAH, which aligns nicely in its treatment of various sounds with the Pinyin transcription used for standard Chinese. And this WAH orthography used in China is phonologically accurate, but it's not in wide use, it's used for formal official translations of documents into WAH, but it's not used by all that many people, but there's quite a lot of printed stuff that you can find in WAH using it from China. So let's have a look. So here's a WAH sentence to give you a first bit of WAH language material. So the sentence, have you read my letter yet? And you can see that the prototype PRC WAH orthography here is one that uses some symbols borrowed from Russian and Russian transcription of Mongolian. And so a little bit outlandish, they use a cue for a final glottal stop. We see that in various places. So some redundant letters used, some new letters used. They're using the Cyrillic hard sign to mark clear register. And so that was the prototype. And then that morphed into what's described here is the PRC orthography, where a bar over the vowel is used for a breathy vowel and the absence of a bar used for clear register vowel. And the treatment of final palatal consonants, so Monkmaer languages have final palatal as you find them in Khmer. They're written using a G, so a vela with a preceding I, which kind of gives an impression of the I off glide before palatal consonants. And that word for already or the yet is pronounced hoi. So it's a palatal final, spelled I G in PRC orthography. In official WAH, they didn't want to use final palatal, so they didn't want to use a C or anything like that, the final palatal side of that spelled I T in official WAH. So you have to have your wits around you, depending on where your WAH text is from to work out who's written it when, which side of the border that splits the WAH between Myanmar and China. And in fact, since this material was produced, the Literacy Committee of the United WAH State Party has revised official WAH again. So there should be another nine in this table. Okay, so let's come back to the register contrast in WAH. So in WAH, instead of having a tonal split between high and low that you might find in other Mon Khmer languages, or you find sets of high tones versus low tones in Chinese or in Thai, Vietnamese, WAH has clear and breathy phonation contrasting rather than tones. And the register contrast is phonetically a complex of phonetic correlates. So fundamental frequency, register slightly higher in frequency than breathy register a vowel quality. So breathy vowels are a little bit more open phonation type breathy, breathy phonation in the breathy register and vowel duration. So lax breathy vowels are a little bit longer. What's interesting is that there's no phonation type contrast. There's no register contrast in syllables with an initial laryngeal consonant so or with a with aspiration in the initial consonant. But you do get the register contrast if there's final a final bottle consonant so like an H or a bottle stop. So here is a set of contrasting syllables. So the words sorry, I had there's a mistake. The second word for peach should be sweet. So there is peach and there with two dots under it means sweet. So there less is there and turn is there. Land is there and wager is there. Change the slide. So you can't see that in the second. Right. And here is, I mentioned earlier that on the Myanmar side of the border, there were various attempts to bring the spelling system used in the old New Testament translation of war to bring it up to up to par by adding things to represent the register contrast, which wasn't represented in earlier forms of the language. And what they did, I think, was look at neighboring languages. And they decided that you could mark a there we go. We've got sweet and peach the work the right way around. So sweet is there and peach is there. And the table and the clear register so the non breathy register is written with two dots after the syllables. T I E I E is the digraph used for the vowel air. The two dots tell you it's clear register, not breathy register. And I think they were looking at high tone in Burmese, which uses something that looks like two dots to mark a high tone. And the absence of that means it's breathy register, which is lower in pitch. So we've got some minimal pairs here, sweet, peach, and I'm overdoing it for illustrative purposes. The register contrast isn't phonetically quite as distinct as that. The words for head and work head is game work is game. And other ways of marking register contrast, if there's a final, final stop, you use the unvoiced syllable P in clear register, the voice syllable B in breathy register. So nap and nap are spelt with different final consonants. And that reflects a little bit the way that tie consonants have a link with tone. If you've learned your tie tone rules and do a bit of historical phonology on tie, you have different consonant letters having an effect on the tone, which is red, which we find in lots of authorities around the region. Okay, however, in this version of official wa, orthography, if there's a final bottle stop, and an X is used for a bottle stop in this version, which they borrowed from the Chinese orthography instantly, incidentally, they're both written the same. So debt to wager to that are both written spelled the same in official while spelling. And I think that's been fixed now in the latest version. Although at the time when I was compiling the dictionary, I had meetings with people from the literacy committee of the United States party, and they told me I was not allowed to fiddle with the official orthography. It was the way it was. It's since been amended. But at the time, I was not invited to offer my suggestions for improvement. But they have most certainly got there. Now, and it wasn't that they didn't understand they were very aware of the complications of writing while using Roman script, which is a choice. Obviously, they will be a lot easier to write while using, for example, booming script. But for those reasons on the Chinese side, that's not something that's been suggested. Right, let's move on. Okay, so consonants and while we'll do a bit of phonetics phonology to start off, there's a four way voicing contrast in initial stops. So voiced and unvoiced, aspirated, unaspirated. Initial consonants, clusters are restricted. So this is sort of classic mainland Southeast Asian language in many ways. Final consonants are restricted to unreleased, label, alveolar, palatal, and vela, the same set of nasals and glottals. And then you get a final H, final IH, which is the reflex of an S and sounds like an S. So that's a bit like what we find in Khmer, where a written S at the end of a syllable is pronounced as an H, except in certain dialects. So that's probably a fairly recent change. And there are a large number of breathy, aspirated voice segments. Okay, so here's your little table of consonants. So we've got a P and a B and an aspirated P, often pre-nasalized the voiced aspirates. And then you've also got breathy, aspirated nasals. So ma and ma, na, na, niya, niya. You'd also get ma and ma. Okay, you have breathy, aspirated, voiced fugitives. So you can have va and va and ra and ra, la, la. And here are some examples of the vowels in wa. So there are nine contrasting unitary vowels, so nine vowel contrasts, so e, e, e, a, a down the front or or mu up the back, and then ʊ and ʊ. So high back unrounded vowels. Again, lots of men in South East Asia have those. And then lots of diphthongs that have ʊ, ʊ, ʊ, ʊ, ʊ, ʊ and ʊ. Right, there we go. There are some vowel quadratials with those vowels on them. Okay, so wa has a very large number of sesku syllables, so syllables with a minor pre-syllable, a minor initial syllable with restricted vowel contrasts appended to a major syllable, which has the full set of possible vowel contrasts and the registered contrast. And you often get, as you do in Burmese and lots of other languages around, which like this pattern, so mon in particular, and other mon premier languages, you often get bisyllables where the first syllable gets reduced to a minor syllable. So you might find the word suso, meaning muddled up and pronounced as suso, or suso, or suso, or suso, and some other examples of that. And a very common pre-syllable is just an s with a sort of indistinct schwa in between the s and the major syllable. So to strike or kick is sublam, to be chapt is sprih, to urge your hasten segli, and to rinse segrah, and you can see some minimal pairs of seang, burn sang want, soo, warm soo, intentionally soo, swollen soo, soo, rather soo, dog. And while the morphological system of prefixation, which existed in earlier forms of the language, is all but gone, we leave out whether just a few prefixes with hard to discern, hard to recover, and a range of functions. This pre-syllable s is by far the most common. According to Schurter, probably results from the generalisation in almost all prefixial contexts of a prefix, which originally were corresponded to those with an initial s in Balao and Rihang Lang. And if you read up in the difluor, difluor, the wa languages you can find reference to. So here are some, there's some evidence of prefixation in earlier forms of the language, so lah and blah, burn and hearth, lang, glang, long, this long, grout, grout, sorry, grout, deep, and this deep, there's this sort of demonstrative stative adjective, stative verbs that describe, if you're explaining to someone, it's this deep, grout, so you add a prefix to the word deep. Voicing of initial stop, so you get related pairs of words, booh, meaning thick, booh, thickness, bing, big, bing, sides, gip, thick, and sgip, thickness. So these are hard to formalise, but there's also evidence that this went on in wa in a previous stage of the language. Okay, onto a bit of morphology, so compounding, wa is a supremely isolating language, the syntax is pretty similar to Thai and Khmer, mon, languages like that in mainland Southeast Asia. So we've got words for clothes, where you often get two synonyms put together in a compound, so ground, cry, clothes, twice, meaning clothing, things, goods, possessions, and you can elaborate on that, so ground, cry, thai, dah, is clothing or clothes, so two generic words, skirt and shirt, altogether clothing and clothes, a bit more about those sorts of forms later. Words for a noun associated with the second noun, so weapons is war equipment, equipment war that way around, so why compounds are, why phrases are left-headed? Well, nyet, so relatives of the house, I remember the family, gan nyet, work to do with the house, nyet jia, so a bee hive, a bee house, and the word for toilet is nyet ang, so the shit house, as little in the way of euphemism in war, when we were compiling the diction we found that the Kedwin was pretty earthy, there's no well-developed system of politeness or euphemism, or avoiding speaking to the point in war. Right, compounding two, so you can form nouns using the relative isa ba, so the word for income or earnings is babon, the things that you get, that which you receive, was righteousness, that which is upright and straight, so it's to form nouns. A very large number of words in war formed, so what I think matters is called psycho-collocations, so expressing emotions in terms of the way a part of the body or an organ is, so if you think of in Burmese, if you want to say you're worried, you say that your mind, which is actually located where your heart is, your mind is hot, and we find similar things in war, so the word for heart is rom, and if your heart is salty, so a rom means that you're angry, a rom means that your head is hot, it means that you're upset or irritated, if your heart is spicy, so bright rom means angry, and there's a whole series of them here. Proverbs and sayings in war, so you'll see in the references at the end, a collection of about 1,000 proverbs and sayings, and these generally pivot around the central rhyme, so we've got three examples here, I'll have a go at reading the first one, so ban dat nyat, lat dat groan, so lat is nyat and light, rhyme with each other around the two halves in the form of the proverbs, so rest in a frequent place, enter a hunter's hide, the joys of hunting, so a lot of the proverbs and sayings are about sort of food, life, how to live healthily, how to get pleasure, there's quite a few to do with sex and courting, and all those sorts of things, so prayer to ward off fire, sy'nach yin, brit nach grei, the war for war, so that's not great, so be romantic for a while, make a true effort once, so invest in long relationships, but for short relationships, just put in the effort, it's slightly earthy as it appears. Right, and elaborate expressions like Southeast Asian languages in general, and indeed Chinese we find the sort of structured four syllable, four morphine formulations which sound nice, which are a little bit more than the sum of their parts, so very often you have a sort of standard morphine, so here if the word for food is bret, and another more obscure or poetic morphine for food is brum, and they sort of fit together, they've got the same consonant cluster in the beginning, so bret, brum, standard word is bret, the elaborate sort of more poetic word is brum, so ngaw bret, ngaw brum means left over, where you could just say ngaw bret, but that would be boring, ngaw bret, ngaw brum, get this nice four morphine phrase which gives the whole thing a bit of twang. Okay, so to make food, so yaw bret is the standard word for making food, but yaw bret, yaw brum, sounds nicer, it sounds more, it has more impact as we're affecting, so another example of rom is heart, and ri is this slightly less common morphine for heart, so if you start a fresh, you have a change of heart, it's ngaw brum, but ngaw brum, ngaw ri, is more explicit, down we want. Large number of loan words from Chinese and Burmese, more Chinese than Burmese, but usage Mexican depends a lot on which side of the China and Myanmar border you're on, so we've got some examples here, so the word for car in Gua is motoc too, so too is for a sort of Yunanese, and most of the borings sound like Yunanese Chinese, obvious reasons, too is the word for vehicle, motoc is Burmese motto from the English word motor, so you've got a real international hybrid of a word there, a nice example here, the word for knowledge is uses the Chinese zhu yi, which comes out in Gua as zhu yi, and combined with the Burmese word pi nha, which means it's from Pali, banya knowledge, so zhu yi pi nha, again you've got four syllables, so that gives the whole thing a bit of twang, the Gua word for knowledge, zhu yi pi nha. And then we've got some examples of borings from Chinese, so jiao shi for classroom, which is appended to a head noun, a super ordinary noun, yi, so the Gua word for house, so house which is a classroom building, which is a classroom, zhan yi, jiao shi, yi, jiao shi, it comes out that way in Gua. A mango, again you have this thai word, mak mung, which is a mango, and you stick that after the Gua, which is a generic Gua word for fruit, which is blik, so blik mak mung is a mango. A shi dhuang, which is the Chinese word for suit, after the Gua word for clothes, so grang, se dhuang is a suit, bu, di se, so di se, the English word via Burmese, di se for diesel oil, and bu the Gua word for oil. So those words with those forms are a very common word for borings. Right, so a little bit about noun phrases, so they're all left-headed, you have a system of major words or classifiers, but with surface station rather than Chinese word order, so you have the noun, then the number, and then the classifier, so a quail, so jog is a quail, de is one, and mu is a classifier, and jog mu is a quail. Okay, so a very generous person, bui, dan ding dat, the gut, so gut is the classifier for people, so generous person, one classifier. Okay, pronouns in Gua, a nice set of basic Gua pronouns, and like other minority languages in Tbiliburma and minority languages spoken in Nomar, but less common around many in Southeast Asia, Gua contrasts, has some dual pronouns and inclusive, exclusive, and second person pronouns. There's the full set, kinship words as pronouns again, so like Burmese and other Southeast Asian languages, Gua uses words like grandfather, grandmother, brother-in-law, and uses some pronouns to refer to, plural pronouns to refer to singular addresses, but otherwise you don't find in Gua this sort of diglossic development of the language with a more basic and a more formal register. Tense mode aspect, so like Chinese, like other Southeast Asian languages, you have these pre-verbal morphemes, as I said in the video, so there's a perfected marker, a negative marker, experiential, remote past marker, so heart corresponds quite closely to the function of look in Chinese, so okay, modals, there are high frequency, partly grammaticalized verbs, so the verb to own is redeployed in grammaticalized form as a possessive to receive these uses can, so like Chinese, like pronouns, like time, but to see, to try and do something is see and do it, to this causative, benefactive verb to give that happens in Gua, the verb top, progressive with ought to live, so that's like, so lots in parallel with, as you'd expect, with neighboring languages of different language factors. Right, and that's it, so a little romp through some highlights of Gua for you, here are some references, do get in touch if you're interested in Gua, there is much more to read and learn about Gua and its dialects and related languages from Northern Monkmae, Palang languages and that's all, thank you very much for listening.