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『嘉戎語文法研究』待望の英訳版！　
嘉戎語＝rGyalrong＝ギャロン語は、チベット・ビルマ系語派の「生きた化石」と言われ、中国四川省北部の山岳地帯に残る言語。本書はその精密な分析に加え、基礎語彙1567語と本文と連動した200例文、日常表現260の音声を収録したCD-ROMを付す。

This book is a descriptive grammar of the Bola dialect of Gyarong (rgyal rong in Written Tibetan) language. rGyalrong is one of the Tibeto-Burman languages spoken in the northwestern part of Sichuan Province, China. It shares some characteristics with several subgroups of the Tibeto-Burman family and thus is considered to be one of link languages that connect languages that have genetic relations among them. While existing link languages are diverse in type, many of them still retain their ancient forms at different levels, and their descriptions are thought to be indispensable for the reconstruction of Proto-Tibeto-Burman. The rGyalrong area has had close connections with Tibet, both historically and culturally. Especially, this area is known for its religious importance, as it served as a major shelter for Bon followers and produced many great Tibetan Buddhist scholars. Consequently, many written Tibetan words along with Tibetan affixes were incorporated into the language spoken by the rGyalrong people. Under this situation, the rGyalrong language has long attracted many scholars’ attention in terms of both its historical position and its complicated morphosyntactic mechanisms that might be comparable to Proto-Tibeto-Burman. This book will describe the morphosyntax of the language in details and examine its genetic relation among the Tibeto-Burman languages.

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Preface


This book is a descriptive grammar of the Bola (WT ’bo la: 莫拉) dialect of rGyalrong [ʥɑ34 roŋ44 ~ ɟa34 roŋ44] language. It is spelled rgyal rong in Written Tibetan and 嘉戎/嘉絨 in Chinese. rGyalrong is one of the Tibeto-Burman languages spoken in the northwestern part of Sichuan Province in the People’s Republic of China. It shares some characteristics with several subgroups of the Tibeto-Burman family and thus is considered to be one of link languages that connect languages that have genetic relations among them. While existing link languages are diverse in type, many of them still retain their ancient forms at different levels, and their descriptions are thought to be indispensable for the reconstruction of Proto-Tibeto-Burman. The rGyalrong area has had close connections with Tibet, both historically and culturally. Especially, this area is known for its religious importance, as it served as a major shelter for Bon followers and produced many great Tibetan Buddhist scholars. Mainly for this reason, many written Tibetan words along with Tibetan affixes were incorporated into the language spoken by the rGyalrong people. For this reason, the rGyalrong language was once considered to represent an ancient form of Tibetan. However, Wolfenden (1929, 1936) and consequent studies denied any direct genetic relation between Tibetan and rGyalrong based on the analysis of a larger inventory of lexical items collected, while discovering the fact that rGyalrong retains lexical forms and morphosyntactic mechanisms as old as those of Proto-Tibeto-Burman, and that a number of its grammatical characteristics, such as its sophisticated personal affix system and their agreement can be thought to have been invented in later times. Also, the theory that rGyalrong shares a common origin with the Qiangic languages, not with Tibetan, is now widely accepted. These studies rely on two methods – comparison of basic vocabularies and analysis of verb structures in terms of morpho-syntax. The former is a generally used method in historical linguistic studies while the latter is unique to rGyalrong studies, which helps us to recognize the developmental role of a number of affixes and precisely identify the grammatical meanings of rGyalrong verb phrases. In rGyalrong, highly complex, yet well-structured syntactic rules are working, and these rules in turn provide important clues in the study of the Proto-Tibeto-Burman syntax. For this reason, many of the preceding rGyalrong studies have focused on the analysis of verb structure.

In 1980, I conducted an intensive survey of the Cogtse (WT lcog rtse: 卓克基) dialect in Kathmandu City, assisted by Mr. Gyarong Jambum (WT rgyal rong rgyal ’bum), a native speaker of the dialect, and based on the findings of this survey, published a monograph on the verb structure of the dialect (Nagano 1984, 2003). As the first monograph that analyzes the structure of verb phrases in terms of hierarchical locations and meanings of affixes, I may say this monograph made a certain contribution to rGyalrong studies, but both my analysis and interpretation remained incomplete, because data collected were insufficient for in-depth consideration. Furthermore, Mr. Gyarong Jambum left Kathmandu and returned home immediately after the intensive survey and he passed away at Cogtse several years later, making it impossible for me to conduct a follow-up survey. Of course, visiting the rGyalrong-speaking area for an on-site survey was simply out of the question due to the entry ban imposed on foreigners back in those days. In 1989, the Chinese government lifted the ban in part and allowed foreigners to travel up to Maerkang (WT ’bar khams: 馬尔康), the capital of Aba Tibetan and Qiang Autonomous Prefecture (阿壩藏族羌族自治州), but various procedural difficulties prevented me from visiting there. Unable to conduct an additional survey, I began preparing for a complete review of the above-mentioned monograph when I heard that three Bon priests from the rGyalrong-speaking area were studying at Triten Norbutse (WT khri bstan nor bu rtse) Monastery, a Bon-learning temple located in Kathmandu City, with which I had a connection through the Bon Study Project of the National Museum of Ethnology. Two of these priests were from Bola, located 9 km west of Cogtse, and one was from Somo (WT so mang: 梭磨), located 17 km east of Cogtse. As rGyalrong native speakers, they were ideal research subjects. I chose to partner with Reverend Sherap Lekden (WT shes rab legs ldan) to study the Bola dialect, which is considered to share some linguistic features with the Cogtse dialect I studied before. Since 1998, I have visited him for a few weeks every summer. Reverend Sherap Lekden completed his study in Kathmandu in 2002 and returned to Bola, where he has continued to work with me in my intermittent surveys along with scholar priests of Bola Monastery with which he is affiliated. Today, the environment that surrounds the rGyalrong language is fraught with many uncertainties. In 1956, under a nationwide ethnic identification project, the rGyalrong people chose to be classified as being of Tibetan ethnicity due to their greater affinity for the Tibetan culture, especially in the religious field. Their sense of being different from the Qiang was strong, and reportedly, it was proposed to add “rGyalrong” as a new ethnic category. Eventually, they elected to be part of the Tibetan ethnicity to avoid being confined to a small minority group.

Consequently, “rGyalrong” was not established as an independent ethnic group (少数民族). The rGyalrong people do not have a writing system of their own. Several ways to write the rGyalrong language using the Tibetan alphabet were proposed and these proposals were adopted by some, but none of them have been widespread among the rGyalrong people. Today, rGyalrong is not taught at school, and Chinese is the only language used in public communications. As a result, rGyalrong is now spoken only among family members or residents of small local communities. Recently, the number of rGyalrong people, especially in the younger age group, who do not understand rGyalrong and speak only Chinese is increasing, and it is often the case that even native rGyalrong speakers have to use Chinese to communicate with their children. This is fully understandable considering the complexity of the rGyalrong language and the overwhelming advantage of the Chinese language, both socially and economically, but I cannot help feeling very sorry that the number of speakers of this difficult yet beautiful language is rapidly decreasing and this valuable historical product is at the risk of being lost forever. A decline in linguistic diversity is a huge loss to our culture. My research collaborators are also deeply concerned about the current situation surrounding the rGyalrong language and culture, and due to fear that this language may go extinct in the near future, hope to pass the record of rGyalrong, along with audio data, onto future generations. By conducting long-term descriptive linguistic studies on-site, though intermittently, I have been able to collect more precise data of the rGyalrong language. At the same time, linguistic typological research has achieved exponential progress over the past thirty years, with new concepts and theories being introduced still now. To shed light on how verb phrases are formed and how affixes function in rGyalrong, I need to apply findings from linguistic typology. In this book, therefore, I base my analysis on not only recently published monographs on rGyalrong studies but also the latest possible knowledge from linguistic typological studies. While I cannot say definitely that the discussion in this book fully reflects the up-to-date theory of linguistic typology, I at least aim to present a kind of reference grammar of the language by showing a variety of sample sentences, and for this purpose, include a basic glossary and two kinds of example sentences (along with an audio CD-ROM) in this book. Also, I gave no annotations in this book following the editing style of Acta Linguistica Hafniensia. It would be my greatest pleasure if this book could make some modest contribution to the progress of rGyalrong studies and historical research on Tibeto-Burman languages.

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著者紹介
Yasuhiko Nagano, born 1946, earned a PhD in Linguistics from University of California, Berkeley, and is a professor emeritus of linguistics at the National Museum of Ethnology, Japan. He has published books and articles on Tibetan, rGyalrong and typological phenomena of Tibeto-Burman languages. He is also known as the editor of Bon Studies series.