[Rgyalrong] Question about orthography

Wed Jan 19 15:46:19 UTC 2022

Dear Yulha, Dear Jesse,

Being completely ignorant on Gyalrongic languages, I wish to add one 
aspect to the discussion.

For a community that is already acquainted with written Tibetan, using 
Tibetan signs once in accordance with Tibetan rules, once against the 
rules (suggestion made by Jesse for ག/ད), may bring too much confusion 
for the system to be efficiently used. But nothing restricts the use of 
Tibetan alphabet to Tibetan orthography. Why not considering e.g. 
letters like ཨ or ཧ (or even འ, restricting མ to all nasal preinitials) 
for preinitial consonants unknown in Tibetic languages? The letters are 
not used in this position in written Tibetan so that no confusion would 
result. You could also consider to write them as superscripts: ཧྡི or ^ཧ 
དི or ^འ དི, although for that you would probably need a new font.

With best wishes,

Joanna

On 2022-01-18 09:39, Jesse P. Gates wrote:
> Dear Yulha,
>
> I too (along with native speakers) have been struggling to find 
> answers for an orthographic representation using the Tibetan script 
> for Stau, a sister language to your beautiful Khroskyabs.
>
> I think འ་ is a good choice for non-bilabial preinitials (nd, nt, ntʰ, 
> ŋg, ŋk, ŋkʰ, etc.) and for bilabial preintials before labials. We have 
> chosen to use མ་ as the bilabial nasal preinitial before non-labials 
> (m- is a distinctive preinitial phoneme in Stau and Khroskyabs). This 
> choice is phonological and sociolinguistic (following Tibetan). I 
> think these sociolinguistic factors need to be considered; because of 
> the large number of loanwords from Tibetan in Stau and Khroskyabs, and 
> since Tibetan is a dominant language, and many speakers learn Tibetan 
> spelling rules.
>
> For ʁ/χ, we could use just one grapheme to represent this phoneme, 
> since in Stau, like Khroskyabs, we have voicing assimilation depending 
> on the initial consonant. However, I have decided to follow Sakya 
> Pandita's Law, which is ག་ before accutes (palatals and dentals) and 
> ད་ before graves (labials and velars), again because of 
> sociolinguistic reasons; since the large number of Tibetan loanwords 
> obey this, but also because it works phonologically. This then 
> provides an interesting solution for ɣ/x: we can reverse Sakya 
> Pandita's Law and so that when ག་ occurs before graves it is ɣ/x and 
> when it occurs before accutes it is ʁ/χ. The same goes for ད་: when 
> occurring before accutes it is ɣ/x, and before graves it is ʁ/χ. This 
> doesn't entirely solve the whole problem in terms of sociolinguistic 
> acceptability; for example, while /ʁdi /'erroneous' would be written 
> གདི་ and abides by Tibetan spelling rule, /ɣdi/ 'flat' would be 
> written དདི་, which breaks Tibetan spelling rules. Fortunately, we 
> don't have ɣ- before velars, so we can avoid something like གགུ་ for *ɣgə.
>
> v/f can simply be represented with བ་. This follows the voicing 
> assimilation rule and is satisfactory sociolinguistically for the most 
> part, but there are some collocation clashes for Tibetan spelling rules.
>
> s/z can simply be represented with ས་. There are still some problems 
> for this with Stau because there are minimal pairs with nasal initials 
> and palatal approximate initials. We can discuss this further if you 
> like.
>
> I'm not sure about l/ɬ, because we don't have this in Stau as a 
> phonemic preinitial. I guess if you are in the spirit of breaking 
> spelling rules, then why not ལ་.
>
> So as you can see, and to answer your question, I think you should 
> just represent a single phoneme as a single phoneme (the "underlying 
> form"). You are going to have a hard enough time finding acceptable 
> spellings just for that.
>
> I'm interested in your decisions; it will help in making decisions 
> with the Stau community since these two languages have so much 
> overlap. We really need to sit down over some butter tea and hammer 
> this out at some point.
>
> --
> Best regards,
>
> *Jesse P. Gates, PhD
> *Nankai University, School of Literature 南开大学文学院
> https://nankai.academia.edu/JesseGates
>
> On Mon, Jan 17, 2022 at 4:49 PM Yu Lha <abayina at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>     Hello all,
>
>
>     I have been working on an orthography for my mother tongue
>     Khroskyabs and I ran into a difficulty regarding the ‘depth’ of
>     orthography, meaning the level of linguistic structure to
>     represent orthographically.  I have been consulting with Yunfan
>     and I am hoping to get your insights on this.
>
>
>     The orthography is based on Tibetan alphabets which the speakers
>     are already familiar with. The question that I ran into is whether
>     or not to reflect allophonic contrasts with different graphemes.
>
>
>     There are both pros and cons for either way. With my priority
>     being language revitalization with high learnability, I am even
>     thinking about combining both systems to maximize the
>     sound-spelling transparency while simplifying some allophones with
>     existing Tibetan preintials.
>
>
>     The allophonic variation cases:
>
>     pre-initial allophonic nasal: mb, mpʰ, mp, nd, nt, ntʰ, ŋg, ŋk,
>     ŋkʰ(For this contrast, I decided to use འ)
>
>     Other pre-initial cases: <ʁ χ> , <ɣ x>, <v f>, <l ɬ>,<s z>
>
>
>     Any suggestions on how to represent the distinction between
>     surface and underlying forms orthographically is appreciated.
>
>
>
>     Best,
>
>     Yulha
>
>
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-- 
Dr. Joanna Bialek
Zentralasien-Seminar
Institut für Asien- und Afrikawissenschaften
Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin
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