[Rgyalrong] Question about orthography

Wed Jan 19 19:04:35 UTC 2022

Dear Yulha and all,

Before posting this thread, Yulha discussed with me several times about it.
The fundamental problem that confused Yulha is how we treat the allophones
in preinitial positions. The proposal of Yulha was to use འ to represent
the phoneme /N-/ which assimilates to the place of articulation of the
following consonants, but to use different symbols to represent other
allophones: for instance, ས for sC- and ཟ for zC-.

According to this convention, we have:
འད་ ndɑ vs འག་ ŋgɑ (both with འ)
but:
སྤ་ spɑ vs ཟྦ་   zbɑ (with different letters for the same preinitial /S-/)

In my opinion, a consistent writing system should have avoided different
treatments for phonemes of the same nature (in this case, preinitial). In
this regard, I roughly agree with Jesse's solution. I would use ས for both
spɑ and zbɑ, and the same Tibetan letters for the other pairs of
allophones.

Best,

Missatge de Joanna Bialek <jbialek108 at gmail.com> del dia dc., 19 de gen.
2022 a les 16:46:

> 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 ཧདི or འདི, 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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>
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>
> --
> Dr. Joanna Bialek
> Zentralasien-Seminar
> Institut für Asien- und Afrikawissenschaften
> Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin
>
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-- 
Yunfan Lai
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