Japhug language

Japhug is a Gyalrong language spoken in Barkam County, Rngaba, Sichuan, China, in the three townships of Gdong-brgyad (Chinese: 龙尔甲; pinyin: Lóng'rjiǎ, Japhug IPA: [ʁdɯrɟɤt]), Gsar-rdzong (Chinese: 沙尔宗; pinyin: Shā'rzōng, Japhug IPA: [sarndzu]) and Da-tshang (Chinese: 大藏; pinyin: Dàzàng, Japhug IPA: [tatsʰi]).

Japhug
IPA: [kɯrɯ skɤt]
PronunciationIPA: [tɕɤpʰɯ]
Native toChina
RegionSichuan
Language codes
ISO 639-3(included in jya)
Glottologjaph1234[1]

The endonym of the Japhug language is IPA: [kɯrɯ skɤt]. The name Japhug IPA: [tɕɤpʰɯ] (Chinese: 茶堡; pinyin: Chábǎo) refers in Japhug to the area comprising Gsar-rdzong and Da-tshang, while that of Gdong-brgyad is also known as IPA: [sɤŋu] (Jacques 2004), but speakers of Situ Gyalrong use this name to refer to the whole Japhug-speaking area.

Phonology

Japhug is the only toneless Gyalrong language. It has 49 consonants and seven vowels.

Consonants
Labial Dental Alveolar Retroflex Alveopalatal Palatal Velar Uvular
Occlusive nasal m n ɲ ŋ
prenasalized mb nd ndz ndʐ ndʑ ɲɟ ŋɡ ɴɢ
voiced b d dz dʐ dʑ ɟ ɡ
voiceless p t ts tʂ tɕ c k q
aspirated pʰ tʰ tsʰ tʂʰ tɕʰ cʰ kʰ qʰ
Continuant voiced w l z r ʑ j ɣ ʁ
voiceless ɬ s ʂ ɕ x χ

The phoneme /w/ has the allophones [β] and [f].

The phoneme /ʁ/ is realized as an epiglottal fricative in the coda or preceding another consonant.

The prenasalized consonants are analyzed as units for two reasons. First, there is a phoneme /ɴɢ/, as in /ɴɢoɕna/ "large spider", but neither /ɴ/ nor /ɢ/ exist as independent phonemes. Second, there are clusters of fricatives and prenasalized voiced stops, as in /ʑmbri/ "willow", but never clusters of fricatives and prenasalized voiceless stops.

Japhug distinguishes between palatal plosives and velar plosive + j sequences, as in /co/ "valley" vs. /kjo/ "drag". These both contrast with alveolo-palatal affricates.

There are at least 339 consonant clusters in Japhug (Jacques 2008:29), more than in Old Tibetan or in most Indo-European languages. Some of these clusters are typologically unusual: in addition to the previously mentioned clusters of fricatives and prenasalized stops, there are clusters where the first element as a semivowel, as in /jla/ "hybrid of a yak and a cow".

Vowels

Japhug has eight vowel phonemes: a, o, u, ɤ, ɯ, y, e and i. The vowel y is attested in only one native word (/qaɟy/ "fish") and its derivatives, but appears in Chinese loanwords.

Grammar

Jacques (2008) is a short grammar and Jacques and Chen (2010) a text collection with interlinear glosses. Other studies on morphosyntax include Jacques (2010) on Direct–inverse marking, Jacques (2012a) on valency (passive, antipassive, anticausative, lability etc.), Jacques (2012b) on incorporation and Jacques (2013) on associated motion.

gollark: Unfortunately, nobody knows what ideal human morals are - or, well, everyone knows different ones - and they'd be hard to implement anyway.
gollark: That will* work.
gollark: Empathy is insensitive to scale and focuses on emotionally salient issues. This is undesirable.
gollark: That's during training - after this you can just use the giant matrices of inscrutable data to process an input directly.
gollark: It uses gradient descent. It basically nudges the parameters slightly in the direction that makes it do better on the current input.

References
  1. Hammarström, Harald; Forkel, Robert; Haspelmath, Martin, eds. (2017). "Japhug". Glottolog 3.0. Jena, Germany: Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History.
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