| She language in Zengcheng is mainly distributed in the She Village of Zhengguo Town,Zengcheng District,Guangdong Province.It belongs to the Miao-Yao language family of the Sino-Tibetan language family.According to UNESCO’s "Language Vitality and Language Endangerment" indicator,She language is a critically endangered language.In terms of phonology,She language in Zengcheng has no voiced stop initials,but has alveolar-palatal voiced fricative "(?)" and labiodental voiced fricative "v".The finals are simple.There are monophonicthe finals "i,u,a,ε,?",and there is no final "y".The vowels are not long or short.Most of the syllables at the beginning of the vowel are preceded by the glottal stop"(?)".The nasal finals have "n" and "?",and there is no "m".The stop finals only exist in loanwords.There are two kinds of tones:Shu tone and Promoting tone.The Shu tone is the inherent tone of She language,and the Promoting tone is only found in loanwords.There are self-formed syllables "m","?" and "??".There are three main types of tone sandhi in She language.First,when the first syllable of a two-syllable word is in the 4th tone,the tone changes,and the following syllables remain unchanged.The second is the derivative words with the prefixes "ka-" and "ta-",and the prefixes change in pitch to adapt to the matching of the high and low rhythm of the tones of She language words.The third is that when the overlapping phrase(A+a24+A)with the negative word "a24" becomes a double syllable word after omitting the negative word,the tone of the preceding syllable becomes the same tone as the negative word.This is because the tone is still attached to compensate and replace the tone of the preceding syllable after the negative word is omitted.In terms of lexicon,about 70%of She language in Zengcheng are inherent words,and about 30%are loan words.There are also a considerable number of inherent words in the basic vocabulary,especially the core things and concept words in daily life are mostly monosyllabic root words,such as "kua?42,ta33,3?42,t??44,lu?42" and so on.Loanwords are mainly from Hakka.Some are borrowed entirely,and some are borrowed in half,and the loanwords in the past two decades are mainly from Cantonese.The word formation of She language in Zengcheng include synthetic method,derivation method and overlapping method.The derivation method mainly adds prefixes "ka-","ta-","a-","mε-","pε-" and suffixes "-k?","ta?","-mε" to form words.In addition,there is an infix“-tε-",which only appears in words of human body parts.When "mε-"and "pε-" are used as prefixes,they are mainly gender markers,and when "-mε" is used as suffix,they are semantic blurring and generalization,which means big or expresses a high degree of meaning,such as "lu?45mε24,ku33mε24".The suffix "-k?"refers to certain categories of things in general,and "-ta?" refers to small and diminutive meaning.Comparing the phonemic systems of She languages in Zengcheng and Boluo,Huidong and Haifeng,it is found that the number of initials and tones of She languages in four places are almost the same,and the phonemes are very close.The difference in the finals is Huidong,and there are more finals borrowed from Chinese.Judging from the phonetic correspondence of the She languages in the four places,most morphemes have obvious and neat correspondences in their initials,finals,and tones.Among them,Zengcheng-Boluo and Haifeng-Huidong show higher correspondence.In addition,within the Haifeng-Huidong group,there is also a special phonetic phenomenon in which the opening-ending syllables in front of disyllabic words become stop-endings due to inverse assimilation.This indicates that the She language has undergone some respective evolution and differentiation in different regions.Through the tonal correspondence of She languages in four places,it is also found that in the two-syllable words of She language in Zengcheng,the phenomenon of "44→22" is a kind of "rise and fall rhythmically" syllable pattern.Restricted by this pattern,some characters originally belonged to the The 5-tone reading "22" becomes "44" when they are spoken singly.However,the tones of these characters are actually not their original tones,but are produced by single-speaking emphasis on pragmatics.The so-called "tone sandhi" of the word is its original tone.Based on the comparison and statistics of Swadesh List in She language,it is found that more than 88%of She language words retain traditional and inherent expressions.Among them,about 47.54%of the homologous words in the four places have the same sound and meaning,and about 36.61%with the same sound and similar meaning.The proportion of homologous words between the four places reached 85%.Among them,Zengcheng-Boluo and HaifengHuidong formed an obvious cluster of two groups with a high proportion(over 96%).Judging from the morpheme similarity of She language vocabulary in the four places,the proportion of words containing the same or similar morphemes between any two She languages has reached 88%,and among the six pairs of relationships,the lexical similarity of Zengcheng-Boluo and Haifeng-Huidong also shows obvious two-group clustering,which is as high as 95%,and this is about 10%higher than that of the other four pairs.According to the actual observation and experience of She language in the four places,we also found that among the She people in Zengcheng and Boluo,they can communicate with each other in their own She language without any problems even people who have never met each other.The same is true of the She people in Haifeng and Huidong.However,if the She people from Zengcheng-Boluo or Haifeng-Huidong have never met each other or heard each other’s She language,there will be difficulty talking and understanding.In fact,the She people in these two places do not speak She-language but Hakka in their usual correspondence or festival gatherings with each other.The results of comparative analysis on the phonetic similarity,lexical homology rate,morpheme similarity and verbal intercommunication of She language within the She ethnic group can further prove that She language is divided into Luofu dialect(Zengcheng-Boluo)and Lianhua dialect(Haifeng-Huidong),which is in line with the historical evolution and reality of She language. |
PDF Full Text Request