The Phonology of a Gyarong Dialect

The Phonology of a Gyarong Dialect

The Gyarong dialect whose phonological system I describe here is that spoken in Tzuta, a village formerly in the Lifan district of Szechuan (it is now in the district of Li in the Szechuan Autonomous Region for the Tibetans). I collected the material cited in 1943, while working in a research project headed by Professor Fang-kuei Li at Yenching University. (Ch'engtu). This dialect has twelve stops (k, kh, g, ṭ, ṭh, ḍ, t, th, d, p, ph, b), ten fricatives (h, š, ž, ṣ, ẓ, r, s, ẓ, ɫ, l), four nasals (ŋ, ň, n, m), two semivowels (j, w), and five vowels (i, e, a, o, u) . I cannot say whether tones are phonemic. When confronted with what seemed to be homonyms, my informant made distinctions on the basis of tone, e. g. temňa 'eye' with high level tones on both syllables, temňa 'steamed bread' with mid level tones on both syllables, and termi 'man' with high level tones on both syllables, termi 'a name', with high tone on the first syllable and high falling tone on the second. In connected texts, however, the tones vary, and I have been unable to correlate this variation with anything in the surrounding environment.