Tangut language

Since the 2010s, Tangutologists have commonly classified Tangut as a Qiangic or Gyalrongic language. On the basis of both morphological and lexical evidence, Lai et al. (2020) classify Tangut as a West Gyalrongic language. Beaudouin (2023a,b) showed that Tangut was a Horpa language, a subgroup of West Gyalrongic. He hypothesizes a position between the Northern (Stodsde) and Central (Stau, Geshiza) lects, proposing a tentative Urheimat around the place where the Erkai variety is spoken today within Ngawa, Sichuan, China. ==Rediscovery==

Modern research into the Tangut languages began in the late 19th century and early 20th century when S. W. Bushell, Gabriel Devéria, and Georges Morisse separately published decipherments of a number of Tangut characters found on Western Xia coins, in a Chinese–Tangut bilingual inscription on a stele at Wuwei, Gansu, and in a copy of the Tangut translation of the Lotus Sutra. The majority of extant Tangut texts were excavated at Khara-Khoto in 1909 by Pyotr Kozlov, and the script was identified as that of the Tangut state of Xixia. Such scholars as Aleksei Ivanovich Ivanov, Ishihama Juntaro (), Berthold Laufer, Luo Fuchang (), Luo Fucheng (), and Wang Jingru () have contributed to research on the Tangut language. The most significant contribution was made by the Russian scholar Nikolai Aleksandrovich Nevsky (1892–1937), who compiled the first Tangut dictionary and reconstructed the meaning of a number of Tangut grammatical particles, thus making it possible to actually read and understand Tangut texts. His scholarly achievements were published posthumously in 1960 under the title Tangutskaya Filologiya (Tangut Philology), and the scholar was eventually (and posthumously) awarded the Soviet Lenin Prize for his work. The understanding of the Tangut language is far from perfect: although certain aspects of the morphology (Ksenia Kepping, The Morphology of the Tangut Language, Moscow: Nauka, 1985) and grammar (Tatsuo Nishida, Seika go no kenkyū, etc.) are understood, the syntactic structure of Tangut remains largely unexplored. The Khara-Khoto documents are at present preserved in the Institute of Oriental Manuscripts of the Russian Academy of Sciences in Saint Petersburg. These survived the Siege of Leningrad, but a number of manuscripts in the possession of Nevsky at the time of his arrest by the People's Commissariat for Internal Affairs (NKVD) in 1937 went missing, and were returned, under mysterious circumstances, to the Institute of Oriental Manuscripts only in October 1991. The collections amount to about 10,000 volumes, of mostly Buddhist texts, law codes, and legal documents dating from mid-11th up to early 13th centuries. Among the Buddhist texts, a number of unique compilations, not known either in Chinese or in Tibetan versions, were recently discovered. Furthermore, the Buddhist canon, the Chinese classics, and a great number of indigenous texts written in Tangut have been preserved. These other major Tangut collections, though much smaller, belong to the British Library, the French National Library (''), the National Library in Beijing, the Library of Beijing University, and other libraries. ==Reconstruction==

The connection between the writing and the pronunciation of the Tangut language is even more tenuous than that between Chinese writing and the modern Chinese varieties. Thus although in Chinese more than 90% of the characters possess a phonetic element, this proportion is limited to about 10% in Tangut according to Sofronov. The reconstruction of Tangut pronunciation must resort to other sources. '' The discovery of the Pearl in the Palm, a Tangut–Chinese bilingual glossary, permitted Ivanov (1909) and Laufer (1916) to propose initial reconstructions and to undertake the comparative study of Tangut. This glossary in effect indicates the pronunciation of each Tangut character with one or several Chinese characters, and inversely each Chinese character with one or more Tangut characters. The second source is the corpus of Tibetan transcriptions of Tangut. These data were studied for the first time by Nevsky (Nevskij) (1925). Though these transcriptions were not written with the intention of representing with precision the pronunciation of Tangut, but instead simply to help foreigners to pronounce and memorize the words of one language with the words of another which they could understand. The third source, which constitutes the basis of the modern reconstructions, consists of monolingual Tangut dictionaries: the Wenhai (), two editions of the Tongyin (), the Wenhai zalei (), and an untitled dictionary. The record of the pronunciation in these dictionaries is made using the principle of fǎnqiè, borrowed from the Chinese lexicographic tradition. Although these dictionaries may differ on small details (e.g. the Tongyin categorizes the characters according to syllable initial and rime without taking any account of tone), they all adopt the same system of 105 rimes. A certain number of rimes are in complementary distribution with respect to the place of articulation of the initials, e.g. rimes 10 and 11 or rimes 36 and 37. Fǎnqiè makes distinctions among the rhymes in a systematic and precise manner. Nonetheless, it is still necessary to compare the phonological system of the dictionaries with the other sources in order to "fill in" the categories with a phonetic value. Nikolai Nevsky reconstructed Tangut grammar and provided the first Tangut–Chinese–English–Russian dictionary, which together with the collection of his papers was published posthumously in 1960 under the title Tangut Philology (Moscow: 1960). Later, substantial contribution to the research of Tangut language was done by , Ksenia Kepping, Gong Hwang-cherng (), , and Li Fanwen (). Marc Miyake has published on Tangut phonology and diachronics. There are five Tangut dictionaries available: the one composed by Nevsky, one composed by Nishida (1966), one composed by Li (1997, revised edition 2008), one composed by Yevgeny Kychanov (2006), and one composed by Han Xiaomang () (2021). Modern refinements to Tangut reconstruction leverage a new type of data that was unavailable to previous scholars: the phonology of modern Gyalrongic languages. ==Phonology==

The Tangut syllable has a CV structure and carries one of two distinctive tones, flat () or rising (). Following the tradition of Chinese phonological analysis the Tangut syllable is divided into initial () and rhyme () (i.e. the remaining syllable minus the initial). Initials The initials are divided into the following categories: Rhymes The rhyme books distinguish 105 rhymes, which are, in turn, classified in several ways: division/grade (), type (), and class (). Tangut rhymes occur in three types (). They are seen in the tradition of Nishida, followed by both Arakawa and Gong HC as 'normal' (), 'tense' (), and 'retroflex' (). Gong HC leaves normal vowels unmarked and places a dot under tense vowels and an -r after retroflex vowels. Arakawa differs only by indicating tense vowels with a final -q. The rhyme books distinguish four vowel grades (). In early phonetic reconstructions, all four were separately accounted for, but it has since been realized that grades three and four are in complementary distribution, depending on the initial. Consequently, the reconstructions of Arakawa and Gong HC do not account for this distinction. Gong HC represents these three grades as V, iV, and jV. Arakawa accounts for them as V, iV, and V. In general, rhyme class () corresponds to the set of all rhymes under the same rhyme type which have the same main vowel. Some rhymes appear twice within the same class in the rhyme books which have otherwise indistinguishable values in the transcriptions. Gong HC labels these rhymes as series 1 and 2, and posits this distinction as phonemic vowel length, pointing to evidence that indicates that Tangut had a distinction that Chinese lacked. Examining Sino-Tangut pronunciations and Sanskrit transcriptions, Gong X instead proposed that the distinction instead comes from presence or absence of a nasal preinitial. Below is a list of the 105 rhymes along with their classifications: In Miyake's reconstruction, the 95 vowels of Tangut formed from a six-vowel system in Pre-Tangut because of preinitial loss. (The two vowels in parentheses appeared only in loanwords from Chinese, and many of the vowels in class III were in complementary distribution with their equivalents in class IV.) The classes here are related to those of Chinese rime tables. Tones Gong Xun (2025) recostructed the flat tone as a high-falling tone /HL/ and the rising tone as a mid-level tone /M/. The paradoxical tone names and their respective contour are thought to have been the result of a tonal reversal process, and cognates between Tangut and other Qiangic languages are observed to correspond quite symmetrically, with the Tangut syllables usually in the opposite pitch of those in the Qiangic languages. ==Morphosyntax==

Tangut clause syntax prefers the subject–object–verb order. Like Chinese, the Tangut NP places numeral and classifier before the noun. Verbs Like other Gyalrongic languages, Tangut verbs are highly synthetic with many different morphological slots. The general verb template is shown in the table below: In Tangut texts, only few instances of syntactic noun incorporation are attested: the head is final, since it doesn’t move, the directional marker serves as adverb; transitive verbs can absorb the object, but not the subject. In other Qiangic languages that possess high levels of pronominalization such as Japhug and Khroskyabs, NI is still a more syntactically productive process with widespread uses. {{fs interlinear|lang=txg|indent = 3|glossing = link Agreement Like other Gyalrongic languages, agreement in Tangut is sensitive to both the subject and object. In Tangut, two parts of the verb are sensitive to agreement, the person suffix (slot -1) and the verb stem itself (verbal core). For intransitive verbs, only the person suffix is relevant where it agrees with the subject of the verb. As for transitive verbs, verbs generally agree with the absolutive argument except if the absolutive argument is 3rd person and the ergative is 1st or 2nd person. In these situations, the suffix instead agrees with the ergative argument. Cells coloured in green not only involve the person suffix but also involve alternations of the stems from the basic stem A to stem B. This stem alternation pattern originates from a 3rd person object suffix of the form *-w as is also found in other Sino-Tibetan languages. In general, stem alternation involves changing the vowel of the stem in a pattern shown as below. Tense Some verbs display an alternation unrelated to person, encoding a non-past/past distinction. The non-past stems can be used in non-finite contexts as action nominals, functional infinitives, or in clause chaining. The past stem is always prefixed by a perfective preverb, except for "to come", and post-verbal occurrences of "to go", which may indicate a different part of speech. ==See also==