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A phonological history of Amdo Tibetan rhymes*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  08 June 2016

Xun Gong
Xun Gong*
Affiliation:
Centre de recherches linguistiques sur l'Asie orientale, INALCO/CNRS/EHESS
*
[email protected]
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Abstract

In this study, a reconstruction is offered for the phonetic evolution of rhymes from Old Tibetan to modern-day Amdo Tibetan dialects. The relevant sound changes are proposed, along with their relative chronological precedence and the dating of some specific changes. Most interestingly, although Amdo Tibetan, identically to its ancestor Old Tibetan, does not have phonemic length, this study shows that Amdo Tibetan derives from an intermediate stage which, like many other Tibetan dialects, does make the distinction.

Keywords

Amdo TibetanOld TibetanHistorical phonologyVowel lengthRelative dating
Type
Articles
Information
Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies , Volume 79 , Issue 2 , June 2016 , pp. 347 - 374
Copyright
Copyright © SOAS, University of London 2016 

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Footnotes

*

This work is funded by the HimalCo project (ANR-12-CORP-0006) and is related to the research strands PPC2 “Evolutionary approaches to phonology: New goals and new methods (in diachrony and panchrony)” and LR-4.11 “Automatic paradigm generation and language description” of the Labex EFL (funded by the ANR/CGI). I would like to thank Guillaume Jacques and two anonymous reviewers for various suggestions which resulted in a more readable and better-argued paper.

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