LINGUIST List 2.435

Sun 25 Aug 1991

Disc: Dialect, Games, Clicks

Editor for this issue: <>

Directory

1. , Language = Dialect + Army/Navy
2. Marjorie K M Chan, Language Games
3. Allan C. Wechsler, Clicks -- response

This probably won't help clarify the issue much, but at the U. of Chicago,
where I went to school, this equation is attributed to Edward Sapir.

For those interested, there have so far been very few sources on the
so-called "fanqie spelling" language games in different Chinese dialects.
These include the following, the most widely cited being Y.R. Chao's 1931
article written in Chinese:
Chao, Yuen Ren. 1931. "Fanqie yu ba zhong" [Eight varieties of secret
	languages]. Bulletin of the Institute of History and Philology
	2.3:312-354.
Li, P. 1985. "A secret language in Taiwanese." Journal of Chinese
	Linguistics 13.1:91-120. (In English)
One or both of these sources are used for analyses within current
theoretical frameworks in:
Bao, Z. 1990. "Fanqie languages and reduplication." Linguistic Inquiry
	21.3:317-397.
Chan, Marjorie. (forthcoming) "Fuzhou glottal stop: floating segment
	or correlation of close contact?" Jialing Wang and Norval
	Smith (eds.). Studies in Chinese Phonology. Dordrecht:
	Foris Publication. (short bit on Fuzhou secret language)
Duanmu, San. 1990. A formal study of syllable, tone, stress and domain
	in Chinese languages. MIT diss.
Lin, Yen-hwei. 1989. Autosegmental treaatment of segmental processes
	in Chinese phonology. U. of Texas at Austin Ph.D. diss.
	(includes an entire chapter on Taiwanese secret language)
Yip, Moira. 1982. "Reduplication and C-V skelta in Chinese secret
	languages." Linguistic Inquiry 13.4:637-661.
Only Lin (1989) uses Paul Li's source on Taiwanese as well as Chao's source.
The others concentrate on Chao's source for the different varieties of
fanqie secret languages.
					marjorie_chanosu.edu

I can contribute one datum in response to Stuart Spore's query about
clicks. In Nama, morpho-phonemic constraints confine clicks to
word-initial position, with one exception that I can find. (The suffix
-//'iiN converts a cardinal to an ordinal number, like E. "-th".) And
clicks can ~F1never~F0 appear word-finally.