LINGUIST List 6.227

Thu 16 Feb 1995

Confs: Chinese Dialect Fieldwork, History of Mandarin Panel

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1. David Prager Branner, Chinese Dialect Fieldwork Conference, Salt Lake City
2. David Prager Branner, History of Mandarin Panel at AOS in Salt Lake City

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The Yuen Ren Society for the Promotion of Chinese Dialect Fieldwork will
hold a conference on the morning of Monday, 27 March, at the Marriott
Hotel in Salt Lake City, Utah, in conjunction with the American Oriental
Society. The journal of the Society will be available for purchase at the
conference.

Below is the list of speakers:

Jerry Norman, U. of Washington, on Herpyng dialect
Richard Simmons, Rutgers U., on Harngjou storytelling
Tao Liang, U. of Colorado, on repair in Peking conversation
Li Zhuqing, Boston College, on sandhi in Foochow dialect
Arienne Dwyer, U. of Washington, on a variety of Sinkiang Mandarin
David Branner, U. of Washington, on Jongbao dialect
Jeff Crosland, U. of Washington, on Amoy dialect.

For further information, please contact David Prager Branner at
(yuenrenu.washington.edu).

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At the upcoming annual meeting of the American Oriental Society in Salt
Lake City there will be a panel on East Asian linguistics, with emphasis
on the history of Mandarin. This is good news because until now there
have rarely been panels on Chinese linguistics at AOS meetings. The panel
will take place from 2:00 pm to 5:30 pm on Monday, 27 March, in the
Marriott Hotel in Salt Lake City, Utah. For more information please
contact David Branner at (yuenrenu.washington.edu).

Below are abbreviated abstracts of the five papers scheduled to be
delivered:

"Sequential Voicing in Sino-Japanese"
 Timothy J. Vance, Connecticut College
Many Japanese morphemes have one allomorph beginning with a voiceless
obstruent and another beginning with a voiced obstruent, the voiced
allomorph appearing only non-word-initially: _tama_ 'ball, _me_+_dama_
'eyeball'. The status of this *Sequential Voicing* (SV) in modern
Sino-Japanese is problematic. This paper systematically compares
representative samples to assess the relative "susceptibitilty" to SV of
native Japanese and two-element Sino-Japanese items. It also tackles the
daunting problem of SV *within* two-character Sino-Japanese items.

"Notes on the Phonology of Late Ming Guanhua"
 W. South Coblin, University of Iowa
This paper outlines the phonology of the late Ming Guanhua variety
codified in the Xiru ermuzi of Nicolas Trigault. Certain features of this
system are then compared with that represented in the unpublished
Portuguese-Chinese dictionary of Matteo Ricci and Michele Ruggieri.
These comparisons lead to hypotheses about the way Trigault's type of
Guanhua reached its final form, about the relationships between competing
Guanhua varieties in the Ming period, and about the nature of Chinese
koines in general.

"On Certain Patterns of Vocalism in Mandarin, Wu, and Gan Dialects"
 Jerry Norman, University of Washington
In past attempts to classify Chinese dialects little attention has been
paid to vocalism. This paper will be an attempt to use the number and
pattern of vocalic contrasts before -n and -ng to determine the boundary
between Mandarin on the one hand and Wu/Gan on the other.

The Philological View in Chinese Dialectology
 David Prager Branner, University of Washington
Philologists often misapprehend the real nature of the Chinese dialects.
Not only are there actually far more than the canonical 1277 syllables in
Peking dialect, but there are also features such as sound symbolism that
further alter our picture of the shape of the morpheme. The canonical
figure of 1277 syllables is based on a notion of the Chinese syllable that
derives from character readings.

A Review of the Vocabulary and Grammar of the Towa Sanyo
 Richard VanNess Simmons, Rutgers University
This paper examines the vocabulary and grammar of the _Toowa sanyoo_, a
Chinese primer compiled in Japan by Okajima Kanzan (1674-1728). While
apparently idealized, the particular combination of colloquial features
seen in the text does have a living parallel: All can still be found in
the single dialect of modern Harngjou. It is possible to surmise that the
Guanhuah koine current in the Jiangnan region in the late Ming may have
also been strongly reminiscent of the Harngjou dialect in most of its
major features.