REPORT RESUMES ED 010 358 48 LANGUAGES OF THE WORLD - -SINO- TIBETAN FASCICLE TWO. BY- VOEGELIN, C. F. VOEGELIN, FLORENCE M. INDIANA UNIV., BLOOMINGTON REPORT NUMBER NDEA-VI-63-11 PUB DATE MAR 65 CONTRACT OEC-SAE-9466 FORS PRICE MF -$0.18 HC -$2.52 63P. ANTHROPOLOGICAL LINGUISTICS, 7(3)/1-57, MARCH 1965 DESCRIPTORS- *SINO TIBETAN LANGUAGES, *CHINESE, Euro *LANGUAGES, ARCHIVES OF LANGUAGES OF THE WORLD, BLOOMINGTON, INDIANA THIS REPORT CONTAINS A PAPER ON RYUKYUAN-JAPANESE LANGUAGE DIVERSITY AND A DESCRIPTION OF THE LANGUAGES OFTHE KHAM-THAI FAMILY FOUND IN THAILAND, CAMBODIA, LAOS, VIETNAM, INDIA, AND SOUTHEAST CHINA. (THE REPORT IS PART OF A,SERIE5, ED inn 350 TO ED 010 367.) (J10 PART I AnthropologicalLinguistics Volume 7 Number 3 March 1965 lit D. DEPARTMENT OF HEALTH,EDUCATION AND WELFARE Office of Education 7b document has been reproducedexactly as received from the person or organization originating it. Pointsof view or opinions stated do not neoseserilz representofficial Office of Education poeition or poky. 40" LANGUAGES OF THEWORLD: SINO-TIBETAN FASCICLETWO A Publication of the. ARCHIVES OFLANGUAGES OF THEWORLD Anthropology Department Indiana University ANTHROPOLOGICAL LINGUISTICS is designed primarily, butnot exclusively, for the immediate publication of data-orientetl papers for which attestation is availablein the form of tape recordingson deposit in the Archives of Languages of the World. Thisdoes not imply that contributors will bere- stricted to scholars working in the Archivesat Indiana University; in fact, one motivation for the publication of ANTHROPOLOGICAL LINGUISTICS isto increase the usefulness of the Archives to scholars elsewhere by making publishable data and conclusions and theirtape recorded attestation more widely available.(Recorded attestation of papers from scholars elsewhere will becopied by the Archives and the original recordings returnedto the collector; others may then work with the tape copy either in the Archives or elsewhere by havinga copy sent to them.)In addition to heavily exemplified papers in the form of preliminaryor final statements on restricted problems in phonemics, morphophonemic:, morphemics, syntax and comparativegrammar, ANTHROPOLOGICAL LINGUIS- TICS will include lexical lists and analyzedtexts (c..pecially it: the otherwise hard-to-publishrange of 20 to 1&O pages) and theoretical and methodologicalpapers (especiall in the form of papers from sYmPogia). Each volume of ANTHROPOLOGICAL LINGUISTICSconsists of nine numbers to ix issued during the months of January, February, March, April, May,June, Obtober, November and December. Subscriptions (3.50a year) and papers for publication should be sent to the editor, Dr. Florence M. Voegelin, Anthropology Department, IndianaUniversity, Bloomington, Indiana. Entered as second clam matter it the postoffi:* at Bloomington, Indiana [The following communicationwas sent to us in the form of a personal letter, unselfishly giving us specialist informationto include in our revision of Languages of the World: Boreo-Oriental FascicleOne, 5. Japanese and Okinawan, AL 7.1.115-21, 19 65.In our reply to the writer thatwe would indeed use his information in thisway, we also requested that he permitus to publish it under his own name, and hegave his permission to do so. Ed.] IMPRESSIONS OF RYUKYU:-N-JAPANESEDIVERSITY W. W. Elmendorf Washington State University First, on the use of 'Okinawan' to denote alldialects found in the Ryukyu Islands. Okinawa is one island ofa long, chain-like archipelago Althoughcen- trally located in the chain, relatively large,and historically important (ascen- ter of a former native kingdom), it is neithera linguistic unit, nor are its dia- lects intelligible everywhere in the Ryukyus. While on Okinawa during 195 1-2 Iwas in the army, recalled as a reserv- ist to active duty, and assignedas head of a branch in the Civil. Education and Information section of the American militarygovernment (USCAR). I had a good deal of contact withpersons from different parts of Okinawa, as wellas elsewhere in the Ryukyus, andwas able (at that time) to conununicate with them fairly effectively in Japanese.I was informed by a large number of people that enough difference existed between dialectsat the extreme north end of the island and the rest of Okinawaso that communication was difficult between them. Dia- lect differences appeared everywherein southern Okinawa also, but not such as to interfere with intelligibility. However, markedlydistinct forms of speech were said to occur on closely adjacent islets,as Kudaka off the SE end of Okinawa.I have no measure of how marked the distinctionswere. But 'Oki- nawan' asa linguistic term would at best denote a rather diversifiedgroup of dialects, probably confinedto Okinawa and a few closely adjacent smaller islands. Then, it appeared that therewere native forms of speech in the Ryukyu chain, mutually unintelligible witheach other and with 'Okinawan'. Some distance north of Okinawa, witha few small inhabited islands in be- tween, is the Amami group, with Amami Oshimathe principal island. The barber who cut my hair in Naha, Okinawa,where I was stationed,was a native of Amami anda native speaker of an Amami Oshima dialect. He toldme (in Japanese): (1) Dialect differences existedwithin the Amamigroup, but with interdialect intelligibility.(2) He was unable to understandOkinawans con- versing in theirown dialect(s), and himself talked to Okinawans only in Japan- ese. After a considerable watergap south of Okinawa, the southern Ryukyus (formerly called SakishimaRedo ), run roughly southwestward towardFormosa. At the end of the chain the quite isolatedisland of Yonaguni is within sight of the mountains of northernFormosa (and this was on a notvery clear day),This 1 2 Anthropological Linguistics, Vol. 7, No. 3 group is made up of three fairsized islands anda number of smaller ones, some well separated from the rest. WilliamBurd, then a graduate studentat the- University of California, collected linguisticdata on Miyako, the northernmost island of the group, and wroteup a grammatical sketch of the dialect. He told me, on Okinawa, that he was sure Miyako dialect wouldbe mutually unintelli- gible with any Okinawa dialect. Thisopinion was later confirmed bya Miyako native working in the CIE sectionon Okinawa. Allan H. Smith of this department (currentlywith NSF), and his wife, did two extendedseasons of ethnographic field work in a small village, Kabira (locally [kibro]),on Yaeyama, another of the southern islands. The second of these field tripswas during the spring and summer of 1952, while Iwas on Okinawa. Allan's prime objectivewas ethnography, but he did collect a consid- erable amount of linguistic materials,including comparative vocabularies from several parts of the Ryukyus.He was certain that the Kabira dialect ofYaeyama was definitely not mutually intelligible withany Okinawan dialect. This im- pression was confirmed bya very intelligent secretary in my office, Kitty Yafuso, a native Okinawan, who hadaccompanied the Smiths briefly into the field on Yaeyama. Thus, these (admittedly impressionistic)observations suggest that Ryukyuan (not Okinawan) native speech fallsinto at least three mutually unin- telligible groups of dialects, centeringrespectively in the northern (Amami), central (Okinawa), and southern(Miyako-Yaeyama) islands of the chain.We should probably speak of the Ryukyuanlanguages, forming with Japanesea closely related language family, in whichthe maximum linguistic differences are probably slightly greater thanamong the present-day Romance dcscendents of Latin.It is pretty clearly nota question of relating one 'Okinawan' language to one other, Japanese, sister language. Implicit in this hypothetical subgroupingarrangement is the centering of linguistic diversity (within theJapanese-Ryukyuan family) in the Ryukyu archi- pelago. Within Japanese,one may add, some data suggest greatest dialect diversity, or greatest dialectdistances, in the south (Kyushu). Of course, all this should be subjectedto rigorous dialect-distance test- ing throughout the Japanese-Ryukyuanspeech area, as wellas controlled vocabu- lary and morphology comparison:. Let me add one other linguistic,or sociolinguistic, fact about Ryukyuan speech habits, which struckme forcibly during the year I was there. School instruction and nearly all writingis conducted in Japanese. All official busi- ness, e.g. with the U.S. authorities (as formerly withtheir Japanese counter- parts) is carriedon through Japanese, as is governmental business in thena- tive legislature (in Naha, Okinawa),in towniouncils, and in relativelyinform- al meetings of the heads ofvillage families. In other words, Japanese has becomea second language for all Ryukyuans (except for a handful of agedmonolingu.als), whichnow tends to be used in all situations except strictly domesticones. The position of the average Ryukyuan with respect to his local formof speech vis-a-vis the Japanese languageseems much like that of theavers eerman-s eakinwises with res- The best brief description knownto me of a typical Ryukyu language situation is Allan H. Smith, The Culture of Kabira,APS-P 104:2.134-71 (1960),p. 139. Sino-Tibetan Fascicle Two 3 dialect vis-a-vis Standard German. The linguistic differences in the former case are almost certainly greater (i.e. between a local Ryukyuan dialect and Japanese), however. Wokmight describe the Swiss situationas one of diglossia; in the Ryukyus an imposed and historically intrusive (though related) language serves the function