Alexis Michaud

Hé Lìmín

. The technical term 'Naish', based on the endonym [nɑ], is used here for this entire low-level grouping within Sino-Tibetan, i.e. covering the same speech varieties as 'Naxi

(NA) language name area with pictographic manuscripts (to-mba) area with syllabic manuscripts (ge-ba)

dialects' (Nàxīyǔ fāngyán 纳西语方言) in Chinese scholarship, and as the former language code NBF.

Naish was originally classified within the Yi (Loloish) branch [START_REF] Shafer | Classification of the Sino-Tibetan Languages[END_REF]). It has since been shown that it does not partake in the innovations that characterize Loloish [START_REF] Bradley | Nahsi and Proto-Burmese-Lolo[END_REF]. The classification of Naxi as part of Yi is nonetheless periodically reaffirmed in China (for instance by [START_REF] Xìngzhī | Nàxīyǔ zài Zàngmiǎnyǔzhōng dē dīwèi 纳西 语在藏缅语中的地位 [The Position of Naxi within Tibeto-Burman[END_REF][START_REF] Xìngzhī | Nàxīyǔ zài Zàngmiǎnyǔzhōng dē dīwèi 纳西 语在藏缅语中的地位 [The Position of Naxi within Tibeto-Burman[END_REF]Lǐ Yǒngsuì 李永燧 2010:21-22) on the basis of some surface phonetic similarities in the vocabulary and some similar syntactic characteristics. Historical work on this area of Sino-Tibetan is still in its early stages for want of in-depth documentation. Preliminary comparative work suggests that the Naish languages are related, in decreasing order of closeness, to: Shixing and Namuyi; Ersu, Lizu, and Tosu; Pumi, Rgyalrongic, Tangut and other languages currently labeled "Qiangic"; and Lolo-Burmese [START_REF] Jacques | Approaching the historical phonology of three highly eroded Sino-Tibetan languages: Naxi, Na and Laze[END_REF].

Geographic distribution

The Naish languages are spoken in an area that straddles the Yunnan-Sichuan border:

Lijiang Municipality and the neighboring prefectures of Yányuán 鹽源, Yánbiān 鹽邊, Mùlǐ 木裡 and Díqìng 迪慶 (see map). An ethno-historical survey is provided by Guō Dàliè 郭大 烈 and Hé Zhìwǔ 和志武 (1994:4-7), and a linguistic overview by Hé Jírén 和即仁 and Jiāng Zhúyí 姜竹儀 (1985:104-116), who distinguish (i) a relatively homogeneous Western dialect area, coinciding by and large with the extension of the domain of the Mù 木 feudal lords in the Ming dynasty, and (ii) a more diverse Eastern area; for an overview of the latter, see Yáng Zhènhóng 楊振紅 (2009). The Yangtze River is an important -though by no means impassable -boundary between the two areas. The greatest linguistic diversity is found aroundYǒngníng 永寧, within a radius of less than 100 km. Interestingly, Yongning is called "land of the center, heartland" in Naish (Lijiang Naxi: /ly˧dy˩/, Yongning Na:

/ɬi˧di˩/). The map shows the location of the three varieties from which illustrations will be drawn in this article: Lijiang Naxi as spoken in the village of A-sher; Yongning Na; and

Laze. It also presents the geographic distribution of the Naxi scripts.

Naish endonyms offer an illustration of dialectal diversification. Na is called /nɑ˩-ʐwɤ˧/: the endonym plus the word for 'language; to speak'. The Naxi endonym has incorporated the word for 'man, person', /hi˧/: the people are /nɑ˩hi˧/ and their language /nɑ˩hi˧-kɯ˧ʈʂɯ˩/ 'language of the Naxi'. According to Guō Dàliè 郭大烈 and Hé Zhìwǔ 和志武 (1994:4-7), Laze /lɑ˧ze˧/ is the name of the place from where this group of people migrated some eight generations ago. Such lexical innovations, added to the great number of homophonous syllables, make cross-dialect communication challenging. In practice, speakers resort to the lingua franca of their area: now dialects of Mandarin Chinese; previously Lijiang Naxi in the Lijiang plain, Na around Yongning, Pumi in Muli, etc.

The speakers of Naish languages

Speakers of Naish languages number about 300,000. Eastern dialects typically have the fewest speakers: less than 1,000 for Laze, and less than 10,000 for Na. Language shift to Mandarin Chinese is under way (Lidz 2010, 19-20). There is a wide generation gap in language proficiency; for detailed examples in Na, see [START_REF] Michaud | A Description of Endangered Phonemic Oppositions in Mosuo (Yongning Na)[END_REF] The correlation between languages and ethnic designations varies between provinces: different teams operated in Yunnan and Sichuan when 'nationalities' (mínzú 民族) were assigned. In Yunnan, there is a good fit between the official ethnic designation 'Naxi' and The main traditional activity of Naish-speaking peoples was agriculture, as well as trade in some areas. Tourism has developed at a staggering pace since the 1990s, leading many young people to leave agriculture and engage in the tourist service industry, and speeding up the influx of non-Naish migrants to the area.

1. Mandarin loanwords are adding to the stock of syllables with on-glides, creating new glide+vowel combinations, and introducing off-glides. This does not warrant the conclusion that all glides were introduced through borrowings, however: there is no evidence that any Naish language had a simple CV structure at any point.

Syllable

The phonology of Naish languages is highly eroded, as compared to the rich syllabic canon of conservative Sino-Tibetan languages. Naish languages underwent strict monosyllabification and a dramatic simplification of its syllable structure, to C(G)V+T,

where G is an on-glide and T a tone. Extreme coarticulation within syllables is common, e.g.

/bv̩ / is realized as [ʙ̩ ]; in Na and Laze, which have nasal vowels after initial /h/, the entire syllable is realized with nasalization.

The synchronic distribution of vowels with respect to initials makes good historical sense: in several cases, it still reflects straightforwardly the conditioning that created new contrastive vowels. For instance, the only context where there is a phonemic contrast between /i/ and /e/ in Yongning Na and in Laze is after coronal fricatives and affricates. (For instance: Na /si˥/ 'wood', /se˥/ 'to walk'.) The diachronic reason why the distribution of /e/ is so restricted in Na and Laze is that it originates from *a after coronal fricatives and affricates (for details see Jacques and Michaud 2011).

Tones i. inventory

Tones in Naish languages consist simply of pitch distinctions, on a three-level scale: High, Mid and Low, without phonation-type characteristics. Contours are made up of sequences of tone levels realized on a single syllable. A notation based on the 5-point pitch scale is adequate (tones /5/, /3/ and /1/, from highest to lowest), and allows for a description of tone sequences: e.g. /35/ for a Mid-to-High rise (as in Laze /ʈʰae 35 / 'to bite'). The symbols used here are tone-letters which represent visually the tonal levels: ˥ High, ˧ Mid, ˩ Low, ˩˧ Lowto-Mid, ˧˥ Mid-to-High. No Naish language has distinctive falling contours (sequences in which the second tone level is lower than the first) on monosyllables.

In Yongning Na and Laze, there is overwhelming evidence from alternations showing that contours consist of sequences of levels: for instance, Na /ʐae˧/ 'to laugh' plus the immediate future /bi˧/ (grammaticalized from 'to go') yields /ʐae˧-bi˧/ whereas /lɑ˧˥ / 'to strike' yields /lɑ˧-bi˥/, where the H part of the verb's MH contour reassociates to the following syllable.

There is also some evidence for the decomposition of contours in Naxi, but the everincreasing influence of Chinese on this language is towards the reinterpretation of tone sequences (phonetically realized as contours) as unitary (non-decomposable) contour tones.

ii. Distribution and historical remarks on the inventory

Lijiang Naxi simply has one tone per syllable, with very few processes of tonal reassociation.

Laze is more complex tonally, and Na has the most complex tone system found among Naish languages so far. All syllables have tone in the surface phonological representation in Na and Laze, although some bound morphemes do not have a tone of their own.

The origins of tones in Naish are not understood in detail yet. Among the four tones of Naxi, the rising tone is marginal, and is clearly an innovation [START_REF] Michaud | Tonal Reassociation and Rising Tonal Contours in Naxi[END_REF][START_REF] Michaud | Reassociated Tones and Coalescent Syllables in Naxi (Tibeto-Burman)[END_REF]. The Mid and Low tones are the most common and probably derive from an original two-way split. The High tone appears to have developed later, from the simplification of initial clusters: it is especially frequent on verbs, where the hypothesized clusters may have resulted from prefixation.

Phonotactics

There is a tendency towards regressive vowel harmony within disyllabic words, which becomes sporadically lexicalized (Lidz 2010, 96-105;155). In some cases, this results in new CV combinations, e.g. /ʂie/ in Laze /ʂie˧lie˧mie˧/ '7 th month' (from /ʂɯ˧/ 'seven' and /lie˧mie˧/ 'moon; month'). Naxi /kɯ˧ʈʂɯ˩/ 'to speak; language' appears to be an instance of vowel harmony in light of comparison with the Na form /kɤ˧ʈʂɯ˩/.

Among other peculiarities of the Naish languages, Laze makes fascinating use of allophonic variation of voiced stops and affricates to signal morphosyntactic junctures. These voiced consonants devoice (though not completely) in medial position within a lexically disyllabic word, and conversely, are realized as prenasalized at a juncture between morphemes within a phonological phrase: /mu˥dy˥/ 'the universe' is realized close to [mu˥d̥ y˥]. Note, however, that this is a tendency, not a hard-and-fast rule neutralizing voicing contrasts in this position.

Voiced realizations are occasionally heard, and speakers are able to produce a hyperarticulated rendering with full voicing. Conversely, the sequence /ɲie˧˥ gɤ˧/, 'because of this', made up of the two morphemes 'thus, in this way' and 'since, as', is realized as

[ɲie˧˥ ŋ gɤ˩].
Numerous examples can be observed in the annotated recordings available online.

Lexicon

Many of the lexical complexities of Naish languages result from the creation of disyllables out of monosyllabic roots, through reduplication, compounding and affixation. In Lijiang Naxi, the word for 'language; to speak' (which has both nominal and verbal uses), /kɯ˧ʈʂɯ˩/, is disyllabic and not divisible. In Na, on the other hand, it is divisible:

(1) hi ̃˧-ki˧ kɤ˧<mə˧>ʈʂɯ˩ person-dat speak<neg> 'to keep [something] secret, not to tell people'.

Loanwords: Tibetan cultural influence in the area is strong; however, relatively few borrowings from Tibetan are found outside of specific spheres such as religion and proper names. Chinese sources show that contacts with Chinese speakers occurred as early as the Han dynasty; they resumed in the Tang dynasty, and have been increasingly strong and direct since the Yuan dynasty. Chinese borrowings undergo various degrees of phonological and lexical accommodation depending on the speakers' proficiency in Chinese; this also allows for several stylistic options. For instance, 'Westerner' translates into Na as /je˩ʐe˧/ (from Chinese yángrén 洋人), or as /je˩ʐe˧-hi ̃˥/, adding the Na word for 'man', /hi ̃˥/. In the first case, the borrowing is processed as a disyllabic noun phrase, as in Chinese. This manifests the speaker's command of that language, and the expectation of similar abilities on the listener's side: Chinese is used as part of the speech act participants' common ground.

In the second case, it is treated as one single morpheme, meaning 'foreign'; this emphasizes the speech act participants' Na common ground.

Morphology

There is no inflectional morphology in Naish. Suppletion is observed between past and non- The context of (3) is the following: the speaker saw me sitting ready for an elicitation session, silently hoping that someone could give me some of their time. There was a real uncertainty as to who that would be, as I was working with two consultants within the household at the time. No subject is indicated in the first part of the sentence ("After feeding the pigs"), as this is obvious from the situation. On the other hand, the explicit mention of both semantic roles in the second part of the sentence thoroughly answers the concerns of its addressee.

As is well-attested across the Himalayas, nominals, including pronouns, need not appear if they can be understood from the discourse context. This applies to any definite argument of the verb, the head of a relative clause, or the head of a complex noun phrase.

(

Question formation

In yes/no questions, the verb is preceded by an interrogative adverb (Naxi /ə˥/, Na /ə˩/, Laze /ɑ/): /ʈʰɯ˧ ə˥-bɯ˧/ 'Is he going?' Naxi uses sentence-final /lɑ˥/ in calls for confirmation:

/ʈʰɯ˧ bɯ˧-lɑ˥/ 'He's going, right?' In wh-questions, the interrogative pronoun occupies the same slot as the noun phrase would in a statement.

Existential sentences

There exist several existential verbs, as is common in the area: four are reported in Na (Lidz 2010, 356-361) The order in compounds is determiner+determined, but a few lexicalized items made of adjective+noun have the reverse order, e.g. 'dry field': Lijiang Naxi /pv̩ ˩-ɭɯ˧/, Na /pv̩ ˧-lv̩ ˧/ ('dry'+'field').

There is no gender or agreement.

The counting system is decimal. The numeral and classifier follow the head noun. There are some tonal irregularities in numeral-plus-classifier phrases, which echo one another across dialects [START_REF] Michaud | The Tones of Numerals and Numeral-plus-classifier Phrases: On Structural Similarities Between Naxi, Na and Laze[END_REF].

Classifiers are relatively numerous; many still correspond transparently to a noun. Some 'self-classifiers' are used without a head noun: Na /ɖɯ˧-so˩ kʰv̩ ˩/ 'several years' (not /*kʰv̩ ˧˥ ɖɯ˧-so˩ kʰv̩ ˩/).

There Naxi presents evidence of this nominalizer from rituals preserving archaic turns of phrase (Michaud 2011a, 99-100) but it has been replaced by the possessive, /gɤ˧/, in everyday language.

Verb, verb phrase, and other predicates

Directionality is expressed before the verb, by /gɤ˩-/ 'upward', /mɯ˩-/ 'downward' or /kae˧-/ 'to the front'.

Verb serialization is used for many constructions including resultatives, equivalents of Chinese 'de 得' constructions, and the expression of movement (Lidz 2010, 397-405).

Imperatives are simply conveyed by intonational means: the syntactic structure is the same as for statements. The only verb that has distinct imperative form is 'go': Naxi /fv̩ ˧/, Na /hu˧/, Laze /hu˥/ (the three forms are cognate; note that the Naxi form is now being replaced by the Chinese borrowing /fae˧/, from fā 發).

There exists a copula in all Naish languages. It is not used with adjectives. In Na, it can be added after any verb to convey certainty (Lidz 2010, 354).

Adjectives can be considered as stative verbs: they "can take aspect marking, be negated, and can be modified by the intensifier" (Lidz 2010:362; the intensifier is /-ʐwae˩˧ / in Na and /gjae˩-/ in Naxi).

Writing

Section 3.1 presents examples of two varieties of the Naxi pictographic script. Section 3.2 places this script in historical perspective, along with the other traditional Naxi script: a syllabic writing system.

Presentation of the pictographic script through an example

The following excerpt is from a central ritual of the Naxi tradition: the funeral ritual for someone whose spouse is still alive. The deceased cannot -must not -take along her/his beloved(s) on the journey back to the ancestral home, and must therefore be accompanied instead by a chicken (sacrificed during the ritual; a rooster for a woman, a hen for a man). This page illustrates several creative possibilities of the pictographic script.

(i) Saving time and space by omitting some characters, e.g. 'clothes', sufficiently cued by the character 'to wear'. Rituals are orally learnt by rote, with the text serving as mnemonic; not all the words have a corresponding character. This is not due to an intrinsic limitation of the writing system: it would be possible to transcribe each word (lexical or grammatical) by a character. A recent book aiming to popularize the Naxi script for a Chinese-reading audience adopts a one-to-one correspondence between characters and syllables (Hé Lìmín 和 力民 2007), thereby sinicizing the Naxi writing system; this is a radical departure from traditional usage, but it demonstrates that the set of characters allows for an exhaustive transcription of the spoken language.

(ii) Making phonetic use of characters. The character for 'lover', which appears several times, is written in two ways: 'man' with 'stone' /lv̩ ˧/, used as a phonetic cue, on top of it: ; or simply the character for 'stone', i.e. a phonetic loan character. 'To kill' comprises a semantic component , composed of 'knife' (top) and the head of an ox turned upside down to express death (bottom). To this is added a phonetic element:

/kʰo˩/ 'railings', whose position is not fixed, witness the following layout, on the same page:

. The characters used for their phonetic value are not necessarily more stylized:

for instance, the character for 'leftovers of butter-tea', /tʰv̩ ˧/, used here for 'to come out' /tʰv̩ ˧/, is written as , not as the more stylized variant .

(iii) Making use of semantic associations. 'Yellow' /ʂʅ˩/ is indicated by means of 'gold', , which in its literal sense would be read as /hae˩/.

(iv) Joining several characters. 'The lover drinks' is represented as . This was described above as two characters, 'lover' and 'wine', but the two are compounded in the On the basis of the rituals' contents, the 7 th -10 th centuries AD have been mentioned as a likely period of rapid development of the written tradition (Hé Zhìwǔ 和志武 1985).

Comparison between variants of characters suggests a gradual evolution towards greater abstraction, with (i) a simplification of some of the characters' shapes, (ii) the creation of an increasing number of composite characters, combining two elements one or both of which are used for their phonetic value, and (iii) a relative standardization of the elements used in characters (circles, dotted lines, etc). However, the greatest care must be exercised when labeling a variant as archaic, since we have not had the opportunity to see manuscripts The documentation of the pictographic traditions of these areas, which remains to be done, is crucial for the study of the development of the Naxi script.

As for the syllabic script, Ge-ba [gɤ˩bɑ˩-tʰe˧ɣɯ˧], a stele dated 1619, found in Jīnzhuāng, has Ge-ba, Tibetan and Chinese inscriptions, providing a terminus a quo for dating this script, which may have existed for a long time before then. This script, which has the inherent limitation of not transcribing lexical tone, did not become as widespread as the pictographic script. See [START_REF] Jírén | Qiúqǔ zhānbǔ jīng 求取占卜经 [The Quest for Divination Books[END_REF] for an introduction, a collection of texts, a list of the Ge-ba symbols, and further references.

In the late 18 th century, a new variety of writing was created in the northwestern part of the Naish area (Wéixī 維西) by people now known locally as /mɑ˧li˥mɑ˧sɑ˧/, who migrated from an area without a writing system, further east (Yányuán 鹽源/Mùlǐ 木裡). Instead of adopting the local writing system holus-bolus, they created a syllabic script on the basis of about one hundred Naxi characters (Hé Zhìwǔ 和志武 1985, 168-170). Mention must also be made of a set of some forty signs used in Yǒngníng (in an area without pictographic books: see map) to refer to days and their symbolic attributes (Hé Xuézhèng 杨学政 1985).

In the 20 th century, the pictographic tradition began to decline, at the same time as it became the object of academic scrutiny. Dictionaries of Naxi characters were published by Fāng As far as can be told from the present (less than ideally tidy) state of library catalogues, some 30,000 Naxi books are kept in libraries worldwide. Excluding variants of the same rituals, there would be on the order of 1,000 different rituals (Zhōngguó shǎoshù mínzú gǔjí zǒngmù tíyào•Nàxīzújuǎn《中国少数民族古籍总目提要•纳西族卷》, 2003:2). But pictographic texts without a full philological apparatus are of little use for research, hence the great importance of in-depth documentation of the Naxi manuscripts in the few areas where these traditions still survive.

  use of a Naish language -except for the growing part of the population which has shifted to speaking Chinese but remains part of the 'Naxi nationality'. In Sichuan, on the other hand, only the relatively small groups of settlers who moved in from Lijiang in recent times and speak Lijiang Naxi were classified as 'Naxi', such as the population of the village of Éyà 俄 亞 (see map). The older Naish-speaking population stratum received the label 'Mongolian' instead (Měnggǔzú 蒙古族); this paradoxical choice was no doubt influenced by the powerful ring which the name 'Mongolian' retains in the area since the Mongolian army's impressive crossing of the Himalayas (passing through Yongning), invasion of the kingdom of Nánzhào 南詔, and victory over the Song dynasty. Initially the 'Mongolian' label was taken very seriously and attempts were made to teach the Mongolian script to Naish speakers of Sichuan, with predictably poor results. The initial ethnic identification was not modified since, because of a national policy to keep the Pandora's box of ethnic labels closed whenever possible.

"

  This text was copied and recited by Mr. Xí Shànghóng 习尚洪, in Rìshùwān 日树湾 village, Zhōngdiàn 中甸 Prefecture (now renamed Xiānggélǐlā 香格里拉; full administrative coordinates of the village: Sānbà xiāng, Dōngbà Xíngzhèng cūn, Rìshùwān zìráncūn 三坝乡 东坝行政村日树湾自然村). The text was recorded, transcribed and annotated by Zhōng Yàopíng. The correspondence between words and characters is not straightforward and requires a special explanatory apparatus. Words with a corresponding character are in bold; in the frequent case where a word is cued by a component of a character, that component is written above the word, but the word is not set in bold. The beloved drinks green wine, the beloved kills green oxen [the text describes the four sides of a mountain, each of which has its own color, which permeates human activities in that place; the deceased wanders through all four sides -i.e. everywhere -without finding her/his beloved/spouse], the beloved won't come out; the beloved won't come for the date.to wear "On the black side of the holy mountain, [where] men wear black clothes," drinks black wine, the beloved eats black food."The text goes on: "When called, the beloved won't come out… On the yellow side of the holy mountain, where men wear yellow clothes, and women likewise wear yellow clothes…"

  actual text; in the variant , the person's mouth is added, going one step further towards the representation of a scene rather than a juxtaposition of characters. 'The lovers eat' is represented as : a lover with an open mouth plus 'food' , plus the same spiked line as in 'to drink', where it represented the straw that was used to drink wine. The use of this line for 'to eat' is an innovation (not attested in any other text, to our knowledge), which transforms this line from a representation of a straw into an abstract representation of the transfer from container to mouth. 3.2. History, main varieties, and geographic distribution Naxi scripts fall into two categories: the one illustrated in section 3.1, which for convenience can be called "pictographic" in a broad sense (though the composition of characters is highly diverse, and some have a phonetic component -as is common in logographic scripts), and syllabic. The pictographic script is currently referred to in Chinese as Dongba script (Dōngbāwén 東巴文) in China, after the name of the /to˧ᵐbɑ˩/ religion, because this writing system is almost exclusively used to write religious ritual texts. However, while the Naxi do refer to the pictographic books as 'To-mba books' [to˧ᵐbɑ˩-tʰe˧ɣɯ˧], the Naxi name of the pictographic writing system is [sae˧cjɤ˥-lv̩ ˧cjɤ˥], literally 'wood marks-stone marks', suggesting that the characters were originally written on wood and stone. There exist similarities between Naxi characters and Magdalenian-like rock paintings recently discovered along the Yangtze river, in the vicinity of the area which is traditionally recognized as the homeland of Naxi pictographic writing, north-northeast of Lijiang (Hé Lìmín 2003; on the state-of-the-art of archaeological research, see Taçon et al. 2010). While the possibility of chance similarities must be carefully considered, especially in the case of representations of animals, a strong argument comes from symbols that are tending towards abstraction. The Naxi pictograph for 'vagina' is shown below, to the right of an as yet undeciphered symbol found by the second author (Hé) among the rock paintings of Ninglang county (Nínglàng Àimǎndū 寧蒗艾满都 ). This strand of research is only beginning. Under the assumption that Tibeto-Burman migration into the area is not much earlier than the Qin dynasty (witness the vestiges of the Shíguān zàng 石棺葬 culture found in the Lijiang area), it must be hypothesized that the Tibeto-Burman invaders borrowed some symbols from rock paintings created by earlier inhabitants, who presumably spoke Austroasiatic languages. It has been suggested that Naxi writing was created by taking pictographs down from mountain tops into cities and entrusting them to ritual specialists -an appropriation and reinterpretation of the earlier local culture that may have been used to legitimize the conquerors' rule in the eyes of the conquered population (Mathieu 2003).

  proposed as a hypothesis that the To-mba tradition of the village of [bə˞ ˧ɖə˞ ˧] (Báidì 白地) was propagated throughout the Naxi area in the wake of the Naxi rulers' conquests, while local traditions continued to exist in remote areas, such as Jīnzhuāng 金庄 (endonym of the people: [bə˞ ˧hə˞ ˩]) to the northwest of Lijiang, and the /ʐə˞ ˧kʰo˧/ (mentioned above) in the north-northeast. An overview of local varieties is presented by Hé Lìmín 和力民 (2010).

Guóyú

  [START_REF] Guóyú | Nàxī xiàngxíng wénzì pǔ 纳西象形文字 谱 [A Dictionary of Naxi Pictographic Characters[END_REF] Hé Zhìwǔ 和志武 1995, Li Lin-ts'an 李霖灿 , Chang K'un 張琨 and Ho Ts'ai 和才 (1953) and Rock 1963 (IPA equivalents for the latter's idiosyncratic phonetic transcription are provided in[START_REF] Michailovsky | Syllabic inventory of a Western Naxi dialect, and correspondence with Joseph F. Rock's transcriptions[END_REF]; there exist relatively numerous collections of texts, including a massive, 100-volume edition with standardized phonetic transcriptions and translations (Nàxī dōngbā gǔjí yìzhù quánjí《纳西东巴古籍译 注全集 》, 1999) prepared with the collaboration of the last generation of proficient To-mba practitioners, as well as earlier publications such as Fù[START_REF] Màojī | Nàxīyǔ túhuà wénzì "Bái biānfú qǔ jīng jì" yánjiū 纳西语图画文字 "白 蝙蝠取经记" 研究 [A study of a Naxi pictographic manuscript[END_REF]

  In that instance, the suffixed syllable does not carry any added meaning: the disyllabic form simply Word order is S+O+V. Adverbials can appear at various places. Particles indicating semantic roles are not obligatory; they play a major role in the expression of logical relations, and allow for a deviation from standard word order, as in (2), where the subject (explicitly marked as such) appears after the object. (The topic marker can be removed from this sentence, whereas the agent marker cannot.) Verb serialization is common.

	replaces the monosyllable.
	2.4. Syntax
	2.4.1. Sentence
	2.4.1.1. Word order
	(2)	ʈʰɯ˥-se˥,		sjɑ˧ho˧tsɯ˧		zo˧	ʈʂʰɯ˧-kv̩ ˥ ɳɯ˥ |
		thus-cond/top	young_man(borrowing)	man	deict.prox-cl	top
	bu˩-me˧ ʂɯ˧-tsʰɯ˩ -ɳɯ˧ |	tsʰɑ˥	-ⁿdzɯ˧	mɤ˧	-mae˧ !
	sow	were/vampire	agt	bite	eat	neg	achieve
	"And so the weresow did not manage to devour that young fellow!"
	(Lijiang Naxi, consultant M4, last sentence of Weresow story)
	(3) bo˩-hɑ˧ | lə˧-ki˧-lə˧se˩-ze˩, | njɤ˧-ɳɯ˧ | no˧-ki˧ | nɑ˩ʐwɤ˧ so˩bi˩! |
	bo˩	-hɑ˧	lə-ki˧		lə-se˩-ze,			njɤ˧-ɳɯ no˧-ki	nɑ˩ʐwɤ˧	so˩-bi
	pig	food	accomp-give	accomp-complete-pfv 1sg-ag	2sg.-dat Na_language	teach/study-fut.imm
	A major driving force towards the creation of disyllables is the pressure of homophony,
	caused by the dramatic phonological erosion of the Naish languages. In Na, /i˥/, realized
	[ʝi˧], can mean 'jar'; 'ox'; 'to do'; 'to draw'; and 'to inform'. 'Jar' is generally disyllabic:
	/i˧mi˧/, adding the syllable for 'mother', which has grammaticalized uses to mean 'female',

past forms for 'to go' (Na: /bi˧/ vs. /hɯ˩/; Laze: /bi˧/ vs. /hɯ˧/; Lijiang Naxi: /bɯ˧/ vs. /hɯ˧/). Grammatically conditioned tone change is ubiquitous in Na, e.g. in compounds: the determinative compound /ʐwae˧zo˧-gv˧dv˥/ 'colt's back' has a final H tone, whereas the coordinative compound 'father and mother', which has the same input tones, is /ə˧dɑ˧-ə˧mi#˥/, with a floating H tone (a tone which can only associate to a following syllable; it is represented as #˥). Reduplication of verbs and adjectives is widely used to convey reflexivity and intensification (on Naxi: Michaud and Vaissière 2007), e.g. /lɑ˥/ 'to strike', /lɑ˥~lɑ˧/ 'to quarrel, to fight'; / n dae˥lae˧/ 'short, low', / n dae˥lae˧~ndae˥lae˧/ 'very short'. An /ə-/ prefix is used in kinship terms referring to one's elders. and 'large' (as opposed to 'small' for 'son; male' -this is widespread in the Himalayas: see

[START_REF] Mazaudon | Tamang[END_REF]

on Tamang, and a cross-language discussion by Matisoff 1992).

"After feeding the pigs, I will teach you Na (myself) !/ I will come over for a language lesson!" (Yongning Na, speaker F4; sentence transcribed on the fly, 2008)

  are proximal and distal demonstratives. The proximal demonstrative of Na, /ʈʂʰɯ˥/, is homophonous with the 3 rd person singular pronoun, as is the distal demonstrative of Naxi, /ʈʰɯ˧/. There are inclusive and exclusive pronouns for 2PL, and collective forms referring to 'me and my kin', 'you and your kin', etc.

	The clause relativizer in Na and Laze is /hi ̃/:
	(8)	go˧mi˧ | tʰi˧-ki˧-hi ̃˧ | ʈʂʰɯ˧-ʑi˥…
		go˧mi˧	tʰi	ki	hi ̃	ʈʂʰɯ˥	ʑi˧˥
		younger_daughter	durative	give nmlz dem.prox	cl_of_households
	'the household which the woman enters upon marriage…' (Yongning Na, 'Marriage of the
	Sister' story)

  dating back earlier than the 18 th century. The examples in Table1were copied by Zhong Yaoping from books belonging to the relatively homogeneous tradition known as /ʐə˞ ˧kʰo˧/ (pronunciation of the Lijiang plain) or /ʐə˞ ˧kʰɑ˧~ʐu˧kʰɑ˧/ (in Báidì 白地). The leftmost character is the one that looks to us most abstract and simplified.

	Table 1. Variants of characters
	mountain
	door
	breath, vapor