The Bai Language: A Musical Language with Typological Ablative Cases

Suqin Li^1,2*

¹School of Foreign Languages of Southwest University, Chongqing, China.
²School of Foreign Languages of Dali University, Dali, China.

DOI: 10.4236/jss.2015.312020                

Abstract

The Bai language (shortened as Bai henceforth) is of Sino-Tibetan language family, used in southwest China. Typological ablative cases are found in Bai that the word-building in some dialects follows a few archaic analytical rules, including the formation of its pronoun system, its antonymic verbs and adverbs, and the formation of its tetra-syllabic phrases, etc. The most particular feature is that the morphological change in the antonymic verbs realizes the grammatical function. The archaic formations may be remnants of Yi-Burman proto language, which needs historical studies in terms of language evolution. However, the pivotal motivation, we believe, is the need to be a musical language in satisfying the various needs to transmit the ethnic culture orally, and this need is the critical stimulus to make it keep the inflective changes.

Keywords

Bai, Musical Language, Typological Ablative Case, Oral Transmission, Grammatical Function

Conflicts of Interest

The authors declare no conflicts of interest.

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