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29-710: Yan & Zhou (2012:147) list the following autonyms of ethnic Bulang in various counties. Exonyms for Bulang include (Yan & Zhou 2012:147): People classified as Bulang in China speak various Palaungic languages , including Blang and U . The Blang language belongs to the Palaungic branch of the Austroasiatic language family. Within the Palaungic branch, Blang belongs to the Waic subgroup, which also contains

58-404: A group of nearly 30 Austroasiatic languages , with scholars disagreeing on exactly which languages to include in the classification. They are spoken in scattered pockets across an inland region of Southeast Asia, centered on the borders between Myanmar, Thailand, Laos, Vietnam, and China. Most of the Palaungic languages lost the contrastive voicing of the ancestral Austroasiatic consonants, with

87-419: A similar series of clicks, Lun Bawang contrasts them with plain voiced and voicelesses like /p, b, b͡p/. There are languages with two sets of contrasting obstruents that are labelled /p t k f s x …/ vs. /b d ɡ v z ɣ …/ even though there is no involvement of voice (or voice onset time) in that contrast. That happens, for instance, in several Alemannic German dialects. Because voice is not involved, this

116-691: A sound is described as "half voiced" or "partially voiced", it is not always clear whether that means that the voicing is weak (low intensity) or if the voicing occurs during only part of the sound (short duration). In the case of English, it is the latter. Juǀʼhoansi and some of its neighboring languages are typologically unusual in having contrastive partially-voiced consonants. They have aspirate and ejective consonants, which are normally incompatible with voicing, in voiceless and voiced pairs. The consonants start out voiced but become voiceless partway through and allow normal aspiration or ejection. They are [b͡pʰ, d͡tʰ, d͡tsʰ, d͡tʃʰ, ɡ͡kʰ] and [d͡tsʼ, d͡tʃʼ] and

145-454: A superscript h . When the consonants come at the end of a syllable, however, what distinguishes them is quite different. Voiceless phonemes are typically unaspirated, glottalized and the closure itself may not even be released, making it sometimes difficult to hear the difference between, for example, light and like . However, auditory cues remain to distinguish between voiced and voiceless sounds, such as what has been described above, like

174-523: Is also informed by local beliefs and customs that relate to the traditional ecology, with special attention being paid to rice, water, bees, beeswax, and the various local spirits that are associated with them. A Christian missionary source describes them as "ardent followers of Theravada Buddhism", and offers as an estimate that 80% of the Bulang are "professing Buddhists", with a lower estimate of 35% being "practicing Buddhists". The Bulang are distributed in

203-421: Is explained as a contrast in tenseness , called a fortis and lenis contrast. There is a hypothesis that the contrast between fortis and lenis consonants is related to the contrast between voiceless and voiced consonants. That relation is based on sound perception as well as on sound production, where consonant voice, tenseness and length are only different manifestations of a common sound feature. Symbols to

232-850: Is located in the center of the house. The Blang are traditionally divided into small clans , with each clan owning its own land. Every Blang town has its own cemeteries, which are divided by clans. The deceased are buried, with the exception of those who perished due to unnatural causes. In this case, they are cremated. Bulang are among the earliest known cultivators of tea , with natural tea forest canopy home to unique species & ecosystems as opposed to monoculture fertilizer & pesticide -consuming tea plantations . The Blang are traditionally associated with animism , ancestor worship, and Theravada Buddhism . Writing in 2011, James Miller described these overlapping traditions as follows: The Blang, like many nationalities in southwest China, are Theravada Buddhists, but their highly complex religious life

261-476: Is not the primary distinctive feature between them. Still, the classification is used as a stand-in for phonological processes, such as vowel lengthening that occurs before voiced consonants but not before unvoiced consonants or vowel quality changes (the sound of the vowel) in some dialects of English that occur before unvoiced but not voiced consonants. Such processes allow English speakers to continue to perceive difference between voiced and voiceless consonants when

290-458: Is used to refer to two separate concepts: For example, voicing accounts for the difference between the pair of sounds associated with the English letters ⟨s⟩ and ⟨z⟩. The two sounds are transcribed as [s] and [z] to distinguish them from the English letters, which have several possible pronunciations, depending on the context. If one places the fingers on the voice box (i.e., the location of

319-612: The Adam's apple in the upper throat), one can feel a vibration while [z] is pronounced but not with [s]. (For a more detailed, technical explanation, see modal voice and phonation .) In most European languages , with a notable exception being Icelandic , vowels and other sonorants (consonants such as m, n, l, and r) are modally voiced . Yidiny has no underlyingly voiceless consonants, only voiced ones. When used to classify speech sounds, voiced and unvoiced are merely labels used to group phones and phonemes together for

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348-613: The Mangic languages as well, instead of grouping them with the Pakanic languages . The following classification follows the branching given by Sidwell (2010, ms). Sidwell (2014) proposes an additional branch, consisting of: Sidwell (2015:12) provides a revised classification of Palaungic. Bit–Khang is clearly Palaungic, but contains many Khmuic loanwords. Sidwell (2015:12) believes it likely groups within East Palaungic. On

377-462: The [z] phone since /z/ is frequently devoiced, even in fluent speech, especially at the end of an utterance. The sequence of phones for nods might be transcribed as [nɒts] or [nɒdz] , depending on the presence or strength of this devoicing. While the [z] phone has articulatory voicing, the [s] phone does not have it. What complicates the matter is that for English, consonant phonemes are classified as either voiced or voiceless even though it

406-577: The "Pu" (濮), who lived in the Lancang river valley during ancient times. It is believed that these people were one branch of a number of peoples that were collectively known to the ancient Chinese as the Bǎipú (百濮, literally Hundred Pu ). Traditionally, the Blang considered teeth blackened by chewing betel nuts a beauty characteristic. The women usually dress in jackets with black skirts. The men had tattoos in

435-505: The International Phonetic Alphabet have a notation for partial voicing and devoicing as well as for prevoicing : Partial voicing can mean light but continuous voicing, discontinuous voicing, or discontinuities in the degree of voicing. For example, ₍s̬₎ could be an [s] with (some) voicing in the middle and ₍z̥₎ could be [z] with (some) devoicing in the middle. Partial voicing can also be indicated in

464-404: The closure) and the duration of the closure and aspiration. English voiceless stops are generally aspirated at the beginning of a stressed syllable, and in the same context, their voiced counterparts are voiced only partway through. In more narrow phonetic transcription , the voiced symbols are maybe used only to represent the presence of articulatory voicing, and aspiration is represented with

493-408: The contrast is more complicated for English. The "voiced" sounds do not typically feature articulatory voicing throughout the sound. The difference between the unvoiced stop phonemes and the voiced stop phonemes is not just a matter of whether articulatory voicing is present or not. Rather, it includes when voicing starts (if at all), the presence of aspiration (airflow burst following the release of

522-482: The defining lexical innovations for his Northern Mon-Khmer branch, was likely borrowed from Palaungic into Khmuic. The Palaungic family includes at least three branches, with the position of some languages as yet unclear. Lamet, for example, is sometimes classified as a separate branch. The following classification follows that of Diffloth & Zide (1992), as quoted in Sidwell (2009:131). Some researchers include

551-428: The devoicing of the former would otherwise make them sound identical to the latter. English has four pairs of fricative phonemes that can be divided into a table by place of articulation and voicing. The voiced fricatives can readily be felt to have voicing throughout the duration of the phone especially when they occur between vowels. However, in the class of consonants called stops , such as /p, t, k, b, d, ɡ/ ,

580-504: The distinction often shifting to the following vowel. In the Wa branch, this is generally realized as breathy voice vowel phonation ; in Palaung–Riang, as a two-way register tone system. The Angkuic languages have contour tone — the U language , for example, has four tones, high, low, rising, falling, — but these developed from vowel length and the nature of final consonants, not from

609-662: The following villages of Yunnan province (Tao 2012:16-18). Except for the Bulang of Xishuangbanna , the Bulang of most of these counties speak the U language (Svantesson 1991). Locations from Wang & Zhao (2013:173-179) are also included. Ethnic Bulang villages are also located in Jinghong City, including in Kunhan Dazhai 昆罕大寨村 in Dahuangba Village 大荒坝村, Dadugang Township 大渡岗乡. Palaungic languages The Palaungic or Palaung–Wa languages are

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638-618: The languages of the Wa and Lawa peoples in addition to Blang. Some Blang also speak the Chinese language and Southwestern Tai languages in addition to Blang. Two systems of writing, based on the Latin alphabet , have been developed: 'Totham' in the Xishuangbanna and 'Tolek' from Dehong and Lincang . Chinese ethnographers identify the Blang as descendants of an ancient tribe known as

667-480: The length of the preceding vowel. Other English sounds, the vowels and sonorants, are normally fully voiced. However, they may be devoiced in certain positions, especially after aspirated consonants, as in c o ffee , t r ee , and p l ay in which the voicing is delayed to the extent of missing the sonorant or vowel altogether. There are two variables to degrees of voicing: intensity (discussed under phonation ), and duration (discussed under voice onset time ). When

696-429: The normal IPA with transcriptions like [ᵇb̥iˑ] and [ædᵈ̥] . The distinction between the articulatory use of voice and the phonological use rests on the distinction between phone (represented between square brackets) and phoneme (represented between slashes). The difference is best illustrated by a rough example. The English word nods is made up of a sequence of phonemes, represented symbolically as /nɒdz/ , or

725-449: The other hand, Sidwell (2015) considers Danaw to be the most divergent Palaungic language. Diagnostic Palaungic lexical innovations as identified by Paul Sidwell (2021) are: Voiced consonant Voice or voicing is a term used in phonetics and phonology to characterize speech sounds (usually consonants ). Speech sounds can be described as either voiceless (otherwise known as unvoiced ) or voiced. The term, however,

754-515: The purposes of classification. The International Phonetic Alphabet has distinct letters for many voiceless and voiced pairs of consonants (the obstruents ), such as [p b], [t d], [k ɡ], [q ɢ] . In addition, there is a diacritic for voicedness: ⟨ ◌̬ ⟩. Diacritics are typically used with letters for prototypically voiceless sounds. In Unicode , the symbols are encoded U+032C ◌̬ COMBINING CARON BELOW and U+0325 ◌̥ COMBINING RING BELOW . The extensions to

783-417: The sequence of /n/ , /ɒ/ , /d/ , and /z/ . Each symbol is an abstract representation of a phoneme. That awareness is an inherent part of speakers' mental grammar that allows them to recognise words. However, phonemes are not sounds in themselves. Rather, phonemes are, in a sense, converted to phones before being spoken. The /z/ phoneme, for instance, can actually be pronounced as either the [s] phone or

812-415: The torso and the stomach. They dressed in wide black trousers and jackets buttoned to the front. Often, they would wear turbans of either white or black fabric. The houses of the Blang are made out of bamboo and usually consist of two floors. The first floor is designed as a warehouse for food and a stable for livestock animals, such as chickens, whereas the second is designed to house the family. The chimney

841-580: The voicing of initial consonants. Paul Sidwell (2015) suggests that the Palaungic Urheimat (homeland) was in what is now the border region of Laos and Sipsongpanna in Yunnan , China. The Khmuic homeland was adjacent to the Palaungic homeland, resulting in many lexical borrowings among the two branches due to intense contact. Sidwell (2014) suggests that the word for 'water' (Proto-Palaungic *ʔoːm), which Gérard Diffloth had used as one of

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