Jiamao ( Chinese : 加茂 ; pinyin : Jiāmào ; also 台 Tái or 塞 Sāi ) is a divergent Kra-Dai language or possible language isolate spoken in southern Hainan , China. Jiamao speakers' autonym is tʰai .
7-585: Jiamao is often classified one of the Hlai languages , which constitute a primary branch of the Kra–Dai language family , but Norquest (2007, 2015) and others note that Jiamao has a non-Hlai substratum. Graham Thurgood (1992) suggested that Jiamao might have an Austroasiatic substratum . Norquest (2007) identified various lexical items in Jiamao that do not reconstruct to Proto-Hlai and later firmly established it as
14-594: A non-Hlai language. Hsiu (2018) notes that Jiamao also contains various words borrowed from an unknown, currently extinct Tibeto-Burman branch. In the 1980s, Jiamao was spoken by 50,000 people in central and south-central Hainan, mostly in Jiamao Township (加茂镇) in Baoting Li and Miao Autonomous County . It shares less than half of its lexicon with the Hlai languages. In Lingshui Li Autonomous County , Jiamao
21-572: A primary branch of the Kra–Dai language family spoken in the mountains of central and south-central Hainan in China by the Hlai people , not to be confused with the colloquial name for the Leizhou branch of Min Chinese ( Chinese : 黎话 ; pinyin : Líhuà ). They include Cun , whose speakers are ethnically distinct. A quarter of Hlai speakers are monolingual. None of the Hlai languages had
28-696: A writing system until the 1950s, when the Latin script was adopted for Ha. Norquest (2007) classifies the Hlai languages as follows. Individual languages are highlighted in bold. There are some 750,000 Hlai speakers. Nadou is spoken by approximately 4,000 people in the two villages of Nàdòu 那斗村 (in Xīnlóng Town 新龙镇 ) and Yuè 月村 (in Bāsuǒ Town 八所镇 ), in Dongfang, Hainan . Speakers refer to themselves as lai¹¹ and are officially classified by
35-642: Is documented in Huang (2011). Jiamao has 8 distinct tone categories (Norquest 2015:311): Like Proto- Be , Jiamao does not distinguish between tone categories B and C, but rather only has an X category. As noted by Thurgood (1992) and Norquest (2015), these do not correspond to Hlai tones, but rather initials in Proto-Hlai . High register tones are derived from unvoiced initials, and low register tones from voiced initials. Hlai languages The Hlai languages ( Chinese : 黎语 ; pinyin : Líyǔ ) are
42-458: Is spoken in Benhao (本号), Nanping (南平), Wenluo (文罗), Zuguan (祖关), Longguang (隆广), and Tianzi (田仔). In Lingshui County, Jiamao is known as Tái (台), and is also known as Sāi (塞) or Jiāwǒ (加我). There are four Jiamao dialects, namely Jiamao (加茂), Liugong (六弓), Tianzi (田仔), and Qunying (群英). Jiamao is spoken in the following villages and townships of southern Hainan. The Liaoergong (廖二弓) dialect
49-423: The Chinese government as ethnic Han Chinese. Jiāmào 加茂 (52,000 speakers) is a divergent Kra-Dai language with a Hlai superstratum and a non-Hlai substratum. The Proto-Hlai language is the reconstructed ancestor of the Hlai languages. Proto-Hlai reconstructions include those of Matisoff (1988), Thurgood (1991), Ostapirat (2004), and Norquest (2007). The following displays the phonological features of
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