Evolution of Dorsal Fricatives in rGyalthangic Varieties of Khams Tibetan

Abstract

This study examines the regularity of sound changes in rGyalthangic, a Tibetic dialectal group spoken in Yunnan, China, and discusses how to characterise processes of fricativisation of dorsal (i.e., prepalatal, palatal, and velar) obstruents based on current dialectal data collected with geolinguistic methodology. The article focuses first on how retention and merger occurred in the sounds derived from a set of four series in Literary Tibetan, Ky, Kr, Pr and Py, within Khams Tibetan and the target languages. Second, it describes detailed processes of sound change in the Pr and Py series in relation to dorsal initials, and discusses how fricativisation developed.