TITLE:
The Bai Language: A Musical Language with Typological Ablative Cases
AUTHORS:
Suqin Li
KEYWORDS:
Bai, Musical Language, Typological Ablative Case, Oral Transmission, Grammatical Function
JOURNAL NAME:
Open Journal of Social Sciences,
Vol.3 No.12,
December
29,
2015
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.