Thousands of languages are known to exist in our world. (Mainly as the result of globalization, more than half of them, at least, will have become ‘extinct’ within hundred years. But let us keep this topic for later.)
Many people do not make a clear distinction between written and spoken language. These people should know that most of the world’s languages are unwritten. Spoken language is the basis, whereas writing systems are useful innovations or ‘extra’ features. Languages can be written in all kinds of ways. Some languages are written in pictograms, such as Chinese and old Egyptian, and others are written in the most various types of alphabets. (There are several tens of them, such as the Latin one, the Cyrillic, Arabic, Cherokee, Burmese etc., many of which can be used for different languages. One very special type is International Phonetic Alphabet, which aims at pinpointing the language exactly the way it sounds, like a recording device in letters.)
My set of books is named ‘Zaiwa Grammar and Dictionary’, so it is NOT only a dictionary. In fact, the grammar part of my work consists of more than twice as many pages than the dictionary. The reason why many people think that my work is basically a dictionary may well be that the meaning of a ‘grammar’ is not very clear. A ‘grammar’ is an extensive description of all the workings and building blocks of a language, from its sounds and their variations onwards, and discussing as many as possible of the grammatical tools and how to use them, while also PROOVING all statements, through numerous examples.
My books are not boring!
My books contain all building blocks and instruments and a large part of the vocabulary, of a world named ‘Zaiwa language’, a unique and richly varied world of possibilities for conceiving and expressing things. Any language is a world on its own. Of course: special living environments (subtropical areas, polar steppes, etc.) and collective memories (for example: a history of innumerous migrations for thousands of years) also make things interesting. (And once you have the tools, you can start to explore the old tales and songs, etc.) These factors do make the research and the language contact more exiting, but just as interesting is the language itself. It is always amazing to see how greatly languages can differ in the ways of expressing things, with not only all the words different, but also very much different grammatical tools. At other times, the similarities with other languages as for their ways of expressing can be striking. To cut short: I believe that ‘language contact’ can feed the mind.
In my books I have reduced the use of linguistic jargon to a minimum and left lots of space for example sentences, about daily life and other, sometimes funny, situations. These examples are for illustrating or proving the use of the words or grammatical items in question, but also for showing how these components ‘cohabit’ with others within the language, and for the reader they can be used for peeping into the language on a larger scale, and testing unto what extend one can find one’s way in. (These books are also my own Private playground, since I enjoy feeling the language coming to life when I read them.) Though these books may not be easy, I think their value is that they offer a ‘window’ into the world of Zaiwa language.
My research took place in the settings of PhD studies at Leiden University and was much inspired by the scientific mindset taught by my tutors, for which I am much grateful of course. This undertaking formed part of a specific scientific field: the comparative linguistics of the language family in case.
Zaiwa belongs to the Tibeto-Burman language family (or Sino-Tibetan: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sino-Tibetan_languages), including a few big Asian languages such as the Chinese and Tibetan languages and Burmese, but the most of them being really small. Scientists in this field - but not me! – can use these materials in their reconstructions of proto-languages, which are the languages that are thought to have preceded certain groups of languages, before they had split up and diversified because of migrations, being separated by mountains or rivers, etc. This is all unwritten ethnic history going back thousands of years, often exceeding the scope of archeology. In recent years, genetics has been used alongside linguistics (such as by my tutor George van Driem) to trace back ancient migrations. And indeed, the correlation between genes and languages is also an immensely interesting field for scientists to explore.
Grammars and dictionaries like mine are mostly only read by colleagues in the same field, but they can also be treasured as monuments, since most of these languages are disappearing. They can also be used for reference and justification when making writing systems and educational materials.
One could also say that my two books are the outcome of a kind of very special game: to expose a person to a language completely different from his/her mother tongue and spoken in far away place, and let him/her investigate this language totally from scratch, and moreover describe it systematically so that other non-speakers of that language will also understand. Will the results be objective? Expertise and tricks are needed, learned from very competent teachers, but also a good intuition.
“Is Zaiwa a ‘dialect’?”
Zaiwa is one of the five languages spoken by the Jingpo minority within China. These should be referred to as languages, and certainly not as dialects of Chinese, Burmese or any other languages. The scientific ways for dividing between languages and dialects are often different from how people normally tend to speak about these matters. But there is one popular saying which is in fact quite true: “a language is a dialect with an army” (and a government, a currency, a flag etc.). For most people, a ‘dialect’ refers to some unified form of speech spoken by a relatively small community that somehow belongs to larger communities speaking in a different way. Just like in China; in order to simplify matters and to emphasize a sense of unity, all variants of Chinese are normally called ‘dialects’ (方言), whereas scientifically, Chinese rather is a group of languages, of which each can be divided into numerous dialects.
But how do scientists distinguish languages and dialects then? I am afraid this is rather a complicated matter, which I would like to keep to some experts on these matters. The rate of mutual intelligibility is often a criterion, though not always decisive. Sometimes, two dialects may sound very different but, upon a closer look, have a lot of structural similarities. My teacher once joked that Dutch and German should in fact be called dialects of one another, since they don’t differ so much. To consider Swedish and Norwegian to be different languages should be really ridiculous then, because they are very similar.
People often underestimate the differences existing between languages, given that for outsiders they would all sound just as unintelligible. Very small languages can also be very different from bigger ones spoken in surrounding areas. (There even are language isolates, like Basque and some languages in the Himalayas, that in all their basics are completely unlike other languages around, and that are the result of ancient migrations.) People sometimes ask whether the difference between Zaiwa and Chinese may be something like Dutch and Frysian. Well, no, maybe it would rather be like between Dutch and Russian, or English and Italian.
But what IS in these books then?
The next piece will be entitled: the Fun of Zaiwa.
