The Naish languages are a low-level subgroup of

Sino-Tibetan languages Sino-Tibetan (also referred to as Trans-Himalayan) is a family of more than 400 languages, second only to Indo-European in number of native speakers. Around 1.4 billion people speak a Sino-Tibetan language. The vast majority of these are the 1.3 ...

that include Naxi, Na (Mosuo), and Laze.

Classification

The Naish languages are: * Naish ** '' Naxi'' ** '' Na'' (Narua, Mosuo) ** '' Laze'' In turn, Naish together with

Namuyi Namuyi (Namuzi; autonym: ') is a Tibeto-Burman language belonging to the Naic branch, spoken by approximately 10000 people. It is primarily spoken in southern Sichuan. Namuyi has also been classified as Qiangic by Sun Hongkai (2001) and Guillaum ...

and

Shixing Shixing County ( postal: Chihing; ) is a county of Shaoguan, Guangdong province, China, bordering Jiangxi province to the east. The native variety of Chinese in the area is Hakka The Hakka (), sometimes also referred to as Hakka-speaking C ...

constitutes the

Naic Naic (), officially the Municipality of Naic (), is a municipality in the province of Cavite, Philippines. According to the 2020 census, it has a population of 160,987 people. Etymology Naic, Cavite is one of the former barrios of Maragond ...

subgroup within Sino-Tibetan. Arguments for relatedness include irregular morphotonology: tone patterns of numeral-plus-classifier phrases that constitute shared structural properties. Since these similarities are phonetically nontransparent, they cannot be due to borrowing.

Names

Note that in Mainland China, the term "Naxi" is commonly used for the entire language group, e.g. by the influential linguistic introduction by He and Jiang (2015).Michaud, Alexis, He Limin & Zhong Yaoping. 2015.
Naxi / Naish
" In Rint Sybesma, Wolfgang Behr, Zev Handel & C.T. James Huang (eds.), ''Encyclopedia of Chinese Language and Linguistics''. Leiden: Brill. The terms "Naish" and "Naic" are derived from the endonym ''Na'' used by speakers of several of the languages. These concepts were initially proposed by

Guillaume Jacques Guillaume Jacques (, born 1979) is a French linguist who specializes in the study of Sino-Tibetan languages: Old Chinese, Tangut, Tibetan, Gyalrongic and Kiranti languages. He also performs research on the Algonquian and Siouan language fam ...

Alexis Michaud Alexis Michaud is a French linguist specialising in the study of Southeast Asian languages, especially Naic languages and Vietnamese. He is also known for his work on the typology of tonal languages and as a foremost proponent of Panchronic p ...

(2011).Jacques, Guillaume, and Alexis Michaud. 2011.
Approaching the historical phonology of three highly eroded Sino-Tibetan languages: Naxi, Na and Laze
" ''Diachronica'' 28:468-498. Phylogenetic issues are summarized in the entry about the

subgroup. For a review of the literature about Naish languages, see Li (2015). TentativeSinoTibetanFamilyTreebyJacquesEtAl2011

Lexical innovations

Jacques & Michaud (2011) list the following words as Naish lexical innovations.

Reconstruction

Proto-Naish, the

proto-language In the tree model of historical linguistics, a proto-language is a postulated ancestral language from which a number of attested languages are believed to have descended by evolution, forming a language family. Proto-languages are usually unatte ...

ancestral to the Naish languages, has been reconstructed by Jacques & Michaud (2011). Another reconstruction of Proto-Naish by Zihe Li is in progress; he has published articles detailing open-syllable rhymes, laterals, pre-initials, and retroflex finals.

Phoneme inventory

The Proto-Naish consonant inventory is as follows: The Proto-Naish vowel inventory is disputed; Jacques and Michaud reconstruct seven vowels (notated in their paper with respectively). On the other hand, Li reconstructs a simple five-vowel system . According to Jacques and Michaud, Proto-Naish syllables are exclusively

open syllable A syllable is a basic unit of organization within a sequence of Phone (phonetics), speech sounds, such as within a word, typically defined by linguists as a ''nucleus'' (most often a vowel) with optional sounds before or after that nucleus (''ma ...

s, not counting the rhyme spelled by Jacques and Michaud as ''*iN''. This situation came about due to a total loss of all pre-Naish coda consonants without a trace; pre-Naish vowels in closed syllables have identical outcomes to their open-syllable counterparts. However, Li believes that there are enough traces of the lost consonants to reconstruct a proto-Naish with closed syllables.

Reflexes of vowels

The reflexes of vowels depend heavily on the preceding consonant. Jacques and Michaud employ the following

cover symbol Linguists use a variety of symbols to represent not just single sounds, but certain particular classes of sounds. They are usually capital letters. This article lists those "cover symbols". Consonants Vowels Capitalized vowels are commonly used ...

s: * K for velar stops * TS for affricates and sibilants * R for *r and clusters that result in

retroflex consonant A retroflex () or cacuminal () consonant is a coronal consonant where the tongue has a flat, concave, or even curled shape, and is articulated between the alveolar ridge and the hard palate. They are sometimes referred to as cerebral consona ...

s in attested Naish * S for *r or *s

Jacques & Michaud

The vowel reflexes in Naish as charted by Jacques and Michaud are as follows.

Li

Li, who reconstructs only a five-vowel system , charts the vowel reflexes as follows: Li also provides reflexes of various closed syllables he reconstructs:

Reflexes of consonants

Naish features up to five series of stop corresponences: aspirated, voiceless, voiced, prenasalized voiced, and prenasalized voiceless.

Reflexes of consonant clusters

Proto-Naish possessed many syllable-initial consonant clusters that were simplified in the Naish languages.

Jacques and Michaud

In the following chart, the following cover symbols are used: * ''S'' standing for ''*s'' or ''*r''; * ''C'' standing for a stop. * ''N'' standing for a nasal consonant.

Li

Li's own analysis of consonant clusters is as follows. He reconstructs two types of pre-initial:

homorganic In phonetics, a homorganic consonant (from Latin and ) is a consonant sound that is articulated in the same place of articulation as another. For example, , and are homorganic consonants of one another since they share the bilabial place of ...

nasal pre-initials, and a non-homorganic pre-initial ''*C₁'' (''C'' in the below table).

References

{{Na-Qiangic languages