Tangut as a West Gyalrongic language

This paper proposes that Tangut should be classified as a West Gyalrongic language in the Sino-Tibetan/Trans-Himalayan family. We examine lexical commonalities, case marking, partial reduplication, and verbal morphology in Tangut and in modern West Gyalrongic languages, and point out nontrivial shared innovations between Tangut and modern West Gyalrongic languages. The analysis suggests a closer genetic relationship between Tangut and Modern West Gyalrongic than between Tangut and Modern East Gyalrongic. This paper is the first study that tackles the exact linguistic affiliation of the Tangut language based on the comparative method.1 Introduction 2 Tangut and Pre-Tangut reconstructions used in this paper 3 Gyalrongic languages (before this paper) 4 Lexicon 4.1 Gyalrongic lexical commonalities 4.2 West Gyalrongic lexical commonalities 4.2.1 “Westernized” Gyalrongic cognates 4.2.2 West Gyalrongic monosyllabic innovations 4.2.3 West Gyalrongic bisyllabic innovations - Unanalyszable bisyllabic words/Words with two innovated morphemes - Words with one innovated morpheme - Innovated combination of common retentions 5 Case marking 6 Partial reduplication of the West Gyalrongic type 7 Verbal morphology 7.1 The ordering of inflectional prefixes 7.2 Inverse marking and stem alternations 7.3 Orientation prefixes 7.4 Modal markers 7.4.1 ‘inferential marker’ 7.4.2 ‘irrealis particle’ 8 Note on the migration of the Tanguts 9 Conclusio