A Typological Survey in Creolization and the Origin of South-East Asian Languages

本研究是笔者近几年来持续开展的东南亚少数民族语言调查项目的一部分。该项目一直致力于收集和分析关于该地区一些少数民族当代口语的第一手数据，目的是出版面向普通读者的入门语言书籍。与以往的研究一样，研究者每年都会进行几次田野调查，主要是在缅甸，通过信息访谈的方式收集目标语言的口语变体数据，并对其句法结构进行分析，以确定这些语言的类型属性。研究的主要对象是蒙语，据说它生活在所谓的语言岛上，主要分布在缅甸和泰国。这种少数民族语言被认为属于…语系的自养亚语系然而，就像这个语系的其他语言一样，到目前为止，孟语很难得到很好的研究，撇开一些语言人种学方面的问题，如亲属称谓或身体部位，以及基于这些数据的家谱论文，大致可以概括为“19世纪语言学”。可能是第一次，本研究能够收集现代蒙语口语变体的第一手数据，足以使其句法结构的主要特征明显，这可能被充分利用，以编写一本蒙语入门语言书籍，不仅用于语言研究。至于狭义的语言专著，正如前人所述，本研究集中于阐述该地区少数民族语言的音译系统，规范描述不同语言所需的类型学参数，并相互比较，以便更容易地对该地区的一种特定语言进行新的研究和更具一般性的语言类型学的理论考察。较少

The present research makes up a part of the continuous investigation project on minority languages in South-East Asia, being carried out by the present author since last several years. The project has been concentrating on collecting and analyzing first-hand data on their present-day spoken languages of some national minorities in this region with the purpose of publishing introductory language books for the general reader. In the same fashion as the former researches, the researcher carried out several fieldworks every year, mainly in Myanmar, collecting data of the spoken variations of the target languages by way of information interview, and analyzed them upon their syntactic structures in order to identify typological properties of these languages.The principal target of research has been Mon, which is said to be spoken in so-called "language islands", scattered mainly in Myanmar and Thailand. This minority language is conceived of as belonging to the Austroasiatic Language Family … More ; in the same way as with the other languages of this language family, however, Mon has long been hardly well investigated hitherto, leaving aside some linguistic-ethnographic aspects such as kinship terms or body parts and genealogical treatises based on such data, what might roughly be summarized as "19th century linguistics". Probably for the first time, the present research was in the position to collect first-hand data of the spoken variety of the present-day Mon language sufficient for making apparent major characteristics of its syntactic structure, which might be fully utilized in preparing an introductory language book in Mon designed for not only language research. Although its publication itself has not been actualized within in the period of the present research, even the general reader might be in a position to gain basic control of this language necessary for taking practical contact to native Mons.As for linguistic treatise in the narrow sense of the term, the present research concentrated, exactly as the former researchers mentioned above, on elaborating the transliteration system of minority languages of the region and standardizing the typological parameters needed for describing different languages and comparing their descriptions with one another so that both a new research on a particular language in this region and a theoretical survey in linguistic typology with a more general character in succession might be carried out with much ease. Less