The Nuosu Book of Origins is a complete translation into English from the language of the Nuosu people dwelling in Liangshan Yi Autonomous Prefecture in Sichuan, China. The translation is thoroughly annotated, which helps us to comprehend the text more profoundly. It also contains an encyclopaedic introduction to the Nuosu people, their life and culture. This part is concise but surprisingly detailed so it is ideal for those seeking to learn more about this ethnic group, and offers indispensable reference for scholars in related fields.
The Nuosu was a caste society until the late 1950s and is now affiliated with the Yi ethnic group (彝族) broadly distributed in Sichuan, Yunnan, Guizhou, and Guangxi. The language the Nuosu people speak and write is officially classified as northern Yi, and consists of six Yi dialects in China, four of which possess the script and are widely evidenced in manuscripts. Traditionally, the written Yi language is used and passed down exclusively by religious leaders or priests called “bimo”. However, interestingly enough, the present work is based on transcription by Jjivot Zopqu, who is not a bimo but was a traditional conflict arbitrator with a deep knowledge of ritual and related texts according to Bender (p. xii).
Yi characters have been used not for communication but the secrecy of each bimo clan. Consequently, they have been so personal and individual that there are countless allographs even in the same dialect. Thence it follows that the Yi characters show great diversity in their forms, phonetic values, and meanings across Yi dialects. Besides, they are still now in the process of transforming from an ideographic state to a syllabic one such as Liangshan Standard Yi script in the case of Northern Yi.
The Book of Origins is known as Hnewo teyy (literally “History Book”) or its Chinese translation《勒俄特依》has been inherited both in oral and written formats by the Nuosu people residing in the Liangshan locale for generations. This sublime classic epic tells “the story of the creation of the world, centered on landscapes in southwest China” (p. xxiii), and various versions exist. The epic has often been translated into Mandarin and English, and studied mainly from cultural, religious, or anthropological perspectives, but there has been very little linguistic analysis hitherto. For instance, more than 20 items on this Nuosu treasure have been reserved in the National Library of China in Beijing.
Among such previous works, the most noteworthy is Kudo, Shisen Dairyouzan I-zoku Sousei-Shinwa Chousa-Kiroku (『四川省大涼山イ族創世神話調査記録』, Research Record of Creation Myth of Yi People in Daliangshan, Sichuan, translated by the reviewer; Tokyo, 2003). This is a magnificent survey with the same theme as the present work; it contains a particularized description of Nuosu life, culture and religion, a translation of the entire “Book of origins” into Japanese and Chinese as well as IPA, and the whole text written in Yi characters. It is to be the most regretted that this is mostly written in Japanese but the Chinese translation part, it would not be readily accessible to everyone.
The work under review here, on the contrary, will be referred more broadly, because it is a complete English version accomplished through the significant efforts of the authors to reconstruct missing lines based on other existing versions and correction of obvious irregularities in the use of the Yi graphs in names, as stated on page xvii. In addition to this pleasing solution, their translation, brimming with explicit annotations, is an outstanding success in itself and will undoubtedly be an essential primary source for scholars of Yi studies.
Notwithstanding its remarkableness, as a linguist, I should mention a few misleading explanations about examples given in the section “Pronunciation guide and conventions” on page xix. As the tone indicator such as -t, -x and -p is attached to every single syllable in the Romanized Liangshan Standard Yi script, in the case of bimox, only the second syllable should be pronounced with the mid-high tone, not a whole word as exemplified on the page.
Then, it might be attributed to dialectal difference within Nuosu, northern Yi, the letter “r” is used by the rule of Liangshan Standard Yi script not as a final consonant but as an indicator of constrictive, more accurately laryngealized, vowel: Iwasa, “Notes on constrictive and non-constrictive vowels in the Yi languages”, Onsei Kenkyuu: According to the Results of Acoustic Analyses (Tokyo, 2019, in Japanese). Hence, with the exception of loanwords from Mandarin or elsewhere, there cannot, to my knowledge at least, be syllables ending with a consonant in this language.
Finally, and most regrettably, the reviewer wishes there would have been either the whole original or Standard Yi text fully glossed, though the translators have generously made the full text of Standard Yi romanization open at the following site: https://doi.org/10.6069/9780295745701.s01
Nonetheless, the entire work deserves to be praised. As noted in the foreword by Steven Harrell (p. vii), it is strenuous to comprehend and decipher a whole text written in Yi characters. For one thing, as is mentioned above, it is arduous to interpret a Yi text like Book of Origins due to its individuality. For another, normally in texts written in Nuosu as well as other Yi dialects, there are recondite expressions by which even prominent bimos are perplexed.
