The past few decades have witnessed tremendous progress in rGyalrongic studies. As far as Northern rGyalrong and West rGyarlongic languages are concerned, there are excellent reference grammars, academic papers on various topics and, most importantly, collections of natural corpora accessible freely online. However, Situ, also known as Eastern rGyalrong, is the first rGyalrong language to have been studied, but remains the most inadequately described variety. Most researchers focus on the Cogtse dialect, but somehow ignore the internal diversity of Situ. The author of this book, Yasuhiko Nagano, is among the very first experts interested in Situ rGyalrong. This reference grammar, focusing on a previously undescribed variety of Situ, the Bhola dialect, as well as the rGyalrong language online database edited by the author, are in my opinion important contributions to study of Situ rGyalrong.
This grammar, written in Japanese, is concise in style. It reveals several interesting discoveries, and constitutes an important scholarly contribution. The main body is divided into five parts. Chapter 1 introduces the history of the rGyalrong area, the history of rGyalrongic studies, and the upper classification of rGyalrongic languages from a macro perspective. Chapter 2 provides a phonological sketch. Chapter 3 is the most detailed part of the grammar, dealing with different parts of speech in the Bhola dialect with a focus on its verbal morphology. Chapters 4 and 5 describe simple and complex sentences in Bhola. It is worth mentioning that this book is accompanied by a well-presented list of Bhola lexical items and more than 200 daily phrases with gloss and translation.
Marielle Prins's grammar (A Grammar of rGyalrong Jiǎomùzú (Kyom-kyo) Dialects, Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2016) of Kyom-kyo Situ shows us a possible isogloss between the deprenasalizing dialects (such as Cogtse) and the lenited dialects (such as Kyom-kyo and Brag-bar) inside Situ rGyalrong (Gong Xun, “Le rgyalrong zbu, une langue tibéto-birmane de chine du sud-ouest : une étude descriptive, typologique et comparative”, PhD thesis, Institut National des langues et des civilisations orientales, 2018, pp. 22–3). The Bhola dialect, described in this grammar, reveals the fact that lenition can develop independently inside Situ dialects. A comparison of three cognate words in Situ illustrates that Bhola has clearly undergone different initial lenition to Kyom-kyo and Brag-bar: “to do” (Cogtse ka-pá, Bhola ka-pa, Kyom-kyo ka-va, Brag-bar ka-viɛ̂), “to come” (Cogtse ka-pô, Bhola ka-we, Kyom-kyo ka-vi, Brag-bar ví/və́), and “snow” (Cogtse tɐ-jpâ, Bhola te-wa, Kyom-kyo tə-jva, Brag-bar ta-jviɛ̂).
The grammar mentions the existence of a negative prefix ǰV- (section 3.4.2.1), presenting complementary distribution with negative prefix mV- widely found in Sino-Tibetan languages (a similar situation is also reported in Kyom-kyo, Prins, p. 594). The origin of this prefix is mysterious, since no cognate forms are found in other rGyalrong languages or adjacent Tibetan dialects. In Bhola, this negative prefix ǰV- occurs in perfective and prohibitive, where we normally expect a directional prefix serving as perfective or prohibitive marker. However, in most examples provided in the grammar, the negative perfective and prohibitive verbs prefixed by ǰV- do not have a directional prefix. This can be shown by the sentence “I did not see (him/her/it)” ǰi-mto-ṅ (neg-見る-1s) in Bhola (p. 57, e.g. 048) and ma-na-mətɐ̂-ŋ (neg-pfv-see2-1sg) in Brag-bar. The absence of directional prefixes in perfective and prohibitive is surprising to our knowledge of core rGyalrong languages. This discovery may have a far-reaching impact, since it encourages us to rethink the status of directional prefixes in the verbal morphology of rGyalrongic languages and their grammaticalization as markers of tense-aspect-mood-evidentiality. But whether this morphology is related to the orientationally unmarked (non-motion) verbs in West rGyalrongic languages (Lai Yunfan, “Grammaire du khroskyabs de Wobzi”, PhD thesis, Université Sorbonne Nouvelle-Paris 3, 2017, pp. 311–2) needs further investigation.
This book can serve as the basis for a more in-depth documentation of this language in the future. Topics that deserve further study include the tonal system and stem alternations, which are known to exist in Situ (Lin You-Jing, “Tense and aspect morphology in the Zhuokeji rGyalrong verb”, Cahiers de Linguistique – Asie Orientale 32/2, 2003, 245–86; and Zhang Shuya, “Stem alternations in the Brag-bar dialect of Situ Rgyalrong”, Linguistics of the Tibeto-Burman Area 41/2, 2018, 294–330), but are not mentioned in this work.
