アムド・チベット語におけるヤクの呼び分け --青海省ツェコ県の事例を中心に--

Abstract

Generally, individual ethnic groups have folk vocabularies that are deeply related to their lives. For example, Inuit is known to have hundreds of words for categorizing snow, while Japanese is known to have different words for the same fish at different stages of its growth. These lexical categorizations reflect the field in which each ethnic group takes a great interest. In the case of Tibet, Tibetan pastoralists have a systematic way of referring to livestock according to sex, age, role in herds, physical features (i.e., colors and patterns of fur, horns etc.) , and behavior. Though Tibetan has an extensive vocabulary for livestock, as far as I know, only a few detailed studies have yet been conducted on it. This paper applies linguistic analysis to data from Tsekog (rtse khog) to reveal the systematic terminology for cognizing yaks in Amdo Tibetan. Through this systematic terminology, we can begin to understand the cognition of Tibetan speakers, accumulated in a long time of the traditional pastoral life.