Directional Prefixes in Tangut and Mu-nya: A Contrastive Study

Abstract

Tangut is an extinct language spoken during Xixia 西夏 dynasty (AD 1038-1227) by the people who settled in the northwestern part of China. Mu-nya (Muya 木雅) is a language spoken in the Sichuan Province in southwest China. These two languages belong to the Tibeto-Burman language group. Since the Mu-nya people share the same ethnic name with the ancient Tangut people, which corresponds to Minyag in written Tibetan, the relationship between these two languages concerns many scholars. They agree that these two languages share cognates and similar typological constructions, one of which is that both languages use “directional prefixes” in verb predicates. Approximately seven or eight morphemes act as verb prefixes to express different directions of motion or behavior in each language. This paper discusses the similarities and differences in the functions of their prefixes using sample sentences to expound on the features and grammatical behavior of these prefixes. First, we introduce an outline of the language and the function of directional prefixes in each language. Second, we compare the directional prefixes using morphological analysis. Finally, we discuss the comparison.