Beaudouin Mathieu. Grammaire du tangoute. Phonologie et morphologie

INALCO Paris — Langues O', 2023. — 813 p.Tangut is a medieval language attested on a period ranging from the 11th to the 13th Century, whose importance does not only come from the fact it is the third oldest of all the historically widely attested languages within Sino-Tibetan, but also because it belongs to the Gyalrongic subgroup, one of the most conservative taxons of the family. Numerous researches have been done on this language, mainly with a philological or phonological approach, first in the Soviet Union, then in Japan, continental China and Taiwan. However, the works by Nishida (1964/66) and Kepping (1985), although systematic, do not meet the requirements of a description grammar, which was still needed in the field of Sino-Tibetan linguistics. The dissertation tries to fulfill this need, by giving typologists and comparative linguists the first volume of a comprehensive and coherent tool, whose originality lies in the use of comparison with the Gyalrongic languages of the closest taxon ever documented (Horpa). After a historical, cultural, and linguistic (classification, typology, parts of speech) overview of the language, the thesis considers successively the phonology, the nominal morphology, the adverbial clauses, and finally the verb.