Ersu phonology

## Consonants

Ersu has 37 simple initial consonants and 22 cluster initial consonants. Besides the ones found in Mandarin loanwords, there are no syllabic final consonants.

The following table shows the phonological system of speakers of about age 50 and younger. All the sounds represented below are word initial except the nasals, which can also occasionally be used as an independent syllable.

There are 22 cluster initials, eighteen of which are composed of two consonants and four are composed of 3 consonants. They are as follows:

There is also some restrictions on what vowels the cluster initials can precede and are generally more limited than the number of vowels that the simple consonants can precede.
More on allophones of these consonants can be found in Zhang, S.'s 2013 dissertation.

## Vowels

Their vowel system includes seven basic vowels, three rhotic vowels, six diphthongs, and one triphthong. Ersu does not have nasalized vowels, however, there are nasalized vowels in loan words from Chinese. There are no long vowels.

The fifteen basic vowels are: /i/, /y/, /ɨ/, /ɯ/, /u/, /e/, /ɛ/, /æ/, /ɐ/, /ə/, /ɑ/, /ɒ/, /ʌ/, /ɔ/ and /o/. The three rhotic vowels are: /ɑɹ/, /əɹ/, and /oɹ/.

There are also six diphthongs, three rising and three falling. The three rising diphthongs are /iɛ/, /iɑ/ and /uɑ/. The three falling diphthongs end with a less prominent front vowel /i/, but begin with a more prominent vowel. They are: /ui/, /ɛi/, and /ɑi/. All of the diphthongs besides /uɑ/ are not frequently found in Ersu, only in a few individual words. /uɑ/ is found in a large number of words, following a variety of consonant initials such as /kh/, /k/, /n/, /ŋ/, /l/, /tsh/, /ʂ/, and /x/.

/uɑo/ is the only triphthong found in Ersu, and only to exist in one word [zuɑo] 'bowl'.

## Syllable Structure and Types

The basic syllable pattern is CV. C can be a single consonant or consonant cluster. V can be a single vowel, diphthong, or triphthong. Native words of Ersu do not contain coda consonants. Each syllable will have a nucleus that is a vowel, diphthong, or triphthong, and very rarely a syllabic nasal.

Often a syllable can be simply V or C. The vowels /ɑ/, /ɑɹ/ and /əɹ/ can function as a syllable V. Nasals /m/, /n/, and /ŋ/ can also form independent syllables as C, however they are much rarer.

Lastly, there is the NCV pattern, which refers to nasalized syllables, where the N stands for a nasal /n/ or /m/. The rest of the structure is the same as the basic CV structure above.

## Tones

The tone bearing unit is a syllable, and each syllable is obligatorily assigned a tone. There are two tones with contrastive minimal pairs found in Ersu; high level, and mid level. The assignment of the tones in a particular morpheme or word is unpredictable, though data suggests that the high level tone is much more frequent than the mid level tone. The pitch contour of the Ersu tones is also much less stable/consistent compared to Mandarin Chinese, and often have contextual variation.

Below is an example of the contrastive minimal pairs of words with tonal differences. [`] marks the mid level tone, and nothing marks the high level tone.

## Loanword Phonology

There is strong evidence that Tibetan and Yi words have been borrowed into Ersu without adaptation. Some of the words have exactly the same pronunciation as the Tibetan or Yi words. There is some contention as to whether or not this is good enough evidence to say that Ersu people belong to the Tibetan nationality.

There is also a large amount of Mandarin words borrowed into the Ersu language. These words mainly come from the dialect in Mandarin that carries the tone systems of Southwestern Mandarin varieties, henceforth referred to as "Mandarin". According to Zhang, the majority of Mandarin loanwords occur in the texts relevant to modern times such as long conversations, procedural and autobiographical narratives. In a historical context, Mandarin is hardly seen, even as late as the 1980s.

Ersu generally utilize Mandarin words in two different ways:

1. Mandarin is directly borrowed without any adaptation, and is rather obvious. This leads to the use of nasalized vowels that are borrowed from Mandarin to appear in Ersu everyday speech, though it is not originally a part of their phonemic inventory.
2. They assimilate Mandarin into Ersu by making the former sound very much like Ersu. This applies to words that have been borrowed for a longer time, and also the speech of the older Ersu speakers over 70 years old. Below are methods that Ersu adapts Mandarin words.

* Nasals in the coda of Mandarin are deleted when adapted, most likely due to the lack of codas in native Ersu.
* When there are diphthongs in Mandarin that are also in Ersu, they are directly borrowed. However, for the diphthongs that are in Mandarin and not in Ersu, only one of the vowels in the Mandarin diphthong is kept. Usually only the back vowel is kept. ex. /uo/ in Mandarin is adapted to keep the /o/ in the Ersu lexicon.
* /ə/ and /ɤ/ in Mandarin always becomes /o/ in Ersu.
* All the tones in Mandarin are transformed to the mid level tone in Ersu.
* Two notable exceptions are the adaptations of Mandarin words for 'duck' and 'goose'. They are open syllables in Mandarin, but are adapted with a nasalized coda and a stressed glottal stop at the onset of the word.