Abstract
This article is a field-work report on the phonological system of the hitherto undescribed Jarut variety of Inner Mongolian. I adopt the theoretical model of a somewhat updated classical generative phonology.
The paper is divided into 6 sections. Section 1 is a brief introduction. Sections 2 to 4 deal with the phonemes in Jarut Mongolian and their distinctive features, the syllable structure rule and the constraints on the distribution of the phonemes, and the morpheme structure rule. Section 5 describes some phonological rules, such as vowel harmony, fronting, short vowel weakening, deletion and insertion. Section 6 is the conclusion. The appendix contains the bulk of the lexical material on which the paper is based, giving the colloquial Jarut words with their corresponding forms in standard Classical Mongolian.
There are 19 consonants, 7 short vowels, 7 long vowels and 9 diphthongs in Jarut Mongolian. Stress is not phonemic. The syllable structure is '(C)V(C) (C), and the morpheme structure is '(C)V(C)(C)(CV(C)(C))n'. Besides, because the phonetic base for vowel harmony in Jarut Mongolian is pharyngealization, we use 〔±RTR〕 to distinguish the so-called 'male vowels' from the 'female vowels'. Our Jarut data support Svantesson's (1985) claim that there is a typological change from palatal harmony to pharyngeal harmony in Inner Mongolian dialects.
We treat the 'intrusive -g-' between two long vowels/diphthongs as the onset of suffixes rather than as an insertion.
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