A sketch of Solon grammar

北海道大学大学院文学研究科北方研究教育センター

北方人文研究

The present paper is intended as a grammatical sketch of Solon, a Tungusic language spoken in northern Inner Mongolia, China. The first section is a brief introduction including an explanation for dialects and previous literatures. The second section is devoted to phonology and the third to morphological description. In the fourth section, various types of noun phrase and sentence structure are illustrated. Finally,issues of lexical borrowing are briefly touched upon. Though the present sketch is far from a full grammatical description, it might be of some use for those who wish to get some general idea of this minority language. The first version of this sketch was contributed to a chapter of the Tungusic volume of grammatical description series. For some reason the volume has not appeared for several years, so that I will publish my chapter (with minor revisions) separately here with the permission of the volume editor Alexander Vovin.