Ghost's bride (transcription, glossing, translation)

This is an attempt to document a narrative text, henceforth called ‘Ghost’s bride’, told in the Stau language.1 I have transcribed Ghost’s bride using the International Phonetic Alphabet, glossed each morpheme primarily according to Leipzig Glossing Rules, and translated the narrative line by line in Section 2. Even though much recent progress has been made in the analysis of Stau grammar, and the grammar of related Horpa lects, surprisingly little data is available online to verify the claims that have been made. Thus, this small con- tribution to Stau language documentation is a step in the direction of rectifying that problem; so that Stau data would be freely available and analyses would be reproducible.

The narrative found here, ‘Ghost’s bride’, is part of herder Tibetan (Amdo) folklore, and was originally told in Amdo Tibetan to the storyteller of the version found here. So in a sense this is a translated story: from Amdo into Stau. A large number of ‘traditional’ Stau narratives actually come from Amdo stories. One point of interest of these stories is that certain lines are sung, giving us a rare chance to hear the Stau language in song.

The recording for this text can be found online at: http://doi.org/10.5281/ zenodo.3694003. (A higher quality retelling can be found at http://doi.org/ 10.5281/zenodo.3693994; but the transcription found here will not be an exact match.) Unfortunately,Ghost’s bride is not yet time aligned, but this story as well as several others will be time aligned in the near future.