The Central Loloish languages, also known as Central Ngwi, is a branch of
Loloish languages in Bradley (1997). It is not used in Lama's (2012) classification. Central Loloish is also not supported in Satterthwaite-Phillips' (2011) computational phylogenetic analysis of the Lolo-Burmese languages.[1]
Languages
Lama (2012) considers Central Loloish to be
paraphyletic, and splits up Bradley's (1997) Central Loloish into the following independent branches of Loloish. The
Lawu language group has been added from Yang (2012)[2] and Hsiu (2017).[3]
Lisoish is the largest and most diverse group.
Jinuo is classified as a
Hanoish (Southern Loloish) language in Lama (2012).
Innovations
Pelkey (2011:367) lists the following as Central Ngwi innovations.
Proto-Ngwi tone categories 1 and 2: tone splitting that is widespread
Proto-Ngwi tone category 2 splits to *glottal-prefixed initials (higher-pitched reflexes) and *non-glottal-prefixed initials (lower-pitched reflexes; with a subsequent flip-flop in Lahu)
Proto-Ngwi tone category L prefixed stop initials > high/rising pitch reflexes
Family group classifiers paradigmatized with disyllabic forms, vowel leveling, and other systemic changes
Burmic extensive paradigm is moderately grammaticalized; more than Southern Ngwi, but fewer than Northern Ngwi
^Satterthwaite-Phillips, Damian. 2011. Phylogenetic inference of the Tibeto-Burman languages or On the usefulness of lexicostatistics (and "Megalo"-comparison) for the subgrouping of Tibeto-Burman. Ph.D. dissertation, Stanford University.
Bradley, David (1997). "
Tibeto-Burman languages and classification". In Tibeto-Burman languages of the Himalayas, Papers in South East Asian linguistics. Canberra: Pacific Linguistics.