Yunfan Lai (Trinity College Dublin) -- Animal calling sounds in Khroskyab

Animal calling sounds in Khroskyab Yunfan Lai (Trinity College Dublin) The Khroskyabs people, residing in Western Sichuan, have a cultural tradition of utilising distinctive calling sounds to communicate with their domesticated animals, notably cows, sheep, goats, cats, and dogs. These animal calling sounds serve as a means for summoning, directing, or releasing animals within their daily activities. Different sounds used for different animals may give us a clue about the classification of animals in the Khroskyabs speaking region. This presentation will showcase the animal calling sounds in Khroskyabs, accompanied by morphophonological analyses. It will also infer the indigenous classification of animals and compare it to the scientific classification. Yunfan Lai is a Research Fellow in the Trinity Centre for Asian Studies. He earned his PhD from Université Sorbonne Nouvelle in 2017 for a grammar of Wobzi Khroskyabs. Before coming to Trinity he was a postdoc at the Max Plank Institute for Human History in Jena. He has over 30 publications, and in 2022 he was honored by the Li Fang-Kuei Society for Chinese Linguistics as Outstanding Young Scholar. His work focusses on the linguistics and ethnography of the Gyalrong peoples of Western Sichuan.