earticle

영어

Despite the lack of historical documentation, The Nakhi are believed to be the descendants of the Old Chiang, moving to the Lijiang area from their nothern home in The Middle Western China. But even after the official recognition by the government in 1954, the Nakhi have kept suffering from two problems: the lack legitimacy in the tribal name as their endonym among the whole tribe, and the unclear interpretation ('na'='black', 'khi'/'xi'='people') of the tribal name. They can be properly treated by the fact that the Moso are not a tribe distinct from the Nakhi. Especially for the meaning of the tribal name, it needs to consider the adjective modification in the Nakhi language. In the name the first one is regarded as a modifier before the second letter whose grammatical category is a noun. For this reason the disputable meaning('na'='black', 'khi'/'xi'='people') can not hold out no longer, and a different syntactic relation has to be considered. Through the semantic analysis of the Moso as their exonym, a better semantic interpretation of the tribal name is proposed that 'na' and 'xi' refer to 'heaven' and 'people' respectively, and the tribal name has a compound noun structure, 'Noun1+Noun2'. In this papen, I will claimthat the tribal name has to be reanalyred as an exonym stracture (Noun1+Noun2) instead of endonym stractare (Adj+Noun).