The origin of vowel alternations in the Tangut verb

Language and Linguistics, 10.1:17-27, 2009.Like other Qiangic languages, Tangut has complex verbal morphology. Based on comparative data from Qiangic languages, this article attempts to reconstruct the origin of the Tangut ablaut system. In Tangut, some verbs have two stems, the distribution of which is determined by the person of the agent and the patient. Stem 2 appears when the agent is first or second person singular and the patient is third person, and Stem 1 in other verbal forms. We show that there was a third person patient *-w suffix in Tangut cognate with Northern Qiang, and that Stem 2 is the result of the coalescence of this suffix with the verb root vowel.