Languages of the Greater Himalayan Region – serie

This book is the first description of Kulung, a complex-pronominalising Kiranti (Tibeto-Burman) language spoken in eastern Nepal. It contains the phonology, morphology, and syntax as well as sample texts, verbal paradigms, and a Kulung-English lexicon. The data presented here were collected during four field trips which the author undertook to Nepal between 1992 and 1995. This grammar of Kulung is an exhaustive reference work for Tibeto-Burman linguistics, language typology, and linguistic theory. With financial support of the International Institute for Asian Studies (www.iias.nl).

This description of Sunwar, an endangered Tibeto-Burman language spoken in eastern Nepal, is based on extensive field work by the author and contains a chapter with background information on the Sunwar language, its speakers and their culture, followed by sections on the phonology, the indigenous writing system and the morphology of Sunwar. Verb paradigms, glossed texts, a Sunwar-English glossary and bibliographical references are also presented.Contact between the Sunwar and Nepali languages resulted in language change, most visible in the verbal system, where the older biactantial agreement system typical for Kiranti languages disappeared and suffix conjugations emerged.This book will interest those interested in descriptive linguistics, language change and languages of South Asia.

The present work, a grammar of Dhimal, fills an important void in the documentation of the vast and ramified Tibeto-Burman language family. Dhimal, a little known and endangered tongue spoken in the lowlands of southeastern Nepal by about 20,000 individuals, is detailed in this work. With data gathered in the village of Āṭhiyābārī, the author crafts a readable description of the western dialect, using over 1000 examples to illustrate usage. Included in this reference work are seventeen texts, riddles, songs and a Dhimal-English glossary. Joining other recent ground-breaking linguistic descriptions by researchers from the Himalayan Languages Project at Leiden University, this grammar of Dhimal will have lasting scientific value and aid the Dhimal community in preserving their language.

A Grammar of Tshangla is the first major linguistic description of Tshangla, a Tibeto-Burman language spoken in Bhutan, northeast India, and southwest China. Written from a functional-typological perspective, it contains a wealth of illustrative examples both from elicited data and from spontaneously generated texts. It is a truly comprehensive description, including sections on phonology, lexicon, morphophonemics, morphosyntactic structure, clause-concatenating constructions, as well as discourse-pragmatic features. The volume will be of interest to language students, and to linguists and ethnographic scholars seeking to understand the Bhutanese and South Asian linguistic situation. The large amount of raw language data presented here make this Grammar of Tshangla an indispensable tool for students of Tibeto-Burman comparative linguistics and morphosyntactic theory in general.

Himalayan Languages and Linguistics gathers together nine outstanding and original contributions on the Tibeto-Burman and Indo-Aryan languages of this important and culturally diverse mountainous area. Filling a marked gap in our understanding of the languages of this underdocumented region, the collection offers a snapshot of the state of the field of Himalayan language research and linguistic comparison. Drawing on primary fieldwork in China, India, Nepal and Pakistan, as well as on comparative sources, the new analyses outlined in these contributions will interest a readership of linguists, philologists, anthropologists, historians, lexicographers and specialists in the languages and cultures of Inner and South Asia. Contributions cover topics as diverse as linguistic palaeontology, orthographical standardisation, dialectology, phonology, morphology, semantics and syntax.

While providing unique and detailed information on early Tibeto-Burman languages and their contact and relationship to other languages, this book at the same time sets out to establish a field of Tibeto-Burman comparative-historical linguistics based on the classical Indo-European model. The volume includes six papers on Tangut, three on Tibetan and one each on the languages Mon, Burmese, Lepcha, Pyu, Nam, and Yi. Building a bridge between linguistic and literary research the range of studies treats phonology, decipherment, literature and religion.

A Grammar of Prinmi represents the first in-depth description of a Tibeto-Burman language spoken by the Pǔmǐ Nationality and the Zàng Nationality (in Mùlǐ, Sichuan) in southwest China. Prinmi belongs to the Qiangic branch and is closely related to the extinct language of Tangut.Picus Ding examines in the grammar the phonology (both segmental and suprasegmental), morphology, syntax and information structure of Prinmi, with two sample texts and an English-Prinmi glossary provided in appendices. Some noteworthy features of Prinmi include a wealth of clitics (appearing as proclitic, enclitic, mesoclitic or endoclitic), a lexical tone system akin to Japanese, and a collection of existential verbs that discriminates concreteness, animacy, and location.

A grammar of Kurtöp is the first descriptive grammar of Kurtöp, a threatened language of Bhutan, and the only reference grammar of any East Bodish language. The East Bodish languages are a relatively unstudied branch of the larger Tibeto-Burman family, situated in Bhutan and neighbouring regions in Tibet and Arunachal Pradesh. The chapters introduce the language and the people who speak in a historical context and then go on to detail the synchronic and diachronic phonology, discuss word classes and cause structure, morphosyntax and syntax, and illustrate rich system of evidentiality and related categories. The book will be of interest to Tibeto-Burmanists, historical linguists and those interested in the prehistory of the eastern Himalayas, and to typologists.

In The Dura Language: Grammar & Phylogeny Nicolas Schorer provides the definite descriptive account of this hitherto poorly documented language of Lamjung, Nepal. The Dura language is effectively extinct, although attempts at revival may be undertaken by well-intentioned members of Dura ethnicity. On the basis of a comprehensive study and analysis of all of the extant Dura language material, the book outlines the phonology, nominal and verbal morphology, lexical and syntactic properties as well as the phylogenetic position of the language in unprecedented detail. The result of the phylogenetic inquiry will help explain some of the sociocultural realities associated with the Dura community in Nepal and is a significant contribution to our understanding of the linguistic landscape of the Himalayas.

Tangam is a critically endangered Trans-Himalayan (Tibeto-Burman) language spoken by around 150 hilltribespeople in the far Eastern Himalaya. A member of the Tani subgroup of Trans-Himalayan, Tangam is mutually-unintelligible with other languages of this otherwise relatively homogeneous subgroup. This is demonstrated to be a consequence of Tangam's early-branching status within the Western Tani subgroup, subsequent contact with Eastern Tani languages, and historical relationship with speakers of Bodic languages. Based on three field trips to the Tangam-speaking area over two years, this work presents a brief but comprehensive cultural, historical and grammatical introduction to the Tangam language, together with a trilingual lexicon in Tangam, English and Minyong, and a collection of fully-analysed texts. It will be of interest to linguists and anthropologists of the Himalayan region, as well as to historical linguists and language typologists.

Sociohistorical Linguistics in Southeast Asia blends insights from sociolinguistics, descriptive linguistics and historical-comparative linguistics to shed new light on regional Tibeto-Burman language varieties and their relationships across spatial, temporal and cultural differences. The approach is inspired by leading Tibeto-Burmanist, David Bradley, to whom the book is dedicated.The volume includes twelve original research essays written by eleven Tibeto-Burmanists drawing on first-hand field research in five countries to explore Tibeto-Burman languages descended from seven internal sub-branches. Following two introductory chapters, each contribution is focused on a specific Tibeto-Burman language or sub-branch, collectively contributing to the literature on language identification, language documentation, typological analysis, historical-comparative classification, linguistic theory, and language endangerment research with new analyses, state-of-the-art summaries and contemporary applications.

In A Grammar of Purik Tibetan, Marius Zemp offers a comprehensive description of the phonologically archaic Tibetan variety spoken in Kargil, the capital of a region called Purik, situated in the state of Jammu & Kashmir, India. This book contains the most thorough and insightful description of the verbal system of a Tibetic language yet written and will be particularly relevant for scholars studying evidentiality. It also includes highly valuable discussions of a syntactically and pragmatically well-defined class of ideophones which Zemp calls “dramatizers” and of prosody – topics which are too often neglected in language descriptions. Finally, this book goes beyond what others have done in that Purik data are used to elucidate our understanding of Classical Tibetan and its origins.

With Grammar of Duhumbi (Chugpa), Timotheus Adrianus (Tim) Bodt provides the first comprehensive description of any of the Western Kho-Bwa languages, a sub-group of eight linguistic varieties of the Kho-Bwa cluster (Tibeto-Burman).Duhumbi is spoken by 600 people in the Chug valley in West Kameng district, Arunachal Pradesh, India. The Duhumbi people, known to the outside world as Chugpa or Chug Monpa, belong to the Monpa Scheduled Tribe. Despite that affiliation, Duhumbi is not intelligible to speakers of any of the other Monpa languages except Khispi (Lishpa).The volume Grammar of Duhumbi (Chugpa) describes all aspects of the language, including phonology, morphology, lexicon, syntax and discourse. Moreover, it also contains links to additional resources freely accessible on-line.

This is the first complete description of Poumai Naga (Poula), an understudied language spoken in Manipur in northeast India. Poumai Naga belongs to the Angami-Pochuri clade of the Trans-Himalayan family. The book comprises all aspects of the language, including phonology, lexicon, morphosyntax, syntax and discourse. This work employs the tone periodic table, an innovative method used for documenting tone languages. A bilingual lexicon and a collection of fully-analysed texts are provided in the appendices. This research work represents a substantial contribution to the field of comparative Trans-Himalayan linguistics.

A Grammar of Bjokapakha by Selin Grollmann constitutes the first description of Bjokapakha, an endangered language spoken in central Bhutan belonging to the Tshangla branch of Trans-Himalayan. This grammar comprises a description of the phonology, lexicon, nominal morphology, predicate structures and syntax. In addition to the descriptive parts, this book encompasses a historical-comparative account of Bjokapakha. The introductory chapter provides a comparison with the standard variety of Tshangla and corroborates the internal diversity of the Tshangla branch. The present-day structure of Bjokapakha verbal morphology is illuminated by means of an internal reconstruction. Moreover, this book contains a glossary and a text collection.