This volume is the outcome of the 13th Himalayan Languages Symposium, organized at the Indian Institute of Advanced Study, Shimla. Prof L. M. Khubchandani, an eminent sociolinguist of the country, was the Keynote speaker and scholars from various countries like Japan, U.S.A, Netherland, Nepal and India working on Himalayan languages participated in this symposium. The volume begins with the paper of Prof. Khubchandani, which elaborates the multiplicity of languages in India including Himachal lying in Western Himalayas where languages of two language families are spoken is a good area of language convergence study. He stressed on the multiple linguistic identity of an individual in modern Indian society due to cross-cultural settings and spread of education and usefulness of speech profiles of different language groups and examined the patterns of language use in intimate and formal domains.
He illustrated his points of view with lots of demographic details. He also mentioned about India as a linguistic area identified in 1956 by Emeneau a noted linguist and India as a sociolinguistic area identified in 1972 by Prof. P.B.Pandit - an eminent Linguist. Prof. Khubchandani in 1993 also described the entire Indian subcontinent as sociolinguistic area focusing on the symbiotic networks evolved among language groups belonging to more than one family- a typical feature of Indian communication ethos of animals and ancestral order.
The Himalayan Languages Symposium is an annually convening, open scholarly forum for scholars of Himalayan languages. The Himalayan Languages Symposium serves as a podium for contributions on any language of the greater Himalayan region, whether Burushaski, Kusunda, a Tibeto-Burman language, an Indo-Aryan tongue or other language. Linguists as well as specialists from related disciplines like philology, history, anthropology, archaeology and prehistory are welcome to make their contributions to the study of Himalayan languages and Himalayan language communities.
The 1st Himalayan Languages Symposium included contributions on languages of Sichuan and the Tibetan Plateau, which set the precedent for an appropriately panoramic interpretation of the term 'Himalayan'. The Himalayan Languages Symposium is devoted to the study of the languages and language communities which make up the complex ethnolinguistic tapestry of the Indo-Chinese borderlands, a culturally rich and vast territory extending from the Caspian into mainland Southeast Asia.
This volume is the product of the 13th Himalayan Languages Symposium, organized at the Indian Institute of Advanced Study, Shimla, from 22 to 24 October 2007. Prof L.M. Khubchandani, an eminent sociolinguist of the country, was the Keynote Speaker and scholars from various countries like Japan, U.S.A, Netherland, Nepal and India, working on Himalayan languages, participated in this symposium that saw presentation of 33 papers, of which 19 papers are being published in this volume.
The volume begins with the paper of Prof. Khubchandani, which elaborates the multiplicity of languages in India including Himachal that lies in Western Himalayas where languages of two language families are spoken and forms a good area of language convergence study. He stressed on the multiple linguistic identity of an individual in modern Indian society due to cross-cultural settings and spread of education. Under such circumstances, it becomes imperative to question the sanctity of language purity. He also stressed usefulness of speech profiles of different language groups and examined the patterns of language use in intimate and formal domains. He illustrated his points of view with lots of demographic details. He also mentioned about India as a linguistic area identified in 1956 by Emeneau, a noted linguist, and India as a sociolinguistic area identified in 1972 by Prof. P.B. Pandit, an eminent linguist. Prof. Khubchandani in 1993 also described the entire Indian sub-continent as sociolinguistic area focusing on the symbiotic networks evolved among language groups belonging to more than one family-a typical feature of Indian communication ethos, of animals and ancestral order.
Chapters 2, 3 and 4 deal with phonological aspect of Chhatthare Limbu, Kangri and some glimpse of Kurtop Morphophonemics. Govind Bahadur Tumbahang, in "Vowel Length Deletion in Chhatthare Limbu", has stated that there was no vowel length in the language which developed later In the beginning, Chhatthare Limbu had no vowel length contrast and it became phonemic after the deletion of the final consonant of a geminate. Later, with the development of voiced stops/b/and/g/as independent phonemes, the vowel length disappeared. Robert D. Eaton, in his paper "Representing Kangri Tones", has tried to represent two tones, that is two phonemes with one grapheme in Kangri. He has given different models of tones and a good review of earlier studies on tone with respect to Kangri. He has shown through the analysis that the tones are in complementary distribution at the graphemic level. This insight simplifies the orthographic inventory and suggests a specific orthographic convention which has been discussed in this paper. In Chapter 4, Gwendolyn Hyslop gives an account of phonological alternations in Kurtop, a Tibeto-Burman language spoken in Bhutan. This article has described alternations in verbal stems to a great extent. She has given the limitation of her paper as some affixes have not been dealt with as not all the processes underlying Kurtöp morphophonology have been examined. More investigation of these processes can yield some interesting results especially in the direction of historical sound changes in the language.
A good number of papers are devoted to morphology, syntax and typology. To draw a line between these sometimes become difficult. Chapters 5 to 16 deal with these areas. Ambika Regmi's paper on "Case Marking in Kaike" shows a case of syncretism of a Bodish language in contact with Nepali, an Indo-Aryan language. In Chapter 6, Hiroyuki Suzuki, while dealing with Tibetan numerals, tries to give linguistic description of special cardinal numerals in some Tibetan dialects and compares it with the written Tibetan. This paper aims to introduce the special cardinal numeral forms from one to hundred in multiple dialects spoken in three areas: (a) Songpan Jiuzhaigou area, (b) Danbar Gyalrong area, and (c) Shangri-La area. Chapter 7 is Dan Raj Regmi's paper "Tense and Aspect in Bhujel" which is also a Tibeto Burman language spoken in Nepal and explains how tense and aspects are differentiated in Bhujel. It is stated that Bhujel tense, aspect and modality (TAM) form a single complex category. It is discussed how tense and aspect interact with each other so intensively in linguistic expression that sometimes it may be impossible to analyse one without another. A single affix may encode information from more than one of the domain of tense-aspect or tense-modality. A verb in Bhujel may inflect for five subcategories as further elaboration of two main aspectual distinction between perfective and imperfective: past-perfective, perfect, completive, durative and habitual.
The author has shown that Bhujel verbs inflect for two distinct tenses: non-past and past. The past tense distinguishes two degrees of distance: recent past and remote past. This paper is very interesting as it presents a good theoretical background on this topic along with analysis. In Chapter 8, Sabitri Thapa discusses gender system of Tamang and Nepali at morphological as well as syntactic level. She explains different markings for masculine and feminine at lexical level and at syntactic level. Genitive marker does not reflect the gender of the possessed noun in Tamang which is there in Nepali. She did point out the influence of Nepali on Tamang, a Tibeto Burman language. In Chapter 9, Kedar Prasad Poudel, in his paper on moods in Dhankute Tamang, describes various kinds of moods in this Tibeto Burman language. The paper is in a descriptive mode and describes five distinctive moods: indicative, imperative, hortative, optative and irrealis in Dhankute Tamang. It contains two distinctive uses: epistemic and deountic. Epistemic uses deal with the speaker's knowledge of situation.
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