Himalayan Linguistics

This issue of Himalayan Linguistics marks twenty years for the journal. We reflect on the early history of Himalayan Linguistics, its contribution to the field, and the future of the journal.

Speech and singing both make use of the same vocal apparatus, but studies analyzing the formant frequencies of spoken and sung vowels produced by the same subject generally show a difference in vowel quality as a result of articulatory modifications. Though such modifications may be codified and systematized in traditional musical styles, which place special emphasis on pedagogy, they appear more arbitrary in contemporary genres, which are usually passed down from mentors to students as aural traditions. While multiple studies have been conducted on the effects of singing on vowel space in various languages, this study is the first of its kind to take a look at such effects with reference to Nepalese pop rock. Since this study deals with bilingual speakers, the spoken vowels here have been compared with their sung counterparts only after establishing some deviations from those produced by monolingual speakers as referenced in previous phonetic studies of the language. This study elucidates the variation in Nepali vowels while speaking versus singing and attempts to derive an orderly, albeit preliminary, pattern of articulatory modifications that must have led to such variations.

Abstract

Areal patterns of numeral classifiers have been studied in several Asian languages for a long time. Emeneau (1956) was probably the first work that focused on the distribution of classifiers for defining India as a ‘linguistic area’. Although classifiers (except some ‘measure words’) are virtually absent in western Indo-Aryan languages like Hindi, they are extremely common in a number of Eastern Indo-Aryan languages. There are several studies on the classifier systems of Bengali, Assamese, Maithili and so on. But as yet there has been no study on Khortha, an eastern Indo-Aryan language that also has several classifiers. Some of these classifiers are borrowed from neighboring Munda (Austro-Asiatic) languages because of the prolonged contact between Indo-Aryan and Austro-Asiatic speakers in the eastern part of India. The classifier phenomenon in Khortha and Austro-Asiatic may profitably be seen as being part of a wider areal context, one that is out of kilter with respect to the ongoing exploration of South Asia as a linguistic area, as pointed out by Emeneau. This study provides a detailed description of previously unstudied classifiers, their functions and their distributions in Khortha, an Eastern Indo-Aryan language predominantly spoken in Jharkhand. Additionally, an intriguing aspect highlighted in this study is the postnominal use of certain classifiers to mark the specificity or definiteness of the object. Notably, this specificity is absent when the classifiers are combined with numerals. This paper investigates the distribution of classifiers in detail and illustrates how some of the Khortha classifiers can attach not only to numerals but also to nouns, demonstratives, adjectives, genitives and (past) participles.

The current paper is an attempt at a study of the grammar and meaning of atemporal complement clauses in Assamese from a Cognitive linguistics point of view. Assamese is an Indo-Aryan language spoken in Assam, a northeastern province of India. It is the native tongue of the Assamese and is currently spoken by more than twenty million people both as a native tongue and as a link language in the northeastern India.

Grammar, in Cognitive linguistics, is not independent of meaning, rather any grammatical form is motivated by its underlying semantics, i.e. how the event or the situation is construed by the speaker. Thus, depending on the construal involved, clausal complementation takes different grammatical forms. One type of clausal complementation is atemporal complementation, traditionally called non-finite complementation. One core dimension that the construal of atemporal complementation is based on is atemporalization, which involves a conceptual shift from the relational concept (as encoded typically by a verb) to a thing or object (as encoded typically by a noun) having an ontological existence, which is often called reification. Thus, the verb in the atemporal complement clause is realized in the non-finite form, i.e. it is left ungrounded in time. This in turn also means that typically the situation expressed by the complement clause involves what is called summary scanning in cognitive linguistics. Atemporal complementization also may involve another dimension of construal, i.e. the principle of Figure and Ground.

The present paper identifies the atemporal complementizers in Assamese and their grammar and meaning. Assamese has at least five such complementizers and accordingly the language has at least five different types of atemporal complement clauses with their own semantics. In describing these atemporal complement clauses, the paper also shows that although atemporal they may not fully cancel out sequential scanning. This supports the view that that the distinction between summary and sequential scanning are not mutually exclusive as is claimed in Langacker (2008).

The data for this paper has mainly come from the authors themselves who happen to be native speakers of Assamese.

Three varieties of Kusunda, a moribund language isolate of Nepal, have been recorded in existing literature; in Hodgson (1857), in Reinhard & Toba (1970), and in several recent publications analyzing material elicited from the language’s last two fluent speakers, Gyani Maiya Sen and Kamala Khatri. Each of these varieties exhibits a set of unique phonological and morphological innovations from their latest common ancestor, Proto-Kusunda (PK). This paper seeks to reconstruct the prefixing possessive marking system of PK, using morphological evidence from the 3 attested varieties. Proto-Kusunda is found to have exhibited obligatory possessive marking on a set of inalienably possessed nouns. Possessed nouns were marked with 2 sets of preposed affixes: *t- *n- *g-, which indexed the person of the noun’s possessor, and *-i- *-a- *-u- *-ja-, a set of derivational prefixes which categorized possessed nominals into a number of semantic fields. The formal and functional characteristics of this system are strongly reminiscent of an analogous system of head-marking possession found in the Great Andamanese language family of India, prompting questions of possible areal influence or genetic inheritance in the remote past.

Denjongke is atypical within Tibetic languages in how speaker’s inner sensations such as hunger, cold, feeling of illness and emotions are expressed. Whereas most other Tibetic languages use a sensorial evidential form in default expressions of speaker’s inner sensations (Tournadre 2021, 2023 preprint), Denjongke uses a variety of other forms. The sensorial forms may also be used when the speaker takes an outsider's perspective on their inner sensations in contexts such as surprise and sudden discovery. The reason why Denjongke, unlike Common Tibetan and some other Tibetic languages, can use personal forms for expressing the speaker’s inner sensations is that Denjongke personal forms are not associated with volitionality, whereas the personal/egophoric forms of Common Tibetan and some other Tibetic languages are strongly associated with volitionality.