Himalayan Linguistics

Articles

• The Category of Engagement in Chhitkul-Rākchham (West-Himalayish): The Post-Verbal Clitic =niŋ

  • Martinez, Philippe Antoine

  Chhitkul-Rākchham has a postverbal marker, =niŋ, denoting “engagement”, a newly proposed category that encodes the relative accessibility of a state of affairs to the speaker and addressee. Statistically rare (60 instantiations in an 8-hour corpus consisting of monologues, conversations and stimuli tasks) and with its occurrence entirely pragmatically motivated, =niŋ is constrained to contexts where the speaker confidently assumes that the interlocutor shares the knowledge about the situation expressed by the clause to which it is attached. As such, it differs from two additional members of the same category, the tags man=ta and ne=te, which convey a lesser degree of assertiveness in comparison. Whereas =niŋ is independent from evidentiality (but not from reliability judgements), the previous two tags, where the perceptual =ta or an alternant (=te) is a key component, are not. Engagement is otherwise found to be incompatible with unexpectedness and common knowledge, two pragmatic functions sometimes served by evidentials cross-linguistically. The Chhitkul-Rākchham case thus suggests that any idea of a clear-cut distinction between engagement and evidentiality is inconclusive. 

• A little known past tense marker of the northern Changthang dialects of Ladakh

  • Zeisler, Bettina

  This article describes the various usages of a little known past tense morpheme of the northern part of the Ladakhi Changthang: /-pak/, /-phak/, or {-puk} (< pa.-ḥdug). To some extent, the functions of this morpheme correspond to the so-called ‘evidentially neutral’ or ‘factual’ marker pa.red of Standard Spoken Tibetan. However, the morpheme in question cannot be described as being ‘evidentially’ or ‘epistemically’ neutral. 

• A sketch grammar of Igu, the Shamanic language of the Kera’a

  • Reinöhl, Uta;
  • Pulu, Pachu;
  • Wallner, Usha

  This paper offers the first linguistic description of Igu, the shamanic language of the Kera’a (also 'Idu (Mishmi)'), and thus presents one of the first linguistic descriptions of an Eastern Himalayan ritual language. The Kera’a are a Tibeto-Burman-speaking society of ca. 10 000-16 000 members, based in and around the very northeastern Himalayan river valley of India, in the Dibang Valley and Lower Dibang Valley districts of Arunachal Pradesh. The Kera’a refer to their modern spoken language simply as Kera’a or Kera’a ekobe (‘Kera’a tongue’). For shamanic rituals, shamans recite in Igu (or Igu ekobe ), which the Kera’a consider to be a separate language from Kera'a. Igu is mastered and used by shamans (and their assistants) in rituals, as well as passively understood by knowledgeable elders. This paper demonstrates that Igu is a language in its own right, which partially differs on all core levels - lexical, phonological, morphological, syntactic - from Kera'a. While these differences can in part be accounted for by genre differences, they also point to Igu retaining ancestral forms and structures. Igu consists of several different historical layers, both older and more recent, and its research can thus make valuable contributions to elucidating Eastern Himalayan ethnolinguistic history.