Himalayan Linguistics

There are three pluralizing strategies in Dolpo Tibetan (DT)2 — one for personal pronouns, an- other for animate nouns, and a third for inanimate nouns. The pluralizing strategy for personal pronouns appears to be old, similar to the system found in Classical Tibetan, but no longer found in ‘Standard Tibetan’.3 The strategies for animate and inanimate nouns point to relatively recent innovations, involving a set of morphemes whose literal meaning is roughly translated ‘all’. These more recent strategies are beginning to invade the semantic space of personal pronouns as well.