Preliminary notes on the languages of the Bumthang group (original) (raw)

Language and dialect relations in Bumthang

Himalayan Linguistics, 2021

Author(s): Donohue, Mark | Abstract: Thhis report presents basic wordlists from seven closely related East Bodish languages from Bumthang, northern Trongsa and far eastern Wangdue Phodrang districts in Bhutan. These wordlists are analysed, with lexico-statistical comparison to other languages of the region (East Bodish, Central Tibetan, and Indic), and preliminary notes on phonological processes and sound correspondences and change within the Bumthang varieties.

Tibeto-Burman subgroups and historical grammar

Himalayan Linguistics, 10 (1): 31-39., 2011

Several distinct strains of thought on subgrouping, presented in memory of David Watters and Michael Noonan, are united by a golden thread. Tamangic consists of Tamangish and maybe something else, just as Shafer would have wanted it. Tamangic may represent a wave of peopling which washed over the Himalayas after Magaric and Kiranti but before Bodish. There is no such language family as Sino-Tibetan. The term 'trans-Himalayan' for the phylum merits consideration. A residue of Tibeto-Burman conjugational morphology shared between Kiranti and Tibetan does not go unnoticed, at least twice. Black Mountain Mönpa is not an East Bodish language, and this too does not go unnoticed. k e y wor d s

On the non-Tibetan nature of the East Bodish languages

Proceedings from the Third International Conference on Tibetan, Volume 1,, 2013

The Himalayan kingdom of Bhutan is home to many different ethnolinguistic groups. Some of these groups of people speak Tibetic languages, such as Dzongkha, the national language of Bhutan. Other groups speak languages that are as different from Tibetan as, say, Hindi and English are from each other. A group that falls in the middle of the Tibetic--non--Tibetic cline is the East Bodish language sub--family. East Bodish languages show some remarkable similarities to Tibetic languages on the surface, but closer examination reveals much of this similarity may be due to borrowing and influence. The aim of this article is to examine some lexical and morphological features of the East Bodish languages in a comparative light. In doing so, we illustrate that the relationship between Tibetic and East Bodish languages is complex.

East Bodish and Proto-Tibeto-Burman morphosyntax

pp. 608-617 in Hajime Kitamura, Tatsuo Nishida and Yasuhiko Nagano, eds., Current Issues in Sino-Tibetan Linguistics. Osaka: Organizing Committee of the 26th International Conference on Sino-Tibetan Languages and Linguistics., 1994

On possible Dardic and Burushaski influence on some Northwestern Tibetan dialects

Journal of Language Relationship, 2019

The Northwestern fringe of the Tibetan-speaking area, now forming a part of the Jammu and Kashmir state of India and of Pakistani-controlled Northern Areas, was in the past an area of intensive ethnic and language contact. This contact resulted in the linguistic assimilation of the local pre-Tibetan population by the Tibetans. More than a century ago it was hypothesized that this pre-Tibetan population may have spoken a certain Dardic language. The article attempts to check this hypothesis through the etymological analysis of the vocabulary of Northwestern Tibetan dialects. The results of this analysis suggest the existence of a significant Indo-Iranian, probably Dardic, lexical stratum, as well as of numerous lexemes borrowed from some early form of Burushaski. The author seeks to define the dialectal distribution of Indo-Iranian and Burushaski loanwords in the area under study.