Tshangla verb inflections (original) (raw)
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The internal diversity of the Tshangla languages: Insights from Bjokapakha
Tshangla is a Trans-Himalayan (Tibeto-Burman) language spoken in Bhutan, northeastern India and Tibet. Tshangla has traditionally been represented as a homogeneous language, forming a dialect continuum which exhibits only minor dialectal differences. Standard Tshangla or the lingua franca variety, spoken in eastern Bhutan, has been described by Wangdi (2004), Andvik (2010) and Bodt (2012), whereas most minor varieties of Tshangla remain undescribed. Most of these varieties are in danger of extinction. Urban migration amongst the younger generation leads to a separation from the original home villages and to a gap in the intergenerational transmission of the language. Speakers of non-standard varieties tend to assimilate their language to the lingua franca variety of Tshangla and to hide their often rural origins. The pressure to assimilate to powerful supra-regional languages, such as English, Hindi or Nepali, additionally increases the degree of endangerment of the diverse linguistic landscape of Bhutan. Recently, research has been conducted on the Bjokapakha variety which is located at the periphery of the Tshangla dialect continuum in the Bjoka geok in Zhemgang district. Bjokapakha is the only Tshangla language spoken in Zhemgang district and is surrounded by speakers of the East Bodish language Khengkha. To the northeast, Bjoka verges on the Gongduk speaking region. The Gongduk are one of the oldest ethnolinguistic groups in Bhutan, and their language is linguistically highly distinct from the other languages in Bhutan, e.g. exhibiting biactantial verb agreement. To the southeast, Bjokapakha is geographically adjacent to the Dungsam varieties with which it shares several linguistic features. Bjokapakha is spoken by roughly 1,500 speakers. Based on my grammar of Bjokapakha (Grollmann, in press, Brill), I shall present Bjokapakha phonetic, phonological and grammatical features of Bjokapakha which diverge from the lingua franca variety, many of these traits representing conservative retentions. My account will enable a more comprehensive understanding of the Tshangla group as a whole, both in diachronic and comparative terms as well as from a typological and descriptive perspective. Both Dirang Tshangla and Bjokapkha, when contrasted with the lingua franca variety, vividly highlight the internal linguistic diversity of Tshangla as a Trans-Himalayan subgroup in its own right. This newly more comprehensive understanding of the internal diversity of Tshangla (1) will help us to explain apparent irregularities, (2) provide a better insight into the diachronic history of Tshangla and the linguistic contact situations to which the Tshangla language communities have been historically exposed, and (3) yield new descriptive and areal-typological findings. The internal diversity of Tshangla has major ramifications for our understanding of Bhutan's linguistic landscape and compels us to revise our understanding of the role which languages of this Trans-Himalayan subgroup have played in the eastern Himalayan region.
Verb inflection in Muklom Tangsa
Himalayan Linguistics, 2019
Muklom Tangsa is a Tibeto-Burman language variety with rich verb inflection that exhibits hierarchical indexing and a non-canonical inverse system. Indexes will align with S, A, P, or R arguments, depending on the configuration, but not with the T argument. Inverse marking is triggered by high-ranked P arguments, i.e. the speech act participant (SAP) P, but also by SAP R and even SAP possessors. Based on primary data, this chapter provides an overview of verb inflection in Muklom and introduces the personal pronoun paradigm and possessive determiner paradigm.
North East Indian Linguistics v.4, 2012
Tshangla Orthography Erik Andvik Summer Institute of Linguistics Dzongkha is the official national language of the kingdom of Bhutan and other than English and Nepali the only written language of Bhutan widely used in public administration and education in the kingdom. As the national language, Dzongkha has an important unifying function for 20 or more distinct linguistic groups in the kingdom. However, Dzongkha faces serious challenges. In spite of the efforts of the Dzongkha Development Commission, Dzongkha still suffers from a dearth of published materials, readership for Dzongkha language periodicals is still smaller than for those in English, and even students whose mother tongue is Dzongkha struggle to gain written proficiency, sometimes preferring to write in English. Tshangla is the mother tongue of some 140,000 people, making it the most widely spoken language of Bhutan after Dzongkha and Nepali. The thesis of this paper is that the development and promotion of the Tshangla language can, if properly approached, contribute to the advancement of Dzongkha as the language of national unity even among Tshangla speakers. The paper will propose a Tshangla orthography designed with this in mind. The use of the Dzongkha script for Tshangla will provide an opportunity to introduce this script to Tshangla-speaking children from grade one, but in a language with which they are already familiar. Applying the script phonemically to Tshangla allows pupils to learn the Dzongkha characters without the necessity of learning unfamiliar vocabulary at the same time. After pupils have mastered the script, the study of Dzongkha can begin, gradually introducing the Dzongkha spelling conventions as a second stage of learning. Tshangla and Dzongkha speakers have similar cultures, as is reflected in the languages. The Tshangla lexicon contains a large number of words that have been borrowed from Dzongkha. By adopting into Tshangla the Dzongkha spellings for this borrowed vocabulary the cultural similarity and shared religious and historical heritage can be emphasized, thus promoting the incorporation of the Tshangla-speaking minority into the wider Bhutanese culture. The most advantageous Tshangla orthography from the point of view both of initial learning as well as transition to Dzongkha is one in which a single, unambiguous spelling convention is adopted for each sound in the language, as long as that convention is not in conflict with any Dzongkha convention. Other than for borrowed words, however, the Dzongkha spelling conventions do not need to be adopted for Tshangla. What must be avoided is the use of letter combinations in Tshangla which are already in use in Dzongkha but with a different phonemic value. This will require in certain instances a departure from the ideal of using for Tshangla the simplest phonemic transcription in Ucen characters, when this transcription is already assigned a non-phonemic pronunciation in Dzongkha.
Himalayan linguistics, 2023
This paper presents a synoptic account of verbal suffixation in the Ura dialect of Bumthang, a language of central Bhutan. Examining verbal allomorphy shows the persistence of exceptions to historical sound changes in contemporary allophonic and allomorphic processes, and reveals striking contrasts with the culturally dominant Tibetic languages of the area. We examine the ways in which some of the allomorphy is motivated by patterns seen in the phonology of the language more widely, while some of the changes reflect purely (arbitrary) morphophonological processes.
THE TASHA-SILI LANGUAGE OF BHUTAN: A case study in language shift and Bhutanese pre-history
Most of Bhutan's over 20 languages remain undescribed and almost unknown to the outside world. Bhutan's current ethnolinguistic situation has been briefly addressed in most detail in van Driem (2001). What little is known about Bhutan's linguistic history has also been addressed in van Driem , and . Undoubtedly, more languages remain to be discovered in Bhutan and a great deal of work is needed to even begin to tease apart Bhutan's linguistic past. In this article, Tasha-Sili, a previously unknown Tibeto-Burman language of Bhutan, is presented for the first time. A quick delve into the lexicon and phonology of Tasha-Sili illustrates a language that shares much with the national language, Dzongkha. However, it becomes immediately obvious that Tasha-Sili is not simply a dialect of Dzongkha; for example, many lexical items are similar to those of other languages of Bhutan and the tonal system is also not like that of Dzongkha. We hypothesize that these facts suggest the Tasha-Sili language represents a language community that has recently switched to Dzongkha, leaving its substrate language lost to history.