The Newar verb in Tibeto-Burman perspective (original) (raw)
1993, Acta Linguistica Hafniensia, 26: 23-43.
Newar is the Tibeto-Burman language native to the Kathmandu Valley of Nepal. The Newars are the sole Tibeto-Burman people to have adopted both a Sanskrit literary tradition and the Indo-Aryan caste system. The very name Nepāl originally referred to the Newar homeland in the Kathmandu Valley, and the term is still often used throughout the modern Kingdom op Nepal to refer just to the Kathmandu Valley. Only later did the name Nepal come to apply to the modern state consolidated by the campaigns of the eighteenth-century Indo-Aryan conqueror from Gorkhā, , and his military successors. The word Nevār, which first appears in local sources in Nepāl Samvat 772 (i.e. 1652 AD), is the spoken derivation of fourth century Sanskrit Nepāla. The Sanskrit term Nepāla derives from an older form *nepa, or *ŋepa, of the autonym Nevāh ‘Newar’ by analogy with Sanskrit toponyms like Himāla and Bangāla. The second element of the old autonym, -pa, is a masculine Tibeto-Burman nominal suffix meaning ‘the person who’ or ‘that which’. The first element, ne-, is the root of the original autonym. Various speculative etymologies have been proposed, such as *ne-, allegedly ‘middle’, and *-pa, allegedly ‘country’, giving a toponym meaning ‘Middle Land’ ({Nepāl} 2040: 11), or Tibeto-Burman ŋe- ‘cow’ + *-pa ‘man, keeper’, i.e. ‘cowherd’, whereby the name Nepāla is presumed to be derived by analogy with Sanskrit gopāla ‘cowherd’ (Kamal Prasād Malla, as quoted in Gellner 1986: 117).