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Home , Burushaski, Macrofamily, Sanskrit, Turkic languages

1. Introduction

1.1. The and its speakers is a spoken near the Karakorum mountains, in far northern , by about 100,000 people. Due to recent migrations there are a few speakers also in (a city in ) and elsewhere. Not only the language is unique, but also the people speak- ing it has a cultural heritage which does not exist elsewhere in exactly this form. Burushaski is usually an unwritten language (though there are some speakers today who are able to write it). This means that there are no older documents; the structure and the vocabulary of the language had to be ex- plored by fieldwork. Such work started in the second half of the nineteenth century when colonization by the British began, see .g. Biddulph (1880) and Leitner (1893). These sources, however, use English-based orthogra- phies which are often inconsequent and unreliable, and the grammatical structures were not always understood: the language was thought to have two genders, for instance, while actually there are four. Only rarely are these old sources useful for historical , namely when slight changes in details occurred in the language between that time and now. Lorimer (1935a, 1935b, 1938) arrived at many new insights on Burushaski. Nowadays, however, this work is outdated, too, due to newer research by Hermann Berger, Étienne Tiffou and other scholars. Today the most important of publication on Burushaski are French, German and English, and to a lesser extent also Russian. It is possible to acquire a good working knowledge of the language with Berger (1974), Tiffou / Pesot (1989), Tiffou (1995a), Anderson (1997), Berger (1998), Tiffou (1999), Anderson (2007) and other publications. Research reports include Bashir (2000) and Tiffou (2004a). Publication of fieldwork results and traditional narrations, especially in the last decades and , opens up various possibilities for research activities, and fieldwork itself may continue as well. The state of synchronic research on Burushaski is good, but some problems remain; on some points one does not know whether one should trust the data. Diachronic research has yielded fewer reliable results so far, but some progress has been made in this area, too; many claims have been put forward, but one has to pick out those which are methodologically sound.

11 1. Introduction

The speakers of the language call themselves BurúSo (or BurúSu in the Yasin dialect). This is a form, containing the morpheme - (or -) which is a frequent plural suffix. In English, the designations Burusho and Burushos can be found, the latter one carrying the English plural suffix -s in addition. The singular of BurúSo is BurúSin. The of the lan- guage, BurúSaski, is a derivative. As can be seen, in Burushaski itself the language name is stressed on the second (the accent designates stress). In other languages, such as English or German, the stress may be placed there as well, or elsewhere; the German name of the language is Buruschaski or Burushaski; the French name bourouchaski. There are different opinions on whether Burushaski is an en- dangered language or not. Berger (1992: 25) is afraid that the language is going to disappear. In contrast, Anderson (2007: 1022) writes about the Burusho: “their language remains vital, spoken by all generations”. Cf. also Anderson (2009: 175): “In all communities where Burushaski is spoken, the language remains vital, with many women and children still monolingual speakers.” In fact, Burushaski is learned by children, and the of speakers is rising. Moreover, the speakers of Burushaski are equipped with a positive attitude and healthy pride concerning their lan- guage. In of these facts, in my opinion the language need not be con- sidered endangered at present, and this is also the conclusion of Backstrom (1992: 54). The discussion will probably continue. Burushaski is an SOV language, and other basic constituent orders are AN, GN, NlN (.e. + ), postpositions. The system is i e a o u. The system is large and contains e.g. aspirated and retroflex . Stem shapes vary in their makeup; there are stems which consist of only one consonant, e.g. -s ‘heart’, -t- ‘to do’. The is somewhere between agglutinating and fusional, and both prefixing and suffixing occur; most of the prefixing shows up in the rich . Some verb forms are analytic and use the auxiliary ‘to be’. There is ergativity in Burushaski; with the noun this is simple: there is an and an in the large case system, instead of a nominative case and an which are known from accusative languages. With the verb, in contrast, matters concerning ergativity and related topics require much more room for discussion (see 2.3.5.). There are four genders: masculine, feminine, gender x and gender y, abbreviated m, f, x, y in this book. Numerals have, in addition to gender differentiation, so-called z forms used for counting (hence five forms, but often there is 12 1. Introduction syncretism). are subdivided into two types: alienable and inalien- able. While the former can express the possessor only with a separate word in the genitive, the latter are obligatorily marked for possessor. The lan- guage uses personal prefixes, e.g. a- ‘my’, and inalienable nouns are cited with a hyphen at the beginning, e.g. -rén ‘hand’. There are four sets with varieties of the personal prefixes, varying slightly in phonetic shape.1 The brief typological profile just outlined shows that Burushaski certainly has a remarkable structure considering the area where it is spoken. This has to do with its status as a language isolate which will be treated in more detail in 1.3. The surrounding languages often do not share the grammatical features, although they frequently do share vocabulary items, and also phonetic traits recur, due to mutual influence. Burushaski would possibly make a less extraordinary impression if it was spoken, say, in the or somewhere in the Americas.

1.2. The dialects The Burushaski speech area is divided into a western area with one dialect and an eastern area with two further dialects quite closely related to each other. The dialects are, with their usual abbreviations:

Yasin Nager

Ys. Hz. .

Hunza and Nager are spoken on both sides of the Hunza River, and Yasin is situated in the , further to the west. The speech of Srinagar is Nager Burushaski which has very recently been subjected to strong (Munshi 2010). Nager is also found with the spelling (and also Nagir, Nagyr in old sources). An outdated alternative term for Yasin is Werchikwar, a designation stemming from the neighbouring

1 Burushaski scholars have a system of indicating which set is used on an inalienable noun. This system will be omitted in this work, since it is not relevant for any point that will be made. If an inalienable noun does not carry a stress mark, e.g. -skil ‘face’, this means that stress is on the personal prefixes. 13 1. Introduction

Dardic language Khowar; Tiffou (1995b: 159f.) argues that this term should be given up. Only rarely does one hear of differences within one of the three dialects mentioned. In this connection the word lists by Back- strom / Radloff (1992: 243-260), 210 words, are occasionally interesting since they sometimes show a deviation in the Yasin dialect of the Thui from usual Yasin. According to a tradition the Yasin dialect came into being when a group of speakers migrated to the west in the 16th century AD (Berger 2008: 4f.). There does not seem to be any proof that this is correct, but the linguistic differences that can be observed can indeed be reconciled with about 500 years of separation. Hence, this is not an un- realistic theory. This book takes into account the whole language with all its dialect variation. Of I made sure that no data from any dialect contradicts the conclusions drawn in my investigations. In particular this applies to the claims for in chapter 4. In many regards the dialects are so similar anyway that the differences do not affect any conclusions. Data with no dialect specification is from Yasin (which does not exclude that the Hunza and Nager data may be the same, given the closeness of all dialects).2 The Yasin data used in this book can for the most part be found in Berger (1974), Tiffou / Pesot (1989) and Tiffou (1999); the Hunza data can mostly be found in Berger (1998I, 1998II, 1998III). The transcription (of all dialects) is as Tiffou’s, but instead of háceks, acutes are used for alveolo-palatals, thus S C Ch.

1.3. The status as language isolate Most languages of the world can be grouped into families, but there are some with no known relatives for which Mary Haas coined the term language isolates. Haas (1965: 77) defines these languages as follows: “language isolates, that is, single languages with no demonstrable close relationship to any other single language or family of languages.” The status as language isolate need not remain unchanged for all time; work on language relationships may get ahead and provide new insights which put

2 Note that Berger (2008) proceeds in a different way: in his monograph data not specified for dialect is from Hunza. Linguists who are no specialists in Burushaski sometimes quote data without making clear from which dialect it is; frequently this does no harm, while occasionally the information would be useful. 14 1. Introduction an end to this status. However, it is often quite hard to find relatives for a language isolate, and researchers disagree on many issues. Burushaski is regarded as a language isolate by most scholars. For statements to this effect see e.g. Berger (1985: 36), Tiffou (1993: 1), Trask (1996: 191), Lyovin (1997: 125f.), Tikkanen (2001: 479, n. 1), Munshi (2010: 36, n. 6) and a very large number of other sources. There have been many attempts to find relatives for Burushaski. Morgenstierne (1935: XIIf.) reports that the earliest authors who thought about the question tried links with Munda, Dravidian, Andamanese, Caucasian and other languages. Bleichsteiner (1930) advocates relation- ship with “Caucasian” but we know today that there are actually three independent language families in the Caucasus which show hardly any signs of relationship with each other: Abkhazo-Adyghean, Nakh-Daghe- stanian and Kartvelian, see Deeters (1963), Klimov (1994), Hewitt (2004) and others.3 Moreover, Bleichsteiner (1930) quotes words from various other languages (e.g. Basque, Elamite) as well if they look similar for him; has hardly any other method than pointing out similarities. For criticism of Bleichsteiner see Morgenstierne (1935: XIII-XIX). The review by Bouda (1931) is less critical, but exactly that may be regarded as a short- coming. The articles Berger (1956) and Berger (1959) contain some argu- ments which are intended to show that Burushaski is related to Basque.4 However, later in his life Berger realized himself that these attempts were mistaken. Grolier (1995: 112) reports this and refers to personal communi- cation with Berger. Moreover, Berger (2004: 13) also considers his own attempts as a young a failure. For some further remarks on the topic see Berger (2008: 1). Starostin posited a called Sino-Caucasian; his original is in Russian, but a appeared in Shevoroshkin (1991): Starostin (1991). The term “Caucasian” refers only to the two northern

3 The three families are often called West, East and South Caucasian respectively (or Northwest, Northeast and South Caucasian). To my mind this usage is not recommendable since it makes the erroneous impression that these were branches of one family - which is not the case. Designations with “West” etc. should be reserved for branches of a family or a subgroup. 4 Campbell / Poser (2008: 406) may give the impression that Berger (1956) advocates a rela- tionship between Burushaski and Indo-European but this does not apply. Possibly they misin- terpreted a statement by Bashir (2000: 1) and did not have access to Berger’s article itself. 15 1. Introduction families in the Caucasus here, i.e. not to Kartvelian. The idea was taken up by some other researchers. In several articles in Shevoroshkin (1991), e.g. Bengtson (1991a, 1991b), Bengtson adds Basque and also Burushaski to this macrofamily. Other publications by Bengtson followed, but Tiffou (1995b) points out flaws in them. Bengtson has since then tried to improve his case but not gained much support. Tuite (1996), drawing on ethnological evidence - especially , folk tales - and linguistic data, thinks that a relationship with Nakh- Daghestanian is possible but he does not exclude language contact either. He only offers three insignificant typological parallels, e.g. ergativity, and provides a few from those authors that advocate Sino-Cau- casian. Tuite (1998) is a similar treatment in English. Wolfgang Schulze, an expert in Nakh-Daghestanian, kindly informed me that he is skeptical of a genetic link to Burushaski (personal communication). Some typological similarities with Yenisseian - a small in of which only one language, Ket, is still spoken - were pointed out by Toporov (1971). Later a relationship theory grew out of this approach but no-one ever adduced more than extremely little evidence. Grune (1998) tends to support this view. Furthermore, Driem (2001: 1198-1201) compares six from the verbal system, e.g. Burushaski a- and Yenisseian -, which are not even very similar. He also misunder- stands and confuses the functions of some affixes that he compares. Casule (1998) claims that Burushaski is an Indo-European lan- guage, and there are further publications by Casule which are intended to back this view up. The Indo-European family provides him with a large number of languages to cull data from, and so for example multán ‘blood’ is allegedly with the Germanic word: English blood, German Blut etc. Although this word is taken from Germanic, Casule sees a special affinity to some Indo-European languages from the . (The author himself stems from Macedonia.) However, Casule ignores the fruitful research on the subgroup that is called Balkan Indo-European today, see Klingenschmitt (1994) and his followers. Casule (2009) tries to declare the Burushaski numerals as having Indo-European origins, but these numerals are clearly entirely non-Indo-European, as anyone can see (for the data see 4.3.1.), and only by extremely far-fetched manoeuvres does Casule arrive at his claims. For example, thalé ‘seven’ is said to possibly consist of hapta ‘seven’ plus a particle used for addressing men le (Casule 2009: 174). Neither is it clear why the numeral should be such a 16 1. Introduction , nor is the segmentation of the Burushaski word possible in this way: in reality, -é is a suffix which becomes apparent when comparing other numerals, or, alternatively, other inflectional forms such as thaló (form for the four genders). Bengtson is correct in objecting to Casule’s theory, and see also Tiffou (2004a: 97f.). Unfortunately Casule does not have sufficient knowledge of several areas: neither of Indo-European lin- guistics, nor of Burushaski, nor of the methods of . The Journal of Indo-European Studies (JIES) recently devoted an issue to the topic (Vol. 40, 2012), although no Burushaski expert is among the authors. Finally, there are some other relationship claims about Burushaski, mostly with lexical comparisons, e.g. Bouda (1950). , who classified many languages (e.g. Greenberg 1963), to my knowledge never ventured a statement on the classification of Burushaski. Nowadays there is a heated debate on the internet on the relationship hypotheses: on many pages discussants write both on the content of the claims and on matters of style when dismissing the work of someone whose views one does not share. It must be stated clearly that all attempts so far are not convincing. A basic problem is that they suffer from serious weaknesses in methodo- logy. Many deal only with the vocabulary and not with the , which would be desirable as well. The lexical material, then, is not treated as it should. Burushaski words are often quoted incorrectly. The funda- mental insight of the Neogrammarians that there is regularity of is hardly accounted for. Words are subjected to arbitrary segmen- tations, which entered Burushaski are treated as if they were old in the language, and unrealistic semantic deviations in the cognate sets are tolerated. In short, many explanations and etymologies are far-fetched and it is highly unlikely that they match the prehistoric facts. At the same time, important research on Burushaski is frequently ignored; many authors indeed know very little about the language (especially viewed in relation to the difficult task they set themselves). This also has to do with the fact that one should be able to study all revelant sources, also those in French and in German, and not only those in English; Burushaski linguistics is a multilin- gual enterprise. Hardly anyone of those who presented relationship claims attempted to advance research on Burushaski itself although there would have been many possibilities to do so: fieldwork, typological and areal

17 1. Introduction studies, dialect comparison, internal reconstruction etc. (Hermann Berger is an exception but he abandoned his hypothesis.) I am currently working on my own theory about the external re- lationship of Burushaski which is unlike any previous theory. My work is radically different from all previous attempts both in its content and in the methods; it meets the standards of historical linguistics which exist with full justification. What can be reported here is that the material I have at my disposal already now is much more compelling than that put forward so far for the other theories. The reason is, in my opinion, that I have found the correct combination of languages, which then enables the researcher to accomplish the task - although still such work is hard. I intend to present my results in another monograph when time is ripe for that. The fact that I am determined to come up with such a work indicates that I will have something to offer which is definitely worth being studied by the linguistic community. Finally, it must be reported that the present monograph does not discuss the external relationships of Burushaski (except for what has been said in this section), nor has the work been influenced to a great extent by any such theories. The focus is exclusively on Burushaski itself; the monograph approaches this language as an object of research in its own right. In fact, Burushaski has a lot to offer for any linguist who is willing to delve into it.

1.4. Language contact Language contact is probably important when considering almost any language on earth and trying to develop a deeper understanding of it. Burushaski is no exception is this respect. Its neighbouring languages are mostly Indo-, to be more precise: Dardic, or Iranian, e.g. Wakhi. From the especially Khowar and Shina must be men- tioned, the former being in contact with Yasin, the latter with Hunza / Nager. For a useful survey of the Dardic and see Edelman (1983: 35-58). There is another nearby idiom, Balti, which is a variety of Tibetan. Information on language contact and the sociolinguistic situation in northern Pakistan can be gathered from Backstrom / Radloff (1992). Many inhabitants of the area are bilingual or have a command of even more than two languages. Burushaski has taken up numerous loanwords from languages of the region, but it has also supplied other 18 1. Introduction languages with words of its own. Most remarkably, the Dardic language Shina has taken up a large amount of loanwords from Burushaski. One rightly assumes that the speech area of Burushaski was once larger; speakers then went over to Indo-European or other languages, but sub- effects occurred. Sometimes when a neighbouring language shares a structural feature with Burushaski, this is addressed in this book. are situated a bit further away than those ad- dressed so far. There must have been contact as well, however, since the Burushaski terminology which deals with horses is of Turkic origin, plus some other words; see also Rybatzki (2010). Even the word for ‘horse’ itself is from Turkic. It is Ys. ha6ór / Hz. ha6úr and can be compared to the Turkic word for ‘stallion’, which in Turkish is aygIr. Berger (1998III: 185) and Rybatzki (2010: 158) express doubts about this , but Berger (2008: 35) does not do so any longer. A brief diagram:

Hz. h a 6 ú r ‘horse’ Turkish a y g I r ‘stallion’

Hunza is chosen here because with the vowel correspondence Ys. o / Hz. u it is u which represents the older state, see 3.3.1. Unlike Turkic, Bu- rushaski does not have unrounded back ; therefore Turkic I - or ï, as some scholars would write it - was substituted by u. The y of Turkish is an innovation for an earlier dental, according to the Turkologists pos- sibly *ð; it was such a sound which occurred in that Turkic language which gave the word to Burushaski, and the consonant group was simplified. Berger (2008: 35) gives a few examples of h- which has been added in initial position.5 studies are important because they make the stock of words shrink which is open to comparisons to the outside. equus is one of the well-known indicators that this language is Indo-European, being related to áSvaH ‘horse’ etc.; Burushaski ha6úr, in contrast, does not have the same status. On the other hand, one must not invent too many etymologies with loanwords - this mistake has been made as well. Some of the claims by Parkin (1987), for instance, may be correct, but others are not. Berger (2008) interprets too many Burushaski words as

5 In this book usually Turkish (of ) is used in order to illustrate an etymology. For geographic and phonetic reasons the actual donor languages were different Turkic languages. For the state of the art which languages these may have been see Rybatzki (2010: 174f.). 19 1. Introduction loanwords from Sanskrit and other Indo-Aryan sources, often with far- reaching phonetic and semantic changes. , now the of Pakistan, contributed a large number of words to Burushaski and is continuing to do so. Morin / Da- genais (1977) show how Urdu words are transformed when entering Burushaski; they are adapted to its and phonotactics. The Urdu words are in turn often loanwords; they are frequently of Persian or descent. For example:

Ys. ketáp ‘book’ < Urdu kitáb < Persian < Arabic Ys. and Hz. úmur ‘age’ < Urdu umr < Persian < Arabic

Someone with linguistic experience with the Islamic world will be able to spot many such words and often understand them correctly (although semantic change sometimes occurred). Nowadays there are also some loanwords from English via Urdu. The inherited core of the Burushaski vocabulary is quite different, naturally; these words do not “ a bell” and are a new experience even for polyglots who have studied many languages of the world. The present monograph, whenever dealing with vocabulary, will not often be con- cerned with the large number of loanwords in Burushaski. Instead, the focus will more often be on those words that seem to be ancient in the language since they are more useful for detecting old structures (phonetic, phonotactic, morphological, semantic structures etc.).

1.5. On the content of the monograph Chapter 2 deals with structures of the Burushaski language which had not received sufficient attention, or no attention at all, so far. Within this context, typological comparisons are drawn, and issues in terminology and grammar theory are addressed. Chapter 3 uses the of historical linguistics and applies it to the dialects. Sound correspondences are presented and sound laws are concluded. Also morphological and other comparisons are made. The treatment gives an idea of what Burushaski was like before it split into dialects. In this way we move a few centuries into the past. Chapter 4 investigates what can be revealed about the linguistic past of Burushaski by the means of internal reconstruction. The chapter deals with methodological points, topics in , morphology, syntax, and stress as an issue pervading the whole language system. This

20 1. Introduction chapter constitutes a considerable expansion of earlier work on Burushaski historical linguistics. Moreover, the treatment is intended to have an im- pact on investigating language isolates in : it will be argued that in order to find out more about these languages (and ultimately their genetic links), it is rewarding to first subject them to internal reconstruction. Chapter 5 is a collection of observations that can be made on the vocabulary of Burushaski. For example, there are internal connections among words which deserve being pointed out, but also other approaches are pursued. Although each chapter constitutes a unit in itself, there are also various links between the chapters. A unit introduced by two , e.g. 1.1., is referred to as a section; a unit introduced by three numbers, e.g. 2.2.1., is called a subsection.

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