Advances in Burushaski Linguistics

1. Introduction 1.1. The language and its speakers Burushaski is a language isolate spoken near the Karakorum mountains, in far northern Pakistan, by about 100,000 people. Due to recent migrations there are a few speakers also in Srinagar (a city in India) 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 e.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 linguistics, 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 Nowadays, however, this work is outdated, too, due to newer research by Hermann Berger, Étienne Tiffou and other scholars.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 languages 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 years, 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 plural form, containing the morpheme -o (or -u) 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 name of the language, BurúSaski, is a derivative. As can be seen, in Burushaski itself the language name is stressed on the second syllable (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 endangered 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 number of speakers is rising. Moreover, the speakers of Burushaski are equipped with a positive attitude and healthy pride concerning their language. In view 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 (i.e. numeral + noun), postpositions. The vowel system is i e a o u. The consonant system is large and contains e.g. aspirated and retroflex consonants. Stem shapes vary in their makeup; there are stems which consist of only one consonant, e.g. -s ‘heart’, -t- ‘to do’. The morphology is somewhere between agglutinating and fusional, and both prefixing and suffixing occur; most of the prefixing shows up in the rich verb inflection. 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 absolutive case and an ergative case in the large case system, instead of a nominative case and an accusative case 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). Nouns are subdivided into two types: alienable and inalienable. While the former can express the possessor only with a separate word in the genitive, the latter are obligatorily marked for possessor. The language 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 Caucasus 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 Hunza Nager Ys. Hz. Ng. Hunza and Nager are spoken on both sides of the Hunza River, and Yasin is situated in the Yasin Valley, further to the west. The speech of Srinagar is Nager Burushaski which has very recently been subjected to strong language contact (Munshi 2010). Nager is also found with the spelling Nagar (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 diacritics 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), offering 210 words, are occasionally interesting since they sometimes show a deviation in the Yasin dialect of the village Thui from usual Yasin. According to a vernacular 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 course I made sure that no data from any dialect contradicts the conclusions drawn in my investigations. In particular this applies to the claims for internal reconstruction 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.

Load more