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Annali, Sezione orientale 76 (2016) 265–304

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Elizabeth Mela-Athanasopoulou Based on Fieldwork Research. University Studio Press, Thessaloniki 2014, xxiv + 225 pp. ISBN 9789601222073.

Kalasha (also known as Kalashamondr) is an Indo-European in the Indo- branch spoken by the of the (“the most recent demographic research documented 3.254 Kalasha speakers”,1 p. xi), fur- ther classified as a Dardic language in the group.2 The term ‘Kalasha’ seems to have been adopted by the Kalasha speakers of Chitral from the of Waygal, who for a time expanded up to southern Chitral several centuries ago (Kalasha at Ethnologue 18th ed., 2015). The work consists of three Parts: (pp. 3–18), (pp. 19–113) and Syntax (pp. 115–208); a rich Bibliography (pp. 209–11) and Appendices (pp. 213–24) on categories of verbs. It is the product of the author’s two long field researches in the 2007 and 2009. This publication has a double purpose. It is first of all a very useful reference instrument for linguists on a language with an insufficient documentation, regardless of the fact that two PhD theses have been on this idiom, inter alia, quoted in the bibliography. It is also a pedagogical book for native teachers of this language, who can use it to teach their compatriots. This grammar is the first comprehensive book of Kalasha, an endangered language, which is phonologically atypical, because it contrasts plain, long, nasal, and retroflex as well as combinations of these.3

1 Differently from what has been stated by Mela-Athanasopoulou, there are an estimated 5.000 speakers of Kalasha, according to the 1998 Census Report of (2019. Population Census Organization, Statistics Division, Government of Pakistan). 2 , ‘Dardic’, in D. Jain, G. Cardona (eds.), The Indo-Aryan . , pp. 905–990: “‘Dardic’ is a geographic cover term for those Northwest Indo-Aryan languages which [. . .] developed new characteristics different from the IA languages of the Indo- Gangetic plain. Although the Dardic and Nuristani (previously ‘Kafiri’) languages were for- merly grouped together, Morgenstierne (1965) has established that the are Indo-Aryan, and that the constitute a separate subgroup of Indo- Iranian” (p. 905). 3 Jan Heegård, Ida Elisabeth Mørch, ‘Retroflex vowels and other peculiarities in Kalasha sound system’, in A. Saxena, J. Gvozdanovic (eds.), Synchronic and Diachronic Aspects of Himalayan , Selected Proceedings of the 7th Himalayan Languages Symposium held in Uppsala,

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What strikes the reader is the of examples quoted to illustrate each point of the grammar. Having worked mainly on tonal African languages, the paragraph on Stress in page 9, caught my attention: áya ‘mother’ and ayá ‘here’ and other examples given. If this is not a case of tones, what calls for the stress? Like many languages in the world, Kalasha has a declination of in many cases: Nominative, Genitive/Oblique, Dative, Accusative, Instrumental, Locative, Ablative, Temporal and Vocative, but they are not all in use for both animate and inanimate nouns (p. 29). Considering the huge amount of data present in this grammar, it would have been better to organize all data in a separate glossary, even if there is already a ,4 quoted in her bibliography, to give the chance to scholars working on comparison of the Indo-Aryan branch,5 to have a useful instrument. In fact, found some interesting examples while randomly going through this work:

English Kalasha6 bone at’hi asthi haddee; Nepali ā̃ṭh ‘the ribs’ dog shõ’a śvan sinhal, suvan eight as’ aṣṭa āṭh horse hãsh aśva ghoda neck thor grīva garadan son put putra pūt grom grama gā̃u

The work is scientifically well done and the bibliography, she used, is quite rich. There is only one point, related to the orthography employed in this grammar that is not clear to me. The author says: “Morgenstierne’s original orthography

Sweden (Trends in Linguistics. Studies and Monographs 149). Berlin—New York 2004, pp. 57–76. 4 R.L. Trail, G.R. Cooper, Kalasha Dictionary—English and (Studies in Languages of Northern Pakistan 7). Islamabad 1999. 5 According to Colin P. Masica (The Indo-Aryan Languages, Cambridge 1993, p. 431), the Kalasha language is the closest modern language to Ancient Sanskrit (old Indo-Aryan) closely followed by the nearby western Dardic language, Khowar (G. Morgenstierne, The Kalasha Language. Texts and . Vocabulary and Grammar, Oslo 1973, p. 184). 6 In this table Kalasha words are quoted from Mela-Athanasopoulou’s Kalasha Grammar.

Annali, Sezione orientale 76 (2016) 265–304