PACIFIC LINGUISTICS Series A-86 PAPERS IN SOUTHEAST ASIAN LINGUISTICS NO. 14: TIBETO-BVRMAN LANGUAGES OF THE HIMALAYAS edited by David Bradley Department of Linguistics Research School of Pacific and Asian Studies THE AUSTRALIAN NATIONAL UNIVERSITY Bradley, D. editor. Papers in Southeast Asian Linguistics No. 14:. A-86, vi + 232 (incl. 4 maps) pages. Pacific Linguistics, The Australian National University, 1997. DOI:10.15144/PL-A86.cover ©1997 Pacific Linguistics and/or the author(s). Online edition licensed 2015 CC BY-SA 4.0, with permission of PL. A sealang.net/CRCL initiative. Pacific Linguistics specialises in publishing linguistic material relating to languages of East Asia, Southeast Asia and the Pacific. Linguistic and anthropological manuscripts related to other areas, and to general theoretical issues, are also considered on a case by case basis. 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Uhlenbeck Summer Institute of Linguistics University of Leiden L.A. Hercus J.W.M. Verhaar Australian National University University of Leiden John Lynch C.L. Voorhoeve University of the South Pacific University of Leiden The editors are indebted to the Australian National University for assistance in the production of this series. All correspondence concerning Pacific Linguistics, including orders and subscriptions, should be addressed to: PACIFIC LINGUISTICS Department of Linguistics Research School of Pacific and Asian Studies The Australian National University Canberra ACT 0200 Australia Copyright © The authors First published 1997 Copyedited by Basil Wilson Typeset by Jeanette Coombes Proofread by Pam Rosser Maps drawn by Ian Faulkner Printed by ANU Printing Services Bound by F & M Perfect Bookbinding This publication was made possible by an initial grant from the Hunter Douglas Fund. No royalties are paid on this or any other PacificLinguistics publication. ISSN 0078-7531, 0078-9178 ISBN 0 85883 456 1 TABLE OF CONTENTS INrRODUCTION v-viii DAVID BRADLEY Tibeto-Burman languages and classification 1-72 ANmSAXENA Towards a reconstruction of the Proto West Himalayish agreement system 73-94 ROSS C. CAUGHLEY Semantically related vowel gradation in Sunwar and Chepang 95-101 GERARD J. TOLSMA The verbal morphology of Kulung 103-117 NOVEL KISHORE RAJ and WERNER WINTER Triplicated verbal adjuncts in Bantawa 119-134 BALTHASARBICKEL The possessive of experience in Belhare 135-155 GEORGE VAN DRIEM A new analysis of the Limbu verb 157-173 RICHARD KEITHSPRIGG Lepcha orthography: an earlier and a later stage 175-182 MAP 1: Languages in this volume viii MAP2: Tibeto-Burman languages of Kashmir 65 MAP3: Tibeto-Burman languages of Himachal Pradesh and Uttar Pradesh 66 MAP4: Tibeto-Burman languages of Nepal 67 MAP5: Tibeto-Burman languages of West Bengal, Sikkim and Bhutan 68 MAP6: Tibeto-Burman languages of Arunachal Pradesh, North Assam, North Nagaland and Meghalaya 69 MAP7: Tibeto-Burman languages of South Assam, South Nagaland and Manipur 70 MAP 8: Tibeto-Burman languages of BangJadesh, Tripura and Mizoram 71 ill INTRODUCTION This volume contains eight papers on the Tibeto-Burman and Sino-Tibetan languages of the Himalayan region. The fIrst, 'Tibeto-Burman languages and classifIcation', by David Bradley, is a general overview of the genetic classification and previous studies of these languages, which evaluates the various competing claims on the subgrouping of Tibeto-Burman (TB), and provides a new classifIcation. This is followed by an up-to-date summary of the locations, names and populations of groups speaking these languages. Also included are references to recent and forthcoming linguistic studies. The remaining papers are arranged geographically from west to east, an arrangement which corresponds to the genetic classifIcation proposed. Four are concerned mainly with verbal morphosyntax, synchronic and diachronic. Of the others, one deals with phonesthetics, one with the syntax and semantics of possessives, and one with development and change within an orthography. The West Himalayish languages of Lahul and Kinnaur in north-western India were among the earliest Tibeto-Burman languages of the Himalayas to receive attention from scholars, in the mid-nineteenth century. Little further study was undertaken until quite recently, but now Anju Saxena has done so in her paper 'Towards a reconstruction of the Proto West Himalayish agreement system'. This paperpresents a summary of her own and other recent descriptive studies on verb morphology and a proposed reconstruction. The data and results are extremely useful to compare with the reconstructions of Kiranti verbal morphology by van Driem and others, and to provide further data for the current debate by various scholars including DeLancey (1989), LaPolla (1992) and van Driem (1993) concerning the status of verbal morphology in Proto TB. Ross Caughley, whose previous studies such as Caughley (1982) have also contributed very substantially to this debate, takes up another fascinating topic in his contribution, 'Semantically related vowel gradation in.Sunwar and Chepang'. Sound symbolism is quite widespread in the South and Southeast Asian linguistic areas, but most published descriptions relate to Austroasiatic languages. Caughley shows that similar phenomena exist in TB languages, as indeed they also do in Indic and Tai languages. His study shows the presence of semantically based vowel alternations in two sections of TB, both in Chepang and in Sunwar, which forms part of the Kiranti or Rai group. The following four studies all describe other members of the Kiranti or Rai group. Gerard Tolsma's article 'The verbal morphology of Kulung' provides a thorough summary on this topic for one of the western Kiranti languages. v vi The paper by Novel !Gshore Rai and Werner Winter, 'Triplicated verbal adjuncts in Bantawa', like Caughley's contribution, discusses the continuum of forms extending towards sound symbolism. The paper provides extensive data on the morphosyntactic and phonological characteristics and sources of triplicated verbal adjuncts, including some nominal stems, more verbal stems, and a much larger group of forms not attested except when triplicated. Bantawa is a central !Granti language with a substantial number of speakers and internal dialect diversity, and has replaced or is influencing some of the smaller adjacent languages; it was formerly used as a Rai lingua franca in various areas including even the Drujeeling tea plantations. This paper has previously appeared elsewhere but with very restricted distribution and a number of misprints; thus it has been republished here. Balthasar Bickel presents a convincing summary of the syntax and semantics of possession in his paper 'The possessive of experience in Belhare'. This language, as noted elsewhere, was newly discovered by the Linguistic Survey of Nepal; due to Bickel's work it is becoming one of the better described !Granti languages. In his paper 'A new analysis of the Limbu verb', George van Driem continues to extend his descriptive and comparative studies of !Granti morphosyntax. Like Sunwar in the west, Limbu and a few other languages at the eastern end of the !GrantilRai area are often not included within the Rai group, though linguistically they form part of it. Limbu is unusual among !GrantiIRai languages in several ways: the large number and wide distribution of speakers; the existence of a traditional Indic-derived orthography used by a literary elite and to some degree in education; the degree of diversity among its dialects; and the number of recent descriptive studies of these dialects, most notably by van Driem himself (see the reference in the van Driem paper in this volume). Another traditional orthography of the area is that of Lepcha, the autochthonous group of the Darjeeling/Sikkimlsouth-western Bhutan area. R.K. Sprigg's contribution 'Lepcha orthography: an earlier and a later stage' presents a thorough summary of the changes within this orthography from the earliest records in 1828 to the present. This continues a long series of studies by the same author of the development of and connections between orthographies of South and Southeast Asia. Since Lepcha is regarded by many scholars as a key language in the reconstruction of Proto TB, Sprigg's contribution is particularly timely and will enable scholars to use the recent dictionary by Tamsang (1994) and earlier studies in a fully informed way. Of course a great deal of descriptive and comparative work remains to be done on the TB languages of this area. The scholars whose papers are included in this volume, among many others, are carrying our understanding of TB forward rapidly. I hope that this volume will assist in the process. REFERENCES Caughley, Ross C., 1982, Th e syntax and morphology of the verb in Chepang. PL, B-84. DeLancey, Scott, 1989, Verb agreement in Proto-Tibeto-Burman. Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies LIU2:315-333. Vll van Driem, George, 1993, The Proto-Tibeto-Burman verbal agreement system. Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies L VII2:292-334. La Polla, Randy, 1992, On the dating and nature of verb agreement in Tibeto-Burman.