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There are more native speakers of Sino-Tibetan languages than of any other language family in the world. Records of these languages are among the oldest for any human language, and the amount of active research on them, both diachronic and synchronic, has multiplied in the last few decades. This volume includes overview articles as well as descriptions of individual languages and comments on the subgroups in which they occur. In addition to a number of modern languages, there are descriptions of several ancient languages.
Origins and migration are core elements in the histories, identities and stories of Tibeto-Burman-speaking populations in the extended eastern Himalayas, a region stretching from eastern Nepal through Arunachal Pradesh, Nagaland and the hill tracts surrounding Assam, to upland Southeast Asia and southwest China. This book is the first to bring together contemporary research on Tibeto-Burman-speaking hill peoples in this region and the only multi-disciplinary study of the closely related topics of origins and migration in this part of Asia, presenting current research by anthropologists, folklorists, linguists and historians. Through a series of case studies on local and regional populations, the contributors explore origins and migration in relation to theoretical and methodological approaches, language, identity and narrative.
Expressive Morphology in the Languages of South Asia explores the intricacies of the grammars of several of the languages of the South Asian subcontinent. Specifically, the contributors to this volume examine grammatical resources for shaping elaborative, rhyming, and alliterative expressions, conveying the emotions, states, conditions and perceptions of speakers. These forms, often referred to expressives, remain relatively undocumented, until now. It is clear from the evidence on contextualized language use that the grammatically artistic usage of these forms enriches and enlivens both every day and ritualized genres of discourse. The contributors to this volume provide grammatical and sociolinguistic documentation through a typological introduction to the diversity of expressive forms in the languages of South Asia. This book is suitable for students and researchers in South Asian Languages, and language families of the following; Dravidian, Indo-Aryan, Iranian, Sino-Tibetan and Austro-Asiatic.
At the centre of this study is a shaman's chant performed during a three-week long feast in the eastern Himalayas. The book includes a translation of this 12-hour text chanted in Apatani, a Tibeto-Burman language, and a description of the events that surround it, especially ritual exchanges with ceremonial friends, in which fertility is celebrated. The shaman's social role, performance and ritual language are also described. Although complex feasts, like this one among Apatanis, have been described in northeast India and upland Southeast Asia for more than a century, this is the first book to present a full translation of the accompanying chant and to integrate it into the interpretation of the social significance of the total event.
Contributions from both well-known practitioners and new voices in the areas of language typology, historical linguistics, and function-based approaches to language description define this volume, as does its foci in two major geographical areas — southeast Asia and northwestern North America. All of the papers appeal, in one way or another, to functional-historical approaches to explanation. Behind this appeal lies an assumption that languages are selective in their development in ways that are dependent upon the communicative tasks to which they are put. As such, language function accounts for both variation and historical development over time.
Tangam is a critically endangered Trans-Himalayan (Tibeto-Burman) language spoken by around 150 hilltribespeople in the far Eastern Himalaya. A member of the Tani subgroup of Trans-Himalayan, Tangam is mutually-unintelligible with other languages of this otherwise relatively homogeneous subgroup. This is demonstrated to be a consequence of Tangam's early-branching status within the Western Tani subgroup, subsequent contact with Eastern Tani languages, and historical relationship with speakers of Bodic languages. Based on three field trips to the Tangam-speaking area over two years, this work presents a brief but comprehensive cultural, historical and grammatical introduction to the Tangam language, together with a trilingual lexicon in Tangam, English and Minyong, and a collection of fully-analysed texts. It will be of interest to linguists and anthropologists of the Himalayan region, as well as to historical linguists and language typologists.
There are more native speakers of Sino-Tibetan languages than of any other language family in the world. Our records of these languages are among the oldest for any human language, and the amount of active research on them has multiplied in the last few decades. Now in its second edition and fully updated to include new research, The Sino-Tibetan Languages includes overview articles on individual languages, with an emphasis on the less commonly described languages, as well as descriptions and comments on the subgroups in which they occur. There are overviews of the whole family on genetic classification and language contact, syntax and morphology, and also on word order typology. There are a...
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