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South Asia is home to a large number of languages and dialects. Although linguists working on this region have made significant contributions to our understanding of language, society, and language in society on a global scale, there is as yet no recognized international forum for the exchange of ideas amongst linguists working on South Asia. The Annual Review of South Asian Languages and Linguistics is designed to be just that forum. It brings together empirical and theoretical research and serves as a testing ground for the articulation of new ideas and approaches which may be grounded in a study of South Asian languages but which have universal applicability. Each volume will have three major sections: I. Invited contributions consisting of state-of-the-art essays on research in South Asian languages. II. Refereed open submissions focusing on relevant issues and providing various viewpoints. III. Reports from around the world, book reviews and abstracts of doctoral theses.
The articles in this survey of the Indo-Aryan controversy address questions such as: are the Indo-Aryans insiders or outsiders?
In The Power of Nature archaeologists address the force and impact of nature relative to human knowledge, action, and volition. Case studies from around the world focusing on different levels of sociopolitical complexity—ranging from early agricultural societies to states and empires—address the ways in which nature retains the upper hand in human agentive environmental discourse, providing an opportunity for an insightful perspective on the current anthropological emphasis on how humans affect the environment. Climatic events, pathogens, and animals as nonhuman agents, ranging in size from viruses to mega-storms, have presented our species with dynamic conditions that overwhelm human ca...
This is the only study in a Western European language of an important part of the intellectual and cultural history of the Persianate world in its formative phase. Persian dictionaries (farhangs) of the Islamic era, compiled principally in India, represent a unique linguistic undertaking that has no counterpart in pre-modern Europe. Solomon Baevskii (University of St Petersburg, emeritus) based his work on books and manuscripts from South Asia, Iran, Central Asia and Russia, charting the evolution of these documents from lexical and cultural-historical perspectives. Published originally in Russian in 1989, the book is here presented in a new English edition, revised and updated by John Perry, Professor of Persian at the University of Chicago.
Azuma Old Japanese is an areal term for the two major dialects of Eastern (‘Azuma’) Japan during the eighth century: Eastern Old Japanese and Töpo-Suruga Old Japanese. This volume is an exhaustive, comparative reference grammar based on the linguistic data contained in the Man’yōshū poetic anthology (759 CE). It contains chapters dedicated to the different lexical categories, the lexicon, the phonology, and the historical development. This volume serves to fill the last remaining gap in English language scholarship on the grammar of premodern Japanese dialects, and significantly contributes to our understanding of the historical development of the earliest attested Japanese dialects. It also contains an extensive reconstruction of Proto-Japanese.
In A Phonological Reconstruction of Proto-Hlai, Norquest presents a reconstruction of Proto-Hlai based on data from twelve Hlai languages spoken on Hainan, China. This reconstruction includes chapters on both the Proto-Hlai initials and rimes, and original sesquisyllabic forms are shown to be necessary to account for the reflexes between the daughter languages. A comparison is made between Proto-Hlai and Proto-Tai, and a preliminary reconstruction of Proto Southern Kra-Dai (the immediate ancestor of Proto-Hlai) is performed. When this is compared with Proto-Hlai, it is shown that several important sound changes occurred between Pre-Hlai and Proto-Hlai. The aberrant Jiamao language is also examined, focusing on its complex contact relationships with other Hlai languages.
The Kurux Language: Grammar, Texts and Lexicon by Masato Kobayashi and Bablu Tirkey is a comprehensive description of Kurux, a northern Dravidian tribal language with two million speakers. Isolated in the Chota Nagpur Plateau of Eastern India, Kurux shows a unique mixture of archaic Dravidian traits and innovations induced by contact with neighboring Indo-Aryan and Munda languages, and has posed questions regarding language change and Dravidian subgrouping. Making use of first-hand materials from their fieldwork, Kobayashi and Tirkey analyze the complexities of the language in the grammar section. This book also contains transcribed and glossed texts, and a lexicon with more than 9,000 entries, and serves both as reference for linguists and learning resource for students.
The Munda group of languages of the Austroasiatic family are spoken within central and eastern India by almost ten million people. To date, they are the least well-known and least documented languages of the Indian subcontinent. This unprecedented and original work draws together a distinguished group of international experts in the field of Munda language research and presents current assessments of a wide range of typological and comparative-historical issues, providing agendas for future research. Representing the current state of Munda Linguistics, this volume provides detailed descriptions of almost all of the languages in the family, in addition to a brief chapter discussing the enigmatic Nihali language.
Japanese ranks as the ninth most widely spoken language of the world with more than 127 million speakers in the island state of Japan. Its genetic relation has been a topic of heated discussion, but Altaic and Austronesian languages appear to have contributed to the early formation of this language. Japanese has a long written tradition, which goes back to texts from the eighth century CE. The modern writing system employs a mixture of Chinese characters and two sets of syllabary indigenously developed based on the Chinese characters. This book consists of sixteen chapters covering the phonology, morphology, writing system, tense and aspect systems, basic argument structure, grammatical constructions, and discourse and pragmatic phenomena of Japanese. It provides researchers with a useful typological reference and students of Japanese with a theory-neutral introduction to current linguistic research issues.