A Grammar of Darma

A Grammar of Darma
Author: Christina Willis Oko
Publisher: BRILL
Total Pages: 592
Release: 2019-08-26
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 9004409491

A Grammar of Darma provides a comprehensive description of this threatened Tibeto-Burman language spoken in India’s Himalayan region. The description is based on a corpus that includes natural discourse and elicited data. The analysis is informed by a functional-typological framework.

A Descriptive Grammar of Darma

A Descriptive Grammar of Darma
Author: Christina Marie Willis
Publisher:
Total Pages: 1194
Release: 2007
Genre: Darma language
ISBN:

This dissertation is a description of Darma, an under-documented Tibeto-Burman language spoken in the eastern corner of the state of Uttarakhand, India. With fewer than 2,600 speakers and no writing system, Darma is considered endangered. This is the most comprehensive description of Darma to date. Like the other Himalayan languages, the genetic classification of Darma has not been definitively determined. It is widely described as a western Himalayish language that is closely related to Byansi, Chaudangsi and Rangkas (the latter being extinct). The data presented in this dissertation were obtained through three methodologies: direct elicitation, participant observation, and the discourse-centered approach to data collection advocated by University of Texas linguistic anthropologist Joel Sherzer. The discourse-centered methodology relies on naturally occurring speech, including conversation, stories, songs and public dialogues. The resulting data are contextualized in a cultural framework, which is useful to linguists and anthropologists alike; and the majority of examples presented come from these texts. The dissertation is presented in five sections with a total of nineteen chapters and a glossary. The first section provides background information on the Darma people, the language, and how this project came about. The second section describes the sound system of Darma, including its typologically unusual class of oral stops. The third section introduces the words that comprise a noun phrase including nouns, personal pronouns, and pronominal demonstrative forms, which are marked on a spatial axis (e.g. proximate, neutral, distal, and non-visible). The fourth section examines the affixes that combine with verb stems to form clauses and sentences. This includes a discussion of the basic SV/AOV constituent order, and the ergative/absolutive alignment system. Here nominalization/relativization, a common feature of Tibeto-Burman languages, is also presented along with the clause chaining strategy commonly found in narrative discourse. The analysis for this dissertation is informed by a functional-typological perspective, and an effort has been made to capture general patterns found in the grammar. The goals are to provide a description of the grammar of Darma in a format that is accessible to many, and to avoid relying on any overly specific theoretical framework that may become obsolete.

A Grammar of Kham

A Grammar of Kham
Author: David E. Watters
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 505
Release: 2009-10-01
Genre: Foreign Language Study
ISBN: 1139436082

First published in 2002, this is a comprehensive grammatical documentation of Kham, a previously undescribed language from west-central Nepal, belonging to the Tibeto-Burman language family. The language contains a number of grammatical systems that are of immediate relevance to current work on linguistic theory, including split ergativity, a mirative system, and a rich class of derived adjectivals. Its verb morphology has implications for the understanding of the history of the entire Tibeto-Burman family. The book, based on extensive fieldwork, deals with all major aspects of the language including segmental phonology, tone, word classes, noun phrases, nominalizations, transitivity alterations, tense-aspect-modality, non-declarative speech acts, and complex sentence structure. It provides copious examples throughout the exposition and includes three short native texts and a vocabulary of more than 400 words, many of them reconstructed for Proto-Kham and Proto-Tibeto-Burman.

A Grammar of Dhimal

A Grammar of Dhimal
Author: King John T.
Publisher: BRILL
Total Pages: 634
Release: 2009
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 9004175733

The present work, a grammar of Dhimal, fills an important void in the documentation of the vast and ramified Tibeto-Burman language family. Dhimal, a little known and endangered tongue spoken in the lowlands of southeastern Nepal by about 20,000 individuals, is detailed in this work. With data gathered in the village of hiy b r , the author crafts a readable description of the western dialect, using over 1000 examples to illustrate usage. Included in this reference work are seventeen texts, riddles, songs and a Dhimal-English glossary. Joining other recent ground-breaking linguistic descriptions by researchers from the Himalayan Languages Project at Leiden University, this grammar of Dhimal will have lasting scientific value and aid the Dhimal community in preserving their language.

A Grammar of Kurtöp

A Grammar of Kurtöp
Author: Gwendolyn Hyslop
Publisher: BRILL
Total Pages: 474
Release: 2017-02-06
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 9004328742

A grammar of Kurtöp presents the phonology, morphology, syntax, and semantics of Kurtöp, a Tibeto-Burman language of northeastern Bhutan. When possible, data are presented in a comparative light, lending insight into the development of phenomena such as tonogenesis and nominalizations.

Grammar of Duhumbi (Chugpa)

Grammar of Duhumbi (Chugpa)
Author: Timotheus Adrianus Bodt
Publisher: BRILL
Total Pages: 789
Release: 2020-01-13
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 9004409483

The volume Grammar of Duhumbi (Chugpa) is a comprehensive description of Duhumbi, the language spoken by the Duhumbi (Chugpa, Chug Monpa) people of Dirang circle West Kameng district, Arunachal Pradesh, India.

Darwin, Dharma, and the Divine

Darwin, Dharma, and the Divine
Author: G. Clinton Godart
Publisher: University of Hawaii Press
Total Pages: 321
Release: 2018-03-31
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 0824876830

Darwin, Dharma, and the Divine is the first book in English on the history of evolutionary theory in Japan. Bringing to life more than a century of ideas, G. Clinton Godart examines how and why Japanese intellectuals, religious thinkers of different faiths, philosophers, biologists, journalists, activists, and ideologues engaged with evolutionary theory and religion. How did Japanese religiously think about evolution? What were their main concerns? Did they reject evolution on religious grounds, or—as was more often the case—how did they combine evolutionary theory with their religious beliefs? Evolutionary theory was controversial and never passively accepted in Japan: It took a hundred years of appropriating, translating, thinking, and debating to reconsider the natural world and the relation between nature, science, and the sacred in light of evolutionary theory. Since its introduction in the nineteenth century, Japanese intellectuals—including Buddhist, Shinto, Confucian, and Christian thinkers—in their own ways and often with opposing agendas, struggled to formulate a meaningful worldview after Darwin. In the decades that followed, as the Japanese redefined their relation to nature and built a modern nation-state, the debates on evolutionary theory intensified and state ideologues grew increasingly hostile toward its principles. Throughout the religious reception of evolution was dominated by a long-held fear of the idea of nature and society as cold and materialist, governed by the mindless “struggle for survival.” This aversion endeavored many religious thinkers, philosophers, and biologists to find goodness and the divine within nature and evolution. It was this drive, argues Godart, that shaped much of Japan’s modern intellectual history and changed Japanese understandings of nature, society, and the sacred. Darwin, Dharma, and the Divine will contribute significantly to two of the most debated topics in the history of evolutionary theory: religion and the political legacy of evolution. It will, therefore, appeal to the broad audience interested in Darwin studies as well as students and scholars of Japanese intellectual history, religion, and philosophy.

Senkatana

Senkatana
Author: Sophonia Machabe Mofokeng
Publisher: NYU Press
Total Pages: 105
Release: 2021-10-01
Genre: Drama
ISBN: 1776145453

Senkatana is a tragic play adapted from Sotho folk narrative. The play is regarded as a classic of Sesotho literature. Seen as one of the greatest essayists and dramatists writing in Southern Sotho, Senkatana was Mofokeng’s first book, published in 1952 in the African (then Bantu) Treasury Series, an imprint of Witwatersrand University Press.

The Oxford Handbook of Evidentiality

The Oxford Handbook of Evidentiality
Author: Alexandra Y. Aikhenvald
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 929
Release: 2018-01-18
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 0191077399

This volume offers a thorough, systematic, and crosslinguistic account of evidentiality, the linguistic encoding of the source of information on which a statement is based. In some languages, the speaker always has to specify this source - for example whether they saw the event, heard it, inferred it based on visual evidence or common sense, or was told about it by someone else. While not all languages have obligatory marking of this type, every language has ways of referring to information source and associated epistemological meanings. The continuum of epistemological expressions covers a range of devices from the lexical means in familiar European languages and in many languages of Aboriginal Australia to the highly grammaticalized systems in Amazonia or North America. In this handbook, experts from a variety of fields explore topics such as the relationship between evidentials and epistemic modality, contact-induced changes in evidential systems, the acquisition of evidentials, and formal semantic theories of evidentiality. The book also contains detailed case studies of evidentiality in language families across the world, including Algonquian, Korean, Nakh-Dagestanian, Nambikwara, Turkic, Uralic, and Uto-Aztecan.