1999
KATHMANDU, NEPAL
Himalayan Languages
For the first time in the Symposium's short existence the annual meeting was held in Nepal, in the heart of the Himalayas. More than ever, this year's conference offered an opportunity to scholars from many of the Himalayan regions in particular to share their knowledge and present their findings and views to an international audience.
By ROLAND RUTGERS
The Himalayan Languages Symposium is an open international forum at which scholars can exchange the results of their research with others working on related issues in the same geographical area. The term 'Himalayan' is used in its broad sense to include north-western and north-eastern India, where languages of Indo-Aryan, Dravidian, Tibeto-Burman, and Austro-Asiatic linguistic stocks are spoken; plus embracing the languages of Nuristan, Bhutan, Baltistan, and the Burushaski-speaking area in the west. 'Languages' is used as opposed to 'Linguistics' to broaden the scope of the symposium beyond linguistics proper, so as to allow those scholars working in the related disciplines such as archaeology, philology, and anthropology to present their research wherever this is directly relevant to the understanding of Himalayan languages and language communities.This year, the symposium was a wonderful event in the heart of the mountain resort Kathmandu, capital of Nepal. The conference was hosted by Tribhuvan University. Scholars from Nepal, Tibet, India, several Western countries, and Australia presented their papers. Below is a brief report on a few of the many interesting topics addressed.
A continuous matter of concern in the Himalayas, as elsewhere in the world, is the endangerment of minority languages. Although forces may be mustering to tackle this problem, it remains a vast commission even 'merely' to document these languages, not to mention providing materials for primary mother-tongue education for such minority groups. It was precisely this issue that Professor C.M. Bhandu of Tribhuvan University in Kathmandu addressed in his keynote speech. Where much is done for biological species on the verge of extinction, moribund languages often die a silent and unlamented death, leaving us with an irretrievable loss of human intellectual tradition and cultural heritage. Bandhu observed that the age-old need for communication in areas with a variety of linguistic communities or areas dominated by speakers of a different language, as well as the generation gap between the unschooled elderly, who are proficient speakers of their mother-tongue, and the youth who are educated in a regional lingua franca, contribute to the dwindling and ultimate extinction of many languages.
Among the many interesting topics discussed at the Symposium, was a paper presented by Mrs Juanita War from Shillong University on a set of grammatical markers in the Khasi language of Meghalaya. She expounded on the use of the third person 'particles' i, u, ka, and ki, demonstrating why these markers cannot be considered particles, since they have lost any synchronic connection with specificity and seem instead to sub-divide nouns into classes by virtue of their being mutually exclusive and expressing number and gender of modified nominal entities.
Balthasar Bickel of the University of California came up with some mind-provoking analyses toward a better understanding of syntax in Himalayan languages. His paper dealt with the way Tibeto-Burman languages allow noun phrase features to combine in an appositional, partitional, or even a relational structure with the features marked by the agreement morphology. This contrasts with the principle in Indo-European languages where agreement causes features of noun phrases and verbal forms to merge systematically into a unitary referential expression. Bickel proposed the term 'associative' to coin the underlying principle in Tibeto-Burman languages. This principle manifests itself, not only in agreement, but also in the structure of grammatical relations, in details of role semantics and in discourse tendencies.
The study of historical relations and people movements in the remote past is undoubtedly one of the more exciting topics of Himalayan linguistics. Van Driem summed up the state of the art with respect to the extinct language of Zhang-Zhung, and propounded his reasons for clinging to the hypothesis that this language is related to the Western Himalayan languages Bunan, Manchad, Kanauri etc. Professor Suhnu Ram Sharma of Deccan College in Pune, India, offered us an insight into the manner in which time and space terms in the Manchad language reflect the practical aspects of life for the Manchad people. He also speculated on how the well-known Whorfian hypothesis of linguistic relativity could be used to explain the influence of geography and culture on the linguistic reality and vice versa.
Dr Rudra Laxmi Shreshtha presented a highly significant description of verbal morphology in the Newari Badikhel Pahari dialect. She expounded on the various stem classes of the verb, and the related regular and irregular morphological categories, touching on all different types of modal and non-finite verbal forms. What emerged as a new insight was that, apparently, the morphology of verbs in this dialect constitutes a kind of missing link between Kathmandu Newari, which only has rudimentary pronominalization, and the Newari dialect of Dolakha, which has a much more extensive agreement morphology. Addressing verb pronominalization in a different language, Karnakhar Khatiwada shared his findings and analyses of the morphology of Dhimal verbs. Even though he argued that flexional verb forms in Dhimal lack the complexity of related languages such as Chepang, Hayu, and the Kiranti languages in general, his illustrative examples demonstrate a typical set of Tibeto-Burman pronominal verb affixes, proving Dhimal an undoubted member of Tibeto-Burman pronominalized languages.
The forty-eight papers that were presented will hopefully be published this year. *
Dr Roland Rutgers can be contacted at:
E-mail: rrutgers@compuserve.com