Burushaski language

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Burushaski (ISO/DIS 639-3 bsk) is a language isolate spoken by some 50,000-60,000 Burusho people in the Hunza, Nagar, Yasin, and parts of the Gilgit valleys in northern Pakistan and Kashmir. Other names for the language are Kanjut (Kunjoot), Khaguna, Werchikwār, Boorishki, Brushas (Brushias).

Today Burushaski contains numerous loanwords from Urdu and a few from neighbouring Dardic languages such as Khowar and Shina, but the original vocabulary remains largely intact. The Dardic languages also contain large numbers of loanwords from Burushaski.

Burushaski has loanwords from Sanskrit (like "shiri") and Arabic ("iil") and a term to burn dead (jaaie) at (jaaiemichin) origin budhist culture. These are loanwords to or from the Burushaski language. Some words are similar, like "birgoosh" in Hungarian, or "qara" for "black" and "baig" for "prince" from Chinese Turkish. Some words are borrowed from Chitral too, like "shapik" for "bread".

Contents 1 Classification 2 Literature 3 Phonology 4 Grammar 5 Notes 6 References 7 See also 8 External links

[edit] Classification

Attempts have been made to establish a genealogic relationship between Burushaski and Sumerian,^{[citation needed]} and the Caucasian, Dravidian,^{[citation needed]} and Indo European^[1] language families; Burushaski has also traditionally been part of the Dene-Caucasian hypothesis, along with Yeniseian and Sino-Tibetan. However, none these efforts have met with general acceptance.

Recently George van Driem at Leiden University revived links between Burushaski and Yeniseian in a language family he calls Karasuk. He believes the Burusho took part in the migration out of Central Asia that resulted in the Indo-European conquest of the Indian sub-continent, while other Karasuk peoples migrated northwards to become the Yenisei. These claims have recently been picked up by linguist Roger Blench.^{[citation needed]} Another very important layer of the Burushaski language is allegedly the Indo-European. The linguist Ilija Casule claims to have shown the existence of consistent and regular phonetic correspondences and highly specific semantic concordance with the ancient Balkan languages (most notably Phrygian and Thracian) and with Balto-Slavic.

Calvert Watkins, editor of the Indo-European etymologies in the American Heritage dictionaries, suggested that the word *abel (apple), the only fruit tree reconstructed for Proto-Indo-European, may have been borrowed from a language ancestral to Burushaski.^{[citation needed]}

[edit] Literature

There are three dialects of Burushaski: those used in Hunza, Nagar, and Yasin. The dialect of Yasin is thought to be the least affected by contact with neighboring languages, but the literary and most popular dialect is that of Hunza. The language was seldom written for centuries; today it uses a modified version of the Arabic script, and Partawi Shah has written poetry in Burushaski.

Tibetan sources record a Bru-sá language of the Gilgit valley, which appears to have been Burushaski. The Bru-sá are credited with bringing the Bön religion to Tibet and Central Asia, and their script is alleged to have been the ancestor of the Tibetan alphabet. Thus Burushaski may once have been a significant literary language. However, no Bru-sá manuscripts are known to have survived.

The Burushaski Research Academy submitted the first volume of their Burushaski-Urdu Dictionary to print on 31 October 2005. News GILGIT, Oct 1 2006(APP): The Burushaski Research Academy in collaboration with Karachi University compiled a burushaski urdu dictionary.

[edit] Phonology

There are various phoneme inventories attributed to Burushaski by different scholars.

Consonants 1

		Bilabial	Dental	Alveo- palatal	Retroflex	Velar	Uvular	Glottal
Stops	Voiceless	p	t		ʈ	k	q
	Aspirated	pʰ	tʰ		ʈʰ	kʰ
	Voiced	b	d		ɖ	g
Affricates			ts	tʃ	tʂ
Fricatives	Voiceless		s	ʃ	ʂ	x		h
	Voiced		z	ʒ	ʐ	ɣ
Nasals		m	n			ŋ
Liquids*		w	l	j
Rhotic			r

* Liquids are glides and laterals.

Consonants (Berger)

		Bilabial	Dental	Alveo- palatal	Retroflex	Velar	Uvular
Stops	Tenuis	p	t		ʈ	k	q
	Aspirated	pʰ	tʰ		ʈʰ	kʰ	qʰ
	Voiced	b	d		ɖ	g	ɢ
Affricates	Tenuis		ts	tʃ	tʂ
	Aspirated		tsʰ	tʃʰ	tʂʰ
	Voiced		z	dʒ	ɖʐ
Fricatives	Voiceless		s	ʃ	ʂ
Nasals		m	n			ŋ

Vowels

	Front	Central	Back
High	i		u
Mid	e		o
Low		a

[edit] Grammar

Nouns in Burushaski are divided into four genders: human masculine, human feminine, countable objects, and uncountable (similar to mass nouns). The assignment of a noun to a particular gender is largely predictable.

Noun morphology consists of the noun stem, a possessive prefix (mandatory for some nouns, and thus an example of inherent possession), and number and case suffixes. Distinctions in number are singular, plural, indefinite, and grouped. Cases include absolutive, ergative, genitive, and several locatives; the latter indicate both location and direction and may be compounded.

Burushaski verbs have three basic stems: past tense, present tense, and consecutive. The past stem is the citation form and is also used for imperatives and nominalization; the consecutive stem is similar to a past participle and is used for coordination. Agreement on the verb has both nominative and ergative features: transitive verbs mark both the subject and object of a clause, while intransitive verbs mark their sole argument as both a subject and an object.

Word order is generally Subject Object Verb.

[edit] Notes

[edit] References

• Ilija Casule, "Basic Burushaski Etymologies".[[1]]
• Ilija Casule "Evidence for the Indo-European Laryngeals in Burushaski and Its Genetic Affiliation with Indo-European. [[2]]
• Backstrom, Peter C, "Burushaski" in Backstrom and Radloff (eds.), Languages of northern areas, Sociolinguistic Survey of Northern Pakistan, 2. Islamabad, National Institute of Pakistan Studies, Quaid-i-Azam University and Summer Institute of Linguistics (1992), 31-54.
• Blazek, V. and Bengtson, D., Lexica Dene-Caucasica, Central Asiatic Journal 39 (1995), 11-50, 161-164.
• van Driem, George, Languages of the Himalayas: An Ethnolinguistic Handbook of the Greater Himalayan Region, containing an Introduction to the Symbiotic Theory of Language Leiden: Brill: (2001, 2 vols.).
• van Skyhawk, Hugh, Burushaski-Texte aus Hispar. Materialien zum Verständnis einer archaischen Bergkultur in Nordpakistan, Beiträge zur Indologie, 38, Wiesbaden: (2003), ISBN 3-447-04645-7.

[edit] See also

• Partawi Shah

[edit] External links

• SIL Ethnologue entry
• Burushaski: An Extraordinary Language in the Karakoram Mountains (PDF)
• Ilija Casule publications on Thraco-Phrygian and Balto-Slavic connections of Burushaski