Trans-Himalayan languages

Bailang est une langue transhimalayenne conservée seulement dans les trois « Chants de Bailang » (Bailang ge 白狼歌) reproduits dans l'Histoire des Han postérieurs, le Hòu Hàn shū 漢書漢書 (entre 58 et 75 ec). Profitant pleinement des récents progrès de la phonologie historique du chinois, cet article tente de mieux comprendre la langue Bailang et l'état de la langue chinoise de la dynastie des Han, telle qu'elle devait être parlée par le scribe qui a retranscrit les poèmes.

Mots-clés : phonologie historique du chinois ; langue Bailang ; linguistique transhimalayenne.

Abstract Bailang is a Trans-Himalayan language preserved only in the three 'Songs of Bailang' (Bailang ge 白狼歌) in a Chinese historical text, the Hòu Hàn shū 後漢書 (58–75 ce). Taking full advantage of recent progress in Chinese historical phonology, this paper attempts to gain a better understanding of the Bailang language and the version of Han Chinese that must have been spoken by the scribe who committed the poems to writing.

This work is the first comprehensive descriptive grammar of the Lare dialect of Galo, a Tibeto-Burman language of the Tani branch spoken in central Arunachal Pradesh State, in the North-East Indian Himalaya. It is based on primary data obtained from original fieldwork conducted by the author in Galo towns and villages in Arunachal Pradesh. In addition to description of the synchronic phonology and grammar of Lare Galo, it contains a historical overview and preliminary reconstruction of Proto-Galo segmental phonology, in addition to a glossary of approximately 1,300 lexical roots with 4,000 lexical exemplars and three fully analyzed texts.

This chapter’s goal is to update the case for reconstructing the ethno-linguistic prehistory of “Tani” – a cluster of closely related ethno-linguistic groups found primarily in the mid-Eastern Himalayan region, in the modern Indian states of Arunachal Pradesh and Assam. It aims to demonstrate that important aspects of Tani prehistory can be effectively reconstructed, and argues that such reconstructions can serve as useful counterweights to dominant, yet historically vacuous, "claims" over the Tani-speaking region by large regional nation-states.

Sino-Tibetan/Trans-Himalayan, the second largest language family in the world after Indo-European in terms of speakers, is also one of the typologically most diverse families, one of the few containing both isolating and polysynthetic languages (Jacques 2016c, Arcodia & Basciano 2020). There are five ancient languages that are fully understood: Old Chinese (1300 BC), Tibetan (7th century AD), Tangut (11th century AD), Newar and Burmese (12th century AD), to which several Trümmersprachen can be added: Bailang (1st century AD), Pyu (7th century) and Nam. Spoken in a vast area from Baltistan in the West to the Shandong peninsula in the East, and Inner Mongolia in the North down to Burma in the South, Trans-Himalayan comprises about thirty obvious subgroups (van Driem 2005). The most likely outgroup of the family (i.e., the first branch to split off) is Chinese (Zhang et al. 2019, Sagart et al. 2019, Zhang et al. 2020), though the results are not yet entirely conclusive. An obstacle to a family-wide survey of morphology is the absence of a reliable phonological reconstruction (Fellner & Hill 2019b,a): rigorous reconstructions are only available for lower-level subgroups (VanBik 2009, Bodt & List 2019). For this reason, I abstain from providing proto-Trans-Himalayan reconstructions for the affixes discussed in this chapter, and use descriptive terms such as 'sigmatic', 'velar', 'dental' to refer to affixes whose proto-form was likely an alveolar fricative, a velar stop and a dental stop, respectively. Within each section, I present reconstructible morphology, noteworthy grammaticalization patterns, as well as cases of morphological borrowing. Since morphology-rich Trans-Himalayan languages are also highly verbcentered, this chapter devotes five sections to verbal morphology, followed by nominal morphology, ideophones and language contact.

The western Himalayas are an ancient linguistic area in which Indo-European (IE) and Tibeto-Burman (TB) have been in longstanding contact for more than three millennia (see Masica 1991; van Driem 2001). The region thus constitutes an ideal laboratory for studying the long-term effects of language contact between two typologically very divergent language families. However, detailed investigations of such contact phenomena presuppose detailed knowledge about the history of the languages that are spoken in the region. Unfortunately, our understanding of the linguistic prehistory of the western Himalayas is still very fragmentary. This talk aims at filling this gap and shedding light on the linguistic past of this area based on a historical study of West Himalayish (WH), a group of fifteen endangered minority languages that belong to the TB family and are spoken in remote mountainous areas of the North Indian states Himachal Pradesh and Uttarakhand. 
In a first part, the internal classification of the WH subgroup will be addressed. Based on lexical and grammatical evidence, it will be demonstrated that WH consists of two main branches, a western branch and an eastern branch. This classification will then be compared with the contemporary distribution of WH languages. It will be shown that closely related WH languages are often separated from each other by territories occupied by Indo-Aryan or Tibetic communities, which corroborates the hypothesis that the WH subgroup was once spread over a wider territory.
In a second part, the former distribution of WH languages will be reconstructed based on both linguistic and non-linguistic evidence. It will be demonstrated that the eastern WH languages bear affinities to the language of Zhangzhung, a polity that once controlled major parts of the Himalayan plateau (see Denwood 2008), and that lexical and morphological borrowings of WH origin can be found in western Tibetic varieties. This suggests that WH languages may once have been spoken across the western half of the Himalayan Plateau. It will further be shown that several WH communities practiced transhumance until the recent past, following an annual migration cycle between winter pastures in the Himalayan foothills and summer pastures in the high mountains (see Zoller 1983; Willis 2007). This suggests that WH communities may once have permanently settled the Himalayan foothills, but were then gradually pushed into the Himalayan range by Indo-Aryan communities, who may have arrived in the area as early as 1,500 BCE (see Masica 1991).
The talk thus offers new insights into the linguistic prehistory of the western Himalayas and the history of the linguistic frontier between the TB and IE language families.

Matisoff (2003) reconstructs an “adjectival prefix” *gV-, based on work by Wolfenden (1929). As a result of surveying grammatical descriptions of more than 90 Tibeto-Burman languages, the present study provides evidence to reconstruct Matisoff’s adjectival prefix as a nominalizer whose functional range includes (but is not limited to) the adjectival marking. Evidence for the prefix is found in three major genetic subdivisions. Within Bradley’s (2002) Western branch, Baram (Newaric) has a particularly versatile nominalizer ki-~gi-, and Eastern Kiranti languages have *gV-…-pa nominalizing circumfixes. In Bradley’s Eastern branch, rGyalrongic languages have velar prefixes that function as the main nominalizers. Further, in DeLancey’s (2015) Central branch of Trans-Himalayan (Sino-Tibetan), we find reflexes of *gV- in many languages, most notably the versatile nominalizer kV- in Lamkang (Northwest Kuki-Chin). Other languages of the India-Myanmar border with unresolved phylogenetic status within Tibeto-Burman also have reflexes of *gV-, most prominently Karbi and Tangkhul (Konnerth 2012).

Hill, Nathan W. (2017) 'The State of Sino-Tibetan.' Archiv Orientální,
85 (2) : 305-315.

A review article of

Thurgood, Graham, and Randy J. LaPolla, eds. The Sino-Tibetan Languages. Second Edition. London and New York: Routledge, 2017. xxx + 1018 pp. ISBN 978-1-138-78332-4. Price 300 GBP.

In Kiranti languages, the presence of rich alternations in verbal paradigms make internal reconstruction possible, and allow a better understanding of the vowels and codas of the proto-language than is possible for other parts of speech. This paper, using data from four representative languages (Wambule, Khaling, Bantawa, Limbu), proposes a new approach to Proto-Kiranti historical linguistics combining the comparative method and internal reconstruction, and taking morphological alternations and analogy into account. It presents a comprehensive account of the sound correspondences between the four target languages and reconstructs more than 280 proto-Kiranti verb roots.

The diachronic analysis of person indexation systems in Sino-Tibetan (Trans-Himalayan) languages is currently a topical issue. Factual errors have occasionally crept in, detracting somewhat from the quality of the linguistic discussion about these systems. Evidence from Tangut, Gyal-rongic and Kiranti is so central to the debates that it appeared useful to provide a few clarifications about their person indexation systems, adduc-ing evidence from a body of texts that has been considerably enriched in the past decade. The main points made in this paper can be summarized as follows. First, the view that personal affixes derive diachronically from pronouns is by no means as self-evident as it may seem. Second, person indexation in Tangut, the oldest Trans-Himalayan language with person in-dexation, is not optional, as has sometimes been stated in the literature. Third, person indexation in Gyalrongic and Kiranti is sensitive to grammatical relations, a finding which calls into question its analysis as marking speech act participant involvement.

is the hypothesis that postulates a bifurcate genetic relationship between Sinitic and Tibeto-Burman. The history of the subgrouping of its components as well as its overall membership are briefly though exhaustively summarized. Special attention is given to the methodological shortcomings of a recent Bayesian approach that further professes to substantiate this bifurcate Sino-Tibetan model. Future directions and broader affinities of Trans-Himalayan are also discussed.

The epistemic verbal categories " evidentiality " and " egophoricity " play an important role in the verbal systems of many Tibeto-Burman languages of the Himalayas. In the course of the past decades, our synchronic understanding of those grammatical categories has been considerably enhanced by numerous descriptive studies. However, little is still known about the diachronic processes that give rise to evidentiality and egophoricity. The article addresses this gap by discussing evidence from Bunan, a Tibeto-Burman language for whose past tense system the development of evidentiality and egophoricity can be reconstructed in detail. It is argued that the evolution of the two categories can be explained by reference to two processes: (i) the reanalysis of a resultative construction as an inferential past tense and (ii) the reanalysis of third person agreement markers as allophoric markers. In addition, it is maintained that the concept of Scalar Quantity Implicature is crucial to account for the evolution of the two categories.

Topographical deixis refers to a variety of spatial-environmental deixis, in which typically distal reference to entities is made in terms of a set of topographically-anchored referential planes: most often, upward, downward , or on the same level. This article reviews the genealogical and geographic distribution of topographical deixis in Trans-Himalayan (Sino-Tibetan) languages, reviews the conditions in which topographical deixis in Trans-Himalayan languages may be gained or lost, and concludes that (a) topographical deixis is overwhelmingly found in languages spoken in mon-tane environments, and (b) topographical deixis most likely reconstructs to a deep level within Trans-Himalayan. The language spoken at that level-whose precise phylogenetic status cannot yet be specified-was overwhelmingly likely to have been spoken in a montane environment.

The main objective of this paper is to propose the first tentative periodisation of the Old Tibetan (OT) language based on a group of related sound changes. As it occurs, at the time of the script invention in the 630s, Early Old Tibetan (EOT) must have had four onset clusters /s/+liquid: zr-, sr-, zl-, and sl-. However, in Old Tibetan as well as in Classical Tibetan (CT) we only find sr-, zl-, and sl-, whereas neither of them is attested in modern spoken varieties of Tibetan. In order to find out what has happened to the EOT zr-, I have traced reflexes of CT sr-, zl-, and sl-in modern dialects. Since changes that have occurred with respect to zland sl-parallel each other, I postulate that the same analogy can be applied to sr-to determine in what direction the EOT onset zr-might have evolved. Having reconstructed the development of the onsets in the most conservative dialects of Western Archaic Tibetan (WAT) and Amdo Tibetan (AT), I juxtapose these findings with historical facts that can help us to explain modern distribution of Tibetan dialects. Historical events recorded in OT documents combined with our knowledge of other early sound changes in Old Tibetan constitute a time frame for dating the reconstructed changes and thereby allow us to establish the first tentative linguistic periodisation of Old Tibetan.

In a series of papers I have explored the development of the personal pronoun system in different periods of Tibetan linguistics history (Hill 2007, 2010, 2013, 2015). In this paper, I focus on first person singular pronouns, surveying my own previous findings and filling in the picture with further gleanings from version A and (where the passage in question is missing in A) version E of the Old Tibetan Rāmāyaṇa (de Jong 1989). When the evidence of the Rāmāyaṇa is insufficient, I further consult other Dunhuang texts, the Mdzaṅs-blun, and the Vinayakṣudrakavastu (Ḥdul ba phran tshegs kyi gźi, D.6). Apart from a few Dunhuang texts, these sources are all translations or adaptations of foreign literature into Tibetan. In a series of papers I have explored the development of the personal pronoun system in different periods of Tibetan linguistics history (Hill 2007, 2010, 2013, 2015). 1 In this paper, I focus on first person singular pronouns, surveying my own previous findings and filling in the picture with further gleanings from version A and (where the passage in question is missing in A) version E of the Old Tibetan Rāmāyaṇa (de Jong 1989). When the evidence of the Rāmāyaṇa is insufficient, I further consult other Dunhuang texts, the Mdzaṅs-blun, and the Vinayakṣudrakavastu (Ḥdul ba phran tshegs kyi gźi.

In 1989 Starostin proposed that Old Chinese had a final *-r that later changed ton (and sometimes-j). Baxter & Sagart subsequently incorporated Starostin's proposal in their 2014 Old Chinese reconstructions. This essay attempts to assemble the evidence for Old Chinese final *-r and to elaborate an explicit notation for the relative strength of this evidence for reconstructing an *-r in particular words.

Idu is a putative language isolate spoken in Northeastern Arunachal Pradesh in the flanks of the Himalayas. As a consequence of living in highly dissected terrain, the Idu have developed a highly nuanced set of directionals, indicating both up and down the mountainside, the different levels of villages and orientation is respect of the many rivers that flow through their territory. The paper describes the uses of these directionals and the orientation system they imply. Comparisons are made with directional systems in other regional languages.

“Topographical deixis” refers to a variety of spatial-environmental deixis in which typically distal reference to entities is made in terms of a set of topographically-anchored referential plains: most often, upward, downward, or on the same level. Thus defined, topographical deixis is a pervasive feature of Trans-Himalayan (= Sino-Tibetan) languages. However, while there have been several descriptions of Trans-Himalayan topographical deixis at the language or subgroup level, there has been as yet no account of its overall status and distribution within the family. The primary goal of this article is to provide an account of topographical deixis from a pan-Trans-Himalayan perspective, to the maximum extent possible on the basis of existing descriptions. It discusses its formal coding, functions, distribution within the family, and environmental correlations. In addition to providing a benchmark account of the nature and distribution of topographical deixis within the Trans-Himalayan family, this study thus contributes to cross-linguistic typologies of spatial deictic systems and their environmental-interactional motivations more generally.

This is the complete, and extensively revised version of the Chinese chapter of a forthcoming book on Trans-Himalayan comparative phonology. The idea is to clearly and empirically explain to non-Sinologists how Old Chinese (primarily in the system of Baxter and Sagart) is reconstructed. The comments I received previously on this chapter were extremely useful and testing the patience of the public, I would implore any additional commentaries.

Topographical deixis is a highly grammaticalized system of spatial reference found widely in Trans-Himalayan (= Tibeto-Burman) languages, in which three levels are distinguished in distal reference only: upward, downward, and on the same or an unknown level. A number of extensions follow naturally from these values in a montane environment, including riverine orientation, compass directions, in-village or out-village reference, etc. However, the topographical-orientation values seem to be the most stable across languages, and quite likely reconstruct to the earliest stages of the family.

As various Trans-Himalayan-speaking groups have moved around within and out of montane environments, their topographical-deixis systems have undergone changes. When hill languages have moved into plains areas in which large rivers are found, the systemic “anchor” has been found to shift from topographic to riverine orientation, and systems have been found to remain grammatically intact for several generations at least; such a change is attested in plains-area Tani lects (Post 2011). However, topographical-deixis systems are also prone to erosion and decay in plains-area languages; this appears to have happened in Singpho, in which pale shadows of the Proto-Jingphoic system are now retained in song poetry only (Stephen Morey, personal communcation April 2016, Kurabe 2017). In some plains-area subgroups, topographical deixis was completely lost at the meso-language stage, as appears to have been the case in Proto-Bodo-Garo. And in the few clear instances that we can find of plains-area languages spreading up to (new) hill areas, we find that topographical dexis is not re-innovated, at least within a small number of centuries (Burling 2004).

The picture that emerges is one in which topographical deixis, once established, readily fluctuates and changes in direct response to speaker-group interaction with a changing environment as a result of migration events; these observations seem basically supportive of Palmer, Gaby et al. (2016)’s SocioTopographic model, and would generally support a view of language in which at least some aspects of grammatical structure are directly shaped by discourse patterns resulting from speaker interactions in particular types of environment.

According to Willet (1988:55), evidentiality is “the linguistic means of indicating how the speaker obtained the information on which s/he bases an assertion”. In short, it may also be said to indicate one’s information source (Willet 1988: 51; Aikhenvald 2004: 3). Most of the Tibetic evidential distinctions much like conjunct-disjunct oppositions in other Himalayan languages seem to be informed by the speaker’s involvement in the event profiled in a statement (DeLancey 1986, 1992; Hale 1980). Both types of distinctions may be said to involve “egophoric” and “allophoric” markers, that is, markers which mainly occur when the speaker respectively is and isn’t the subject in a statement (Tournadre 1991, 2008; Floyd, Norcliffe & San Roque 2018). The present paper shows that a majority of the evidential distinctions found in the Greater Himalayan Region (GHR) contrast ego- with allophoric markers, but that the contrasting markers nowhere strictly keep to their respective domains. Instead, we may distinguish different types of distinctions based on what the markers mean in their “atypical environments.”

The original 20-minutes presentation with voiceover is found here: https://osf.io/zxe25/

The paper presents the first complete reconstruction of the Old Tibetan (OT) verb morphology and semantics. Old Tibetan had a productive verb inflection with meaningful inflectional affixes b-, g-, ɣ-, d-, -d, and -s. The distribution of the prefixes was asymmetric and closely related to transitivity of a verb. Verbs of highest transitivity formed four distinct stems, whereas intransitive verbs inflected for one or two stems only. Grammatical voice is the only category that can explain the disproportion in the markings of transitive and intransitive verbs. Because the basic opposition was that between active and passive voice, intransitive verbs could only form active forms, whereas both active and passive forms were available for the majority of transitive verbs. In addition, both groups of verbs inflected for aspect, distinguishing between perfective and imperfective aspect. The OT inflectional system seems to have been a local innovation, only marginally related to verb morphology of other Trans-Himalayan languages.

This response to Jacques' paper (of this volume, JSEALS 14.1:32-38) suggests a revision of the temporal frame of the morphological processes discussed by Jacques. It agrees on the reconstructed sequence of derivation by means of a transitivising and voicing prefix that was followed by Schiefner's law but dates both processes to stages in the history of the Trans-Himalayan family that preceded the formation of Proto-Tibetic.

Previous theoretical discussion about inverse systems has largely revolved around the synchronic and diachronic relationship between the inverse and the passive. In contrast, this study argues for the antipassive origins of two inverse constructions in Monsang (Trans-Himalayan), which are used for 3→SAP and 2→1 scenarios. This questions central assumptions from previous accounts about the functional motivation underlying inverse systems, and suggests that strategies of avoiding overt reference may be at play. The diachronic pathway proposed here connects the traditional inverse with other special marking patterns that involve speech act participant objects, in particular the 'pseudo-inverse' construction of innovative first person object indexation.

This paper documents equative, similative, comparative and superlative constructions on the basis of a corpus of narratives. It reveals a previously unsuspected wealth of constructions: no less than three main types of superlatives, and four types of equative are attested, some including additional subtypes. Most of the constructions described in this paper belong to categories previously identified by typologists, but some constructions, such as the denominal equative adjectives, appear to be crosslinguistically rarer.

Compared with Sub-Saharan Africa, ideophones in the languages of the Himalayas are little studied. Although recorded extensively for languages such as Japanese and Khmer, dictionaries are a sparse resource and few journal publications deal with them. Despite this, they are extremely numerous in the languages of Arunachal Pradesh (and presumably in neighbouring regions). The paper looks in detail at the iconic expressions in two languages, Idu and Kman, which are claimed to be Trans-Himalayan, and extends the analysis to neighbouring languages where some documentation exists. In Idu and Kman, the following classification is adopted;

Onomatopoeic expressives are those which are claimed to mimic the sounds of realworld events. A subset of these are conventional animal noises
Expressives/ideophones those which express states, emotions or sensations
Paired collocations/echo expressives those where a two syllable first element is followed by one which resembles it segmentally and tonally

Onomatopoeic expressives are sometimes reduplicated or repeated many times, according to the pragmatic context. They can be extremely diverse morphologically following the perception of the entity imitated. The register where adults speak to children includes bogus onomatopoeia
Expressives are usually reduplicated. This can be exact, exact except for tonal alternation, or with elements changed, typically the vowels.
Paired collocations are usually not reduplicated exactly. These can either be transparent semantic sequences (e.g. road + bridge giving ‘communication’) or opaque, where the second element has no meaning, but the expression is felt ‘incomplete’ without it

As elsewhere, onomatopoeia is frequently heard in natural conversation. However, expressives are far more common in types of heightened speech, such as narrations and the many registers for which these languages are well-known. Paired collocations are typical of heightened speech, especially mediation language, hunting and shamanic registers. Kman has a poetic register, where these collocations are used in every stanza.

Ideophones usually fill the adverbial slot, preceding the verb they qualify. There are, however, exceptions, such as;

jȭ.õ̀õ̀ describes looking like an owl

which is neither reduplicated nor adverbial. Paired collocations are particularly challenging to assign to a specific part of speech, since they can be nouns, verbs, adjectives and adverbs, and for example a sequence of two verbs can be used to create a nominal. For example;

càcì làpē s.t. annoying fr. undermine + throw

The paper provides illustrations of all these classes of iconic expression and brief examples of their use in syntactic context, especially where they occur in heightened speech, for Idu and Kman. It then extends the discussion to other languages of Arunachal Pradesh, especially May (Sherdukpen) and Miji (Sajolang). A brief comparison with African ideophones is given, highlighting the contrast whereby reduplicated elements in African languages are usually associated with narrative. Finally it considers why these evidently salient aspects of spoken culture have been so little studied in SE Asia.

The book under review serves as a significant contribution to the field of Trans-Himalayan linguistics. Designed as a vade mecum for readers with little linguistic background in these three languages, Nathan W. Hill’s work attempts, on the one hand, a systematic exploration of the shared history of Burmese, Tibetan and Chinese, and, on the other, a general introduction to the reader interested in obtaining an overall understanding of the state of the art of the historical phonology of these three languages. Whilst it is acknowledged that the book in question has the potential to be a solid contribution to the field, it is also felt that few minor issues can be also addressed.