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Tibeto-Burman and Indo-European loans in Burushaski Kinship terminology
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 24 December 2009
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Burushaski consists of two dialects spoken respectively in the Hunza and Nagir valleys (the dialect most usually called Burushaski; henceforward Bu.) and the Yasin valley (Wershikwar, henceforward Wk.) in the Northern Areas of Pakistani Kashmir. Although the language is genetically an isolate, it contains a considerable number of loans from the unrelated languages with which it is in contact, chiefly Indo-European (IE) Shina, Khowar and Dumaki, and Tibeto-Burman (TB) Balti. The chief sources for Burushaski have no difficulty in identifying loans from the former, but TB ones have by and large escaped notice or been disregarded. It is only Lorimer who deals with this question at any length, and even he relegates the data to an appendix in his dictionary because, he says (III, pp. vii-viii), of his limited knowledge of Tibetan. Therefore, the bulk of this article will discuss all the identifiable instances of TB loans in Burushaski in one particular area of vocabulary, namely, kin terms, as well as the possibility that the standard TB honorific prefix, a–, often attached to TB kin terms for elder kin, is present at least in Bu., in both loans and native material. Also discussed are a number of more problematic cases, as well as some that can only be understood as instances of common borrowing by both Burushaski and TB from IE. Finally, I list for convenience the undoubted IE loans among Burushaski kin terms, which will demand much less discussion in view of their identification already in Lorimer and Berger. The whole is intended as a preliminary to a further, somewhat longer, article I wish to publish discussing the whole Burushaski kinship terminology from a more semantic and anthropological point of view.
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- Information
- Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies , Volume 50 , Issue 2 , June 1987 , pp. 325 - 329
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- Copyright © School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London 1987
References
1 ‘Burushaski’ spelt in full refers to both dialects taken together. Unless otherwise stated, the sources used for Burushaski are Lorimer, D. L. R., The Burushaski language, Oslo: Instituttet Sammenlignende Kulturforskning, 3 vols.: I Grammar (1935); II Texts (1935); III, Vocabulary (1938)Google Scholar, for Bu, .; and Berger, H., Das Yasin-Burushaski (Werchikwar), Wiesbaden, 1974, for Wk. Further data on Bu. has been collected recently by Dr. Adam Nayyar, and I am grateful to him and to Professor George Pfeffer for allowing me to use this material. I also wish to thank Dr. N. J. Allen for initially pointing out to me the possible presence of TB loans in the Burushaski material, and for indicating some useful sources.Google Scholar
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