BURUSHASKI LANGUAGE

'Burushaski' (Urdu.بروشسکی) (stress on 'ru') is a language isolate spoken by some 87,000 (as of 2000) 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), Werchikwār, Boorishki, Brushas (Brushias).
Today Burushaski contains numerous loanwords from Urdu (including English words received via Urdu) and from neighbouring Dardic languages such as Khowar and Shina, as well as a few from Turkic languages and from the neighboring Sino-Tibetan language Balti, but the original vocabulary remains largely intact. The Dardic languages also contain large numbers of loanwords from Burushaski.
There are three dialects, named after the main valleys: Hunza, Nagar, and Yasin (also called Werchikwār). The dialect of Yasin is thought to be the least affected by contact with neighboring languages and is generally less similar to the other two than those are to each other; nevertheless all three dialects are mutually intelligible.

Contents

Relationships

Writing system

Phonology

Grammar

Notes

Literature

See also

External links

Relationships

Attempts have been made to establish a genealogic relationship between Burushaski and Sumerian, and the Caucasian, Dravidian, and Indo-European^[1] language families; Burushaski is also part of the Dené-Caucasian hypothesis, along with Yeniseian, Caucasian, and Sino-Tibetan. However, none of 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 are supported by Grune (1998) and have recently been picked up by the linguist Roger Blench. Another very important layer of the Burushaski language is allegedly the Indo-European. The linguist Ilija Čašule 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.
Following Berger (1956), Calvert Watkins, editor of the Indo-European etymologies in the ''American Heritage'' dictionaries, suggested that the word ''
★ abel'' (apple), the only name for a fruit (tree) reconstructed for Proto-Indo-European, may have been borrowed from a language ancestral to Burushaski. (Today "apple" and "apple tree" are /balt/ in Burushaski.) Others, however, reconstruct the Proto-Indo-European word for "apple (tree)" as ''
★ mel-'', while yet others don't think Proto-Indo-European had a word for "apple" at all and consider the different words of different Indo-European subgroups to be separate loans from different unidentified non-Indo-European languages.

Writing system

Usually Burushaski is not written. Occasionally, the Urdu version of the Arabic alphabet is used, but a fixed orthography does not exist. Partawi Shah has written poetry in Burushaski in the Arabic alphabet.
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.
Linguists working on Burushaski use various makeshift transcriptions based on the Latin alphabet, most commonly that by Berger (see below), in their publications. The Burushaski Research Academy, in cooperation with Karachi University, has recently published the first volume (A to ) of a Burushaski-Urdu Dictionary using this transcription.

Phonology

Burushaski primarily has five vowels, /i e a o u/. Various contractions result in long vowels; stressed vowels (marked with acute accents in Berger's transcription) tend to be longer and less "open" than unstressed ones ([i e a o u] as opposed to ). Long vowels also occur in loans and in a few onomatopoeic words (Grune 1998). All vowels have nasal counterparts in Hunza (in some expressive words) and in Nager (also in proper names and a few other words).
In addition, Berger (1998) finds the following consonants to be phonemic, shown below in his transcription and in IPA:

		Bilabial	Dental	Alveolo- palatal	Retroflex	Velar	Uvular	Glottal
Plosives	aspirated	'ph' /pʰ/1	'th' /tʰ/		'ṭh' /ʈʰ/	'kh' /kʰ/	'qh' /qʰ/2
	plain	'p' /p/	't' /t/		'ṭ' /ʈ/	'k' /k/	'q' /q/
	voiced	'b' /b/	'd' /d/		'ḍ' /ɖ/	'g' /g/
Affricates	aspirated3		'ch' /t͡sʰ/	'ćh' /t͡ɕʰ/	'c̣h' /ʈ͡ʂʰ/
	plain		'c' /t͡s/	'ć' /t͡ɕ/	'c̣' /ʈ͡ʂ/
	voiced			'j' /d͡ʑ/4	'j̣' /ɖ͡ʐ/5
Fricatives	voiceless		's' /s/	'ś' /ɕ/	'ṣ' /ʂ/			'h' /h/
	voiced		'z' /z/				'ġ' /ʁ/
Nasals		'm' /m/	'n' /n/			'ṅ' /ŋ/
Trill			'r' /r/
Approximants		'w' [w]6	'l' /l/	'y' [j]6	'ỵ' /ɻ/7

Notes:

★ ¹ Pronunciation varies: .

★ ² Pronunciation varies: .

★ ³ The Yasin dialect lacks aspirated affricates and uses the plain ones instead.

★ ⁴ Sometimes pronounced .

★ ⁵ Sometimes pronounced .

★ ⁶ Berger (1998) regards [w] and [j] as allophones of /u/ and /i/ that occur in front of stressed vowels.

★ ⁷ This phoneme has various pronunciations, all of which are rare sounds cross-linguistically. Descriptions include: "a voiced retroflex sibilant with simultaneous dorso-palatal narrowing" (apparently ) (Berger 1998); "a fricative ''r'', pronounced with the tongue in the retroflex ('cerebral') position" (apparently , a sound which also occurs in Standard Mandarin, written ''r'' in Pinyin) (Morgenstierne 1945); and "a curious sound whose phonetic realizations vary from a retroflex, spirantized glide to a retroflex velarized spirant" (Anderson forthcoming). In any case, it does not occur in the Yasin dialect, and in Hunza and Nager it does not occur at the beginning of words.

Grammar

Burushaski is a double-marking language and word order is generally Subject Object Verb.
Nouns in Burushaski are divided into four genders: human masculine, human feminine, countable objects, and uncountable ones (similar to mass nouns). The assignment of a noun to a particular gender is largely predictable. Some words can belong both to the countable and to the uncountable class, producing differences in meaning: for example, when countable, /balt/ means "apple", when uncountable, it means "apple tree". (Grune 1998)
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/oblique, 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 the object of a clause, while intransitive verbs mark their sole argument as both a subject and an object. Altogether, a verb can take up to four prefixes and six suffixes.
''See also Grune (1998) and/or the German article on Burushaski which describe the grammar in detail.''

Notes

1. in particular a relationship with a "Paleo-Balkan" group (Phrygian and Thracian), as well as Balto-Slavic, was proposed by Ilija Čašule at Macquarie University

Literature

★ Anderson, Gregory D. S. 1997. Burushaski Morphology. Pages 1021–1041 in volume 2 of ''Morphologies of Asia and Africa'', ed. by Alan Kaye. Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns.

★ Anderson, Gregory D. S. 1999. M. Witzel’s "South Asian Substrate Languages" from a Burushaski Perspective. ''Mother Tongue'' (Special Issue, October 1999).

★ Anderson, Gregory D. S. forthcoming b. Burushaski. In ''Language Islands: Isolates and Microfamilies of Eurasia'', ed. by D.A. Abondolo. London: Curzon Press.

★ 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, Qaid-i-Azam University and Summer Institute of Linguistics (1992), 31-54.

★ Bashir, Elena. 2000. A Thematic Survey of Burushaski Research. ''History of Language'' 6.1: 1–14.

★ Bengtson, John D. 1995. Basque: An orphan forever? A response to Trask. ''Mother Tongue'' 1: 84–103.

★ Bengtson, John D. 1997. Ein Vergleich von Buruschaski und Nordkaukasisch [A comparison of B. and North Caucasian]. ''Georgica'' 20: 88–94.

★ Bengtson, John D. 2000. Review of Čašule 1998. ''History of Language'' 6.1: 22–26.

★ Bengtson, John D. 2001a. Genetic and Cultural Linguistic Links between Burushaski and the Caucasian Languages and Basque. (Paper presented at the 3rd Harvard Round Table on Ethnogenesis of South and Central Asia, Harvard University, May 13, 2001.)

★ Bengtson, John D. 2001. Review of H. Berger, Die Burushaski-Sprache von Hunza und Nager. ''Mother Tongue'' 6: 184–187.

★ Bengtson, John D. forthcoming. The Dene-Caucasian Lateral Affricates.

★ Berger, Hermann. 1956. Mittelmeerische Kulturpflanzennamen aus dem Burušaski [Names of Mediterranean cultured plants from B.]. ''Münchener Studien zur Sprachwissenschaft'' 9: 4-33.

★ Berger, Hermann. 1959. Die Burušaski-Lehnwörter in der Zigeunersprache [The B. loanwords in the Gypsy language]. Indo-Iranian Journal 3.1: 17-43.

★ Berger, Hermann. 1974. ''Das Yasin-Burushaski (Werchikwar)''. Volume 3 of ''Neuindische Studien'', ed. by Hermann Berger, Lothar Lutze and Günther Sontheimer. Wiesbaden: Otto Harrassowitz.

★ Berger, Hermann. 1998. ''Die Burushaski-Sprache von Hunza und Nager'' [The B. language of H. and N.]. Three volumes: ''Grammatik'' [grammar], ''Texte mit Übersetzungen'' [texts with translations], ''Wörterbuch'' [dictionary]. Altogether Volume 13 of ''Neuindische Studien'' (ed. by Hermann Berger, Heidrun Brückner and Lothar Lutze). Wiesbaden: Otto Harassowitz.

★ Blažek, Václav, and Bengtson, John D. 1995. ''Lexica Dene-Caucasica'', Central Asiatic Journal 39(1): 11–50 and 39(2): 161–164.

★ Čašule, Ilija. 1998. Basic Burushaski Etymologies: The Indo-European and Paleo-Balkanic Affinities of Burushaski. LINCOM Etymological Studies 01. Munich: LINCOM Europa.

★ Čašule, Ilija. Evidence for the Indo-European Laryngeals in Burushaski and its Genetic Affiliation with Indo-European

★ van Driem, George. 2001. ''Languages of the Himalayas: An Ethnolinguistic Handbook of the Greater Himalayan Region, containing an Introduction to the Symbiotic Theory of Language'' (2 vols.). Leiden: Brill.

★ Greenberg, Joseph H., and Merritt Ruhlen. 1992. Linguistic Origins of Native Americans. ''Scientific American'' 267(5): 94–99.

★ Grune, Dick. 1998. Burushaski – An Extraordinary Language in the Karakoram Mountains.

★ Lorimer, D. L. R. 1935–1938. ''The Burushaski Language'' (3 vols.). Oslo: Instituttet for Sammenlignende Kulturforskning.

★ Morgenstierne, Georg. 1945. Notes on Burushaski Phonology. ''Norsk Tidsskrift for Sprogvidenskap'' 13: 61–95.

★ Пейрос, Илия [Peiros, Ilia]. 1988. Синокавказская теория и бурушаский язык [The Sino-Caucasian theory and the B. language]. Pages 214–227 in Проблемы изучения сравнителного-историческово языкознания и лингвистической истории о востоке и юге Азии. Moscow: Institute of Far Eastern Studies, Academy of Sciences of the USSR.

★ van Skyhawk, Hugh. 2003. Burushaski-Texte aus Hispar. Materialien zum Verständnis einer archaischen Bergkultur in Nordpakistan. ''Beiträge zur Indologie'' 38. ISBN 3-447-04645-7.

★ Starostin, Sergei A. 1996. Comments on the Basque-Dene-Caucasian Comparisons. ''Mother Tongue'' 2: 101–109.

★ Tiffou, Étienne. 1993. ''Hunza Proverbs''. University of Calgary Press. ISBN 1-895176-29-8

★ Tiffou, Étienne. 1999. ''Parlons Bourouchaski''. Paris: L'Harmattan. ISBN 2-7384-7967-7

★ Tiffou, Étienne. 2000. Current Research in Burushaski: A Survey. ''History of Language'' 6(1): 15–20.

★ Tikkanen, Bertil. 1988. On Burushaski and other ancient substrata in northwest South Asia. ''Studia Orientalia'' 64: 303–325.

★ Varma, Siddheshwar. 1941. Studies in Burushaski Dialectology. ''Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society of Bengal, Letters'' 7: 133–173.

★ Witzel, Michael. 1999. Early Sources for South Asian Substrate Languages. ''Mother Tongue'' (Special Issue, October 1999): 1–70.
Munshi, Sadaf. 2006. “Jammu and Kashmir Burushaski: Language, language contact, and change.” Unpublished Ph.D. Dissertation. Austin: University of Texas at Austin, Department of Linguistics.

See also

★ Partawi Shah

External links

★ SIL Ethnologue entry