Dörte Borchers (October 2007)
A Grammar of Sunwar. Descriptive Grammar, Paradigms, Texts and Glossary
| Name |
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Dörte Borchers |
| Title |
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A Grammar of Sunwar. Descriptive Grammar, Paradigms, Texts and Glossary
|
| Date |
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30 October 2007, 13.45 hrs. |
| Promotor |
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Prof. Dr G.L. van Driem |
| Sunwar is a Tibeto-Burman language spoken in eastern Nepal, in the districts of Okhaldhū۠gā and Rāmechāp, which are situated in an area called Kirant. The languages spoken in this region, also known as Kiranti languages. The language commonly known as Sunwar in English and as Sunuvār in Nepali, is called Koĩc by its native speakers. |
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| This description of the Sunwar language is based on data collected during twelve months of field work and contains a chapter with background information on the Sunwar language, its speakers and their culture, followed by chapters on the phonology, the indigenous writing system and the nominal and verbal morphology of Sunwar. Final chapters contain verb paradigms, glossed texts, a Sunwar-English glossary and bibliographical references. |
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| Two of the new discoveries depicted in this grammar pertain to the phonology and to the verbal morphology. |
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| Sunwar has no implosives anymore, but the language once had at least one implosive /б/ as can be shown by a comparison of phonetic realisations of the former implosive /б/ in different dialects.. |
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| At an earlier stage, Sunwar had a biactantial agreement system typical for Kiranti languages. A comparison of the suffix conjugations of modern Sunwar with the older biactantial agreement system shows a regular relationship between the two systems |
Last Modified: 22-09-2008