Synchronic and Diachronic Aspects of Kanashi / / Anju Saxena, Lars Borin, editors.

• TeilnehmendeR: Saxena, Anju,; Borin, Lars,
• Place / Publishing House: Berlin ;, Boston : : De Gruyter Mouton,, 2022.
• Year of Publication: 2022
• Language: English
• Series: Trends in linguistics
• Physical Description: 1 online resource (320 pages).

Kanashi, a Sino-Tibetan (ST) language belonging to the West Himalayish (WH) subbranch of this language family, is spoken in one single village (Malana in Kullu district, Himachal Pradesh state, India), which is surrounded by villages where - entirely unrelated - Indo-Aryan (IA) languages are spoken. Until we started working on Kanashi, very little linguistic material was available. Researchers have long speculated about the prehistory of Kanashi: how did it happen that it ended up spoken in one single village, completely cut off from its closest linguistic relatives? Even though suggestions have been made of a close genealogical relation between Kanashi and Kinnauri (another WH language), at present separated by over 200 km of rugged mountainous terrain, their shared linguistic features have not been discussed in the literature. Based on primary fieldwork, this volume presents some synchronic and diachronic aspects of Kanashi. The synchronic description of Kanashi includes a general introduction on Malana and the Kanashi language community (chapter 1), linguistic descriptions of its sound system (chapter 2), of phonological variation in Kanashi (chapter 4), of its grammar (chapter 3) and of its intriguing numeral systems (chapter 5), as well as basic vocabulary lists (Kanashi-English, English-Kanashi) (chapter 9). As for the diachronic and genealogical aspects (chapters 6-8), we compare and contrast Kanashi with other ST languages of this region (in particular languages of Kinnaur, notably Kinnauri), thereby uncovering some intriguing linguistic features common to Kanashi and Kinnauri which provide insights into their common history. For instance: a subset of borrowed IA nouns and adjectives in both languages end in -(a)ŋ or -(a)s, elements which do not otherwise appear in Kanashi or Kinnauri, nor in the IA donor languages (chapter 6); and both languages have a valency changing mechanism where the valency increasing marker -jaː alternates with the intransitive marker -e(d) in borrowed IA verbs (again: elements without an obvious provenance in the donor or recipient language) (chapter 7). These features are neither found in IA languages nor in the WH languages geographically closest to Kanashi (Pattani, Bunan, Tinani), but only in Kinnauri, which is spoken further away. Intriguingly, traces of some of these features are also found in some ST languages belonging to different ST subgroups (both WH and non-WH), spoken in Uttarakhand in India and in western Nepal (e.g. Rongpo, Chaudangsi, Raji and Raute). This raises fundamental questions regarding genealogical classification, language contact and prehistory of the WH group of languages and of this part of the Indian Himalayas, which are also discussed in the volume (chapter 8).

Table of Contents

Frontmatter -- Contents -- Acknowledgements -- Abbreviations -- Synchrony: description -- 1 Introduction: Kanashi, its speakers, its linguistic and extralinguistic context -- 2 The sound system of Kanashi -- 3 A linguistic sketch of Kanashi -- Synchrony: variation -- 4 Linguistic variation: a challenge for describing the phonology of Kanashi -- 5 And then there was one: Kanashi numerals from borrowed superdiversity to borrowed uniformity -- Diachrony -- 6 Clues to Kanashi prehistory 1: loanword adaptation in nouns and adjectives -- 7 Clues to Kanashi prehistory 2: loanword adaptation in verbs -- Synthesis -- 8 Kanashi and West Himalayish: genealogy, language contact, prehistoric migrations -- Kanashi basic vocabulary -- 9 Kanashi basic vocabulary -- Subject and language index.