QUESTION
What can we learn from languages which are isolates and/or outliers? For example, language isolates (and their pattern of distribution worldwide) may help us to answer questions concerning such topics as:
·ð T h e e v o l u t i o n o f h u m a n l a n g u a g e s
·ð L a n g u a g e c o n t a c t b o t h s p e c i f i c p a t t e r n s o f c o n t a c t a n d h o w c o n t a c t – i n d u c e d c h a n g e w o r k s g e n e r a l l y
·ð L a n g u a g e t y p o l o g i e s w h i c h a l w a y s s h o w a p a t t e r n o f c l u s t e r i n g , p l u s o u t l i e r s
·ð T h e o r i e s o f h u m a n l a n g u a g e g e n e r a l l y ( w h a t i s a p o s s i b l e h u m a n l a n g u a g e ? ) o r o f p a r t i c u l a r a s p e c t s o f g r a m m a r ( w h a t i s a p o s s i b l e c o n s t i t u e n t o r d e r ? )
Y o u r t a s k o v e r a l l i s t o i d e n t i f y a l a n g u a g e w h i c h m e e t s t h e d e f i n i t i o n o f l a n g u a g e i s o l a t e ( a n d / o r , w h i c h c a n b e c o n s i d e r e d a t y p o l o g i c a l o u t l i e r ) , a n d u s e i t t o p r o v i d e a c o m m e n t o n t h i s q u e s t i o n .
·ð S t a r t b y b r i e f l y d e f i n i n g w h a t y o u t a k e a l a n g u a g e i s o l a t e t o b e .
·ð G i v e s o m e b r i e f b a c k g r o u n d o n t h e l a n g u a g e y o u a r e f o c u s i n g o n , i n c l u d i n g w h a t e v i d e n c e p e o p l e h a v e u s e d t o a r g u e f o r i t b e i n g a n i s o l a t e ( o r a n o u t l i e r ) .
·ð T h e n d i s c u s s i t s p o t e n t i a l i m p o r t w i t h r e s p e c t t o o u r u n d e r s t a n d i n g o f h u m a n l a n g u a g e g e n e r a l l y y o u w o u l d n o r m a l l y f o c u s o n a t l e a s t o n e o f t h e a b o v e s u b t o p i c s . I s t h e r e a n y t h i n g s a i d t o b e u n i q u e a b o u t t h e l a n g u a g e which gives us new insights into the nature of human language, or which challenges existing ideas about language and grammar at any level (phonetics, morphology, syntax, semantics, pragmatics)? Take a critical approach!
SOLUTION
Ever since the evolution of Man, it has been his innate quality to learn, evolve further and communicate his desires to his fellow beings. This only goes on to prove that Man through the ages is the only living being capable of communicating coherently as an individual and in groups. Over the centuries the Human language has developed into a highly elaborate and arbitrary system of speech sounds, signals and written structures. Human language is a highly developed and elaborate system of speech sounds and signaling. The arbitrariness and dual patterning of this system has made it unique and also peculiar, attributing to the design features of human language.
Originally each language started out as a unique linguistic structures called isolates; until they started borrowing and evolved as new and more acceptable forms of linguistic structures. Hence, in this paper we will study one such linguistic isolate known as Kusunda and discuss on the various unique aspects of its structural formations.
2. Introduction
A language isolate is a linguistic family which is original and has not been derived from any ancestral language and neither has any descendant language originating from it. Hence, an isolate is a unique language with its own structural code and usage. The most famous among these language structures are the Basque, Ainu, Dravidian, Burushaski, Kusunda, and others.
There are an approximately 129 isolate languages, which make up one third of the prevailing language families in the world (Campbell, 1997). However, the isolates are not a part of unclassified languages which are unclassified due to the insufficiency of data; they are just unique for not having any ancestral link to any language but have sufficient evidence to prove and validate their existence based on the internal reconstruction, philogical evidence, comparative structures based on dialects, morphology and syntax (Campbell and Poser, 2008).
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Socio-linguists and anthropologists were aware of a few uninterpretable texts dating back to 1850’s and 1970’s, belonging to a particular language being spoken in the Himalayan region of Nepal. It was in 2004, that a complete study of the language was carried out and it was recognized as a language isolate.
The Kusunda population also known as ‘Ban Rajas’ or ‘Kings of the forests’ of central Nepal is an ancient relic tribe of short stature and dark complexion who are semi- nomadic hunter gatherers, dwelling in jungles and forests (Vandriem, 2001). Researches indicate that Kusunda language belongs to the Indo-Pacific family located on and around New Guinea islands. It is therefore a possible remnant migratory language which fore calls both linguistic as well as genetic investigation and perspective.
Kusunda first emerged in the ethnographic literature in 1848 as one of the ‘broken tribes’ disconnected with the civilized race and portrayed an ancient cultural fragmentation (Hodgson,1848).Almost a century later (Reinhard and Toba, 1976) closely examined the language and published an article describing briefly the language, its source and the data related to Kusunda.
3. Linguistic History
The Kusunda language is a remarkable example of a linguistic isolate which has persisted despite numerous predictions for it to get extinct. Though often misclassified as a Tibeto-Burman language on the basis of certain typological correspondences (Grierson, 1909), it has now been exclusively classified as an isolate belonging to the Indo-Pacific family of languages which historically covered a vast expanse from Andaman Islands in the Indian Ocean to the Solomon Islands in the Pacific. However, there are speculations possibly connecting Kusunda to Munda and even Nihali which are language isolates of west- central India (Flemming 1996,
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Whitehouse1997) and even the Burushaski of the Caucasus (Reinhard and Toba, 1970).
There are reports which suggest that Kusunda was an abusive term for the Rajput tribes in Nepal who behaved rudely with the public and did not follow any laws or rules of the dominion (Turner, 1931).
The National Foundation for the Development of Indigenous Nationalities (NFDIN) and its sister organizations for the first time introduced a number of these Kusunda inhabitants to the world in order to carry out intensive linguistic research (Rana, 2004). They carried out an elaborate socio-linguistic and anthropological profile which estimated a Kusunda population of 164 out of which 87 spoke the Kusunda dialect (His Majesty, 2002).
The findings further generated a similarity between several words of Tibeto-Burman origins, which were further negated based on the data collected pertaining to a vast majority of lexical terminology which showed no resemblance to any other language in the adjoining regions like the Kham, Magar or Chepang (Bista,1967). Further borrowings were also disregarded which could have been adopted through inter-regional marriages based on the fact that the Kusundas practice Matrilateral cross-cousin marriage (Ross, 1982).
4. Linguistic Analysis
The status of Kusunda is a difficult task to determine, however whatever borrowing the language displays is a recent development due to the current contact with surrounding languages; but it still remains distinctly a typological isolate in terms of grammar, phonology and lexicons (Waters et.al. 2005).
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Phonologically, Kusunda has acquired sounds which are uvular and pharyngealized consonants and an active articulator which are contrastive and unique to this language only. The voicing contrast in this language is counterbalanced by lesser functional consonants as primary auditory incentives denoting their presence.
The Kusunda has a partial set of harmonic vowels and very vivid bilabial, dental, alveolar, palatal, retroflexed, velar, uvular, pharyngeal and glottal consonant sounds. The morpho-phonological processes are quite apparent in Kusunda and are often represented of a single morphological structure in different contexts.
There are very limited cases marking affixes, but they do occur as distinguished morphemes pin various grammatical structures. Even the syntaxes are used in specialized pragmatic notions which often delete the subject noun pronoun markers in running discourse. The verbs are also categorized as non-inflecting based on the auxiliary verb ‘to make’,’ to do’. The derivational operations for intransitive verbs are converted into transitive verbs and vice versa .Even the verb subordination occurs in clauses, verbal felicitation, periphrastic causatives and applications.
The extraordinary aspect of Kusunda phonology (Balaram, 2005) is defined by its unusual typological norms which bear little resemblance to any typical South Asian, Nepali, Tibeto- Burman or even Indo-Aryan languages. The sound strings present in Kusunda depict extreme sound strings. The speech is compressed into very short and highly assimilated speech.
Kusunda also exhibits numerous vocalic sequences which move in vowel space of one periphery to another and also those that move in and out of the peripheral circumference.
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5. Conclusion
The Kusunda language is one of the few original linguistic isolates which has survived the test of time and has continuously maintained its unique sound system only due to the aloofness of the society it is practiced in. Recent study however show that in recent times, Kusunda has started gaining non-native features due to the inter socio-lingual familiarity.
6. References
Balaram, P. (2005) Notes on Kusunda grammar. Kathmandu: National
Foundation for the Development of Indigenous Nationalities.
Bista, D. B. (1967) People of Nepal. Kathmandu: Ratna Pustak Bhandar.
Caughley,
Campbell, L. (2007) How Many Language Families are there in the World, Really?
Paper presented at the International Conference on Historical Linguistics,
Aug 6-12, 2007, University of Quebec, Montreal.
DeLancey, S. (1984) Etymological notes on Tibeto-Burman case particles.
Linguistics of the Tibeto-Burman Area 8.1:59-77.
Fleming, H. C. (1996) Looking to the West and North: Nihali and Kusunda find
links. Mother Tongue 2:67–74.
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Grierson, G. A. (1909) (Reprinted 1967) Tibeto-Burman family, Tibetan dialects,
the Himalayan dialects and the North Assam groups. Delhi: Motilal Banasidass.
Linguistic survey of India, Vol III, Part I.
His Majesty’s Government of Nepal. (2002) Population census 2001. National Report.
Hodgson, B. H. (1848) On the Chepang and Kusunda tribes of Nepal. Journal
180of the Asiatic Society of Bengal XVII (2): 650–658.Himalayan Linguistics: Archive No. 3
Hodgson, B. H. (1857) Comparative vocabulary of the languages of the broken
tribes of Nepal. Journal of the Asiatic Society of Bengal XXVI: 317–371.
Hodgson, B. H. (1874) Essays on the languages, literature, and religion of Nepal
and Tibet. London: Trubner and Co.
Ross, C. (1982) The syntax and morphology of the verb in Chepang.
Canberra: The Australia National University [Pacific Linguistics, Series B, 84].
Van Driem, G. (2001) Languages of the Himalayas: an ethnolinguistic handbook of the Greater Himalayan region. Leiden: Brill.
Whitehouse, P. (1997) The external relationships of the Nihali and Kusunda
languages. Mother Tongue 3:4-49.
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