Burushaski
Burushaski is a language isolate, spoken by the Burusho people, who predominantly reside in northern Gilgit-Baltistan, Pakistan. There are also a few hundred speakers of this language in northern Jammu and Kashmir, India.
In Pakistan, Burushaski is spoken by the people of the Hunza District, the Nagar District, the northern Gilgit District, the Yasin Valley in the Gupis-Yasin District, and the Ishkoman Valley of the northern Ghizer District. Their native region is in northern Gilgit–Baltistan. It also borders the Pamir corridor to the north. In India, Burushaski is spoken in Botraj Mohalla of the Hari Parbat region in Srinagar. It is generally believed that the language was spoken in a much wider area in the past, due to the two disconnected regions in which it is spoken currently, which are separated by more easily traversible regions of the Hunza Valley where the Indo-Aryan Shina language is spoken. It is also known as Werchikwar and Miśa:ski.
Classification
Attempts have been made to establish links between Burushaski and several different language families, although none has been accepted by a majority of linguists.Some hypotheses posit a genealogical relationship between Burushaski and the North Caucasian languages, Kartvelian languages, Yeniseian languages and/or Indo-European languages, usually in proposed macrofamilies:
- The proposed but contended "Dené–Caucasian" macrofamily includes Burushaski alongside Basque, North Caucasian, Yeniseian, Sino-Tibetan and Na-Dené.
- Another proposed family, known as "Karasuk", links Burushaski with Yeniseian.
- A relationship to the proposed "Indo-Hittite clade" of the Indo-European family and ancient Phrygian has been suggested by Eric P. Hamp and. The various proposals linking Burushaski to Indo-European make divergent—or in the case of Čašule even contradictory—claims about the nature of the relationship, and are rejected by mainstream scholarship.
- A possible connection specifically to the North Caucasian languages.
Language contact
Following Berger, the American Heritage dictionaries suggested that the word *abel 'apple', the only name for a fruit reconstructed for Proto-Indo-European, may have been borrowed from a language ancestral to Burushaski.
Kashmiri linguist Sadaf Munshi stated that Burushaski may have developed alongside the Dravidian languages before the Indo-Aryan migration to South Asia, mentioning the fact that both possess retroflex sounds.
Varieties
Burushaski is spoken by about 120,000 speakers in Pakistan, and also by a few hundred in India. In Pakistan, it is spoken in three main valleys: Yasin, Hunza, and Nagar. The varieties of Hunza and Nagar diverge slightly, but are clearly dialects of a single language. The Yasin variety, also known by the Khowar exonym Werchikwar, is much more divergent. Intelligibility between Yasin and Hunza-Nagar is difficult, and Yasin is sometimes considered a distinct language and thought to be the "pure" or "original" Burushaski by the speakers of Yasin valley itself. Yasin is the least affected by contact with neighboring languages, though speakers are bilingual in Khowar. Yasin is spoken by a quarter of Burushaski speakers.In India, Jammu & Kashmir Burushaski "has developed divergent linguistic features which make it systematically different from the varieties spoken in Pakistan." The dialect of Burushashki spoken in India has been influenced by Kashmiri, as well as Hindi and Urdu. Unique to JKB are the features of vowel syncopation. Jammu & Kashmir Burushaski shares more similarities with the dialect spoken in Nagar than with that spoken in Hunza. The Srinagar variety of Burushaski has been described as "low toned" and as heavily influenced by other Kashmiri languages. The Srinagar variety of Burushaski has only 300 speakers.
Phonology
Vowels
Burushaski primarily has five vowels,. There are two sets of long vowels, distinguished by whether it is the first or the second mora that bears a stress or higher pitch. Various contractions result in long vowels; stressed vowels tend to be longer and less "lax" than unstressed ones. Some have described this as an intentional utterance of a rising tone or a falling tone. For example, a word 'I made them say' has a falling tone and the stress is on first mora. Another word, 'I did not say' has a rising tone and stress is on the second mora.Long vowels only ever appear in stressed syllables, and will thus carry one tone or the other.
As for short vowels, mid vowels and open vowels,, can appear in either stressed syllables or unstressed syllables. Short close vowels and usually only appear in unstressed syllables. Furthermore, the pair and alternate with and respectively in a stressed syllable.
| Front | Central | Back | |
| Close | |||
| Mid | |||
| Open |
All vowels have nasal counterparts in Hunza and in Nager.
Consonants
Berger finds the following consonants to be phonemic, shown below in the IPA and in his romanization scheme:Notes:
Writing system
Modern evolution
Burushaski is predominantly a spoken rather than a written language. One of the earliest examples of modern Burushaski literature was the poetry written by Prof. Allamah Nasiruddin Nasir Hunzai in the 1940s. He began by using the Urdu alphabet to write the language, but soon realized that Urdu script was not adequate to the task, since it lacked the necessary letters to represent certain phonemes unique to Burushaski. This led him to undertake the task of devising a standardised Urdu-derived alphabet geared specifically to the accurate transcription of the Burushaski language. To this end, he went on to create the new consonants ݼ , څ , ڎ , ݽ , ڞ , and ݣ . Furthermore, innovative writers of Burushaski began to use superscript Urdu numbers to indicate different stress patterns, tones and vowel-lengths. For example, in Burushaski, the letter ـو represents a long vowel with a falling tone, "óo". The letter ـݸ represents a short vowel "o", and the letter ـݹ represents a long vowel with a rising tone, "oó".Parallel to this, a Latin-derived orthography was created by Hermann Berger - a system which has found favour among many researchers and linguists. The "Burushaski Research Academy" currently recognises both the Urdu-based and the Latin-based orthography.
In the years, 2006, 2009, and 2013, a 3-volume Burushaski-Urdu Dictionary was compiled in a collaboration between the "Burushaski Research Academy" and the University of Karachi, under the auspices of Prof. Allamah Nasiruddin Nasir Hunzai and published by the university's "Bureau of Composition, Compilation & Translation". This dictionary uses primarily the Urdu-derived alphabet, while employing Berger's Latin alphabet-derived orthography in a supplementary capacity.
History
an sources record a Bru zha language of the Gilgit valley, which appears to have been Burushaski and the script of which was one of five used also to write the extinct Zhangzhung language. Although Burushaski may once have been a significant literary language, no Bru zha manuscripts are known to have survived. There is a very voluminous Buddhist tantra of the 'Ancient' school of Tibetan Buddhism, preserved in Tibetan as the mDo dgongs 'dus, which has been the subject of numerous Tibetological publications, including a recent monograph by Jacob P. Dalton, The Gathering of Intentions, which is supposed to be translated from the Burushaski. It contains words that are not Sanskrit but which have not, thus far, been demonstrated satisfactorily to be relatable either to Burushaski, or to any other language. If at least part of this text had actually been translated from Burushaski, it would make it one of the major monuments of an apparently lost literature.Alphabet
Below table shows the standardized orthography used in University of Karachi-published Burushaski-Urdu Dictionary.In addition, linguists working on Burushaski use various makeshift transcriptions based on the Latin alphabet, most commonly that by Berger, in their publications.
Aspirates
Below table shows the digraphs, a combination of a consonant with the letter round he that represent aspirated consonants that occur in Burushaski.| Digraph | Transcription | IPA |
| ph | ||
| th | ||
| ṭh | ||
| ćh | ||
| kh |
Vowels
Below tables show how vowels are written in different parts of the word.Sample text
Below poetry, written in praise of University of Karachi for its role in documentation and preservation of Burushaski language and literature, is presented as a sample text in Burushaski Arabic alphabet, alongside Urdu and English translation of each verse.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. 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, báalt means 'apple' but when uncountable, it means 'apple tree'.
Noun morphology consists of the noun stem, a possessive prefix, 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 and unaccusatives mark both the subject and the object of a clause, while unergatives verbs mark only subject agreement on the verb. Altogether, a verb can take up to four prefixes and six suffixes.