West Himalayish languages

The West Himalayish languages, also known as Almora and Kanauric, are a family of Sino-Tibetan languages centered in Himachal Pradesh, Uttarakhand and across the border into Nepal. LaPolla (2003) proposes that the West Himalayish languages may be part of a larger "Rung" group.

West Himalayish
Kanauric, Almora
Geographic
distribution		Himachal Pradesh, Uttarakhand (India), Nepal
Linguistic classificationSino-Tibetan
Glottologtibe1275[1]

Languages

The languages include:

Zhangzhung, the sacred language of the Bon religion, was spoken north of the Himalayas across western Tibet before being replaced by Tibetan. James Matisoff (2001)[2] provides lexical and phonological evidence for the classification of Zhangzhung within West Himalayish.

Classification

Widmer (2014:47)[3] classifies the West Himalayish languages as follows. The recently discovered Dhuleli language has been added from Regmi & Prasain (2017).[4]

West Himalayish

Widmer (2014:53-56)[3] classifies Zhangzhung within the Eastern branch of West Himalayish, and notes that it appears particularly close to languages of the Central subgroup (Bunan, Sunnami, and Rongpo).

Widmer (2017)[5] notes that many Tibetan varieties in the western Tibetan Plateau have been influenced by West Himalayish languages.

Vocabulary

Widmer (2017)[5] lists the following lexical items that differ in the Eastern and Western branches of West Himalayish.

Language‘one’‘hand’‘cry’‘black’
Proto-Eastern
West Himalayish		*it*gut*krap-*rok-
Manchaditsagùṛakrap-roki
Kanashiidhguḍkərop-roko
Kinnauri
(Southern)		idgŭd'krap-rŏkh
Proto-Western
West Himalayish		*tik*lak*tjo-*kʰaj/*wom
Bunantikilaktjo-kʰaj
Rongpotiglagtyõ-kʰasyũ
Byangsitigɛlàtye-wamdɛ

Widmer (2014:53-56)[3] classifies Zhangzhung within the eastern branch of West Himalayish, and lists the following cognates between Zhangzhung and Proto-West Himalayish.

GlossZhangzhungProto-West Himalayish
barleyzad*zat
blueting*tiŋ-
diminutive suffix-tse*-tse ~ *-tsi
earra tse*re
fattsʰas*tsʰos
girltsa med*tsamet
godsad*sat
gold ?zang*zaŋ
heartshe*ɕe
old (person)shang ze*ɕ(j)aŋ
redmang*maŋ
whiteshi nom*ɕi

Footnotes
  1. Hammarström, Harald; Forkel, Robert; Haspelmath, Martin, eds. (2017). "West Himalayish". Glottolog 3.0. Jena, Germany: Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History.
  2. Matisoff, James. 2001. "The interest of Zhangzhung for comparative Tibeto-Burman." In New Research on Zhangzhung and Related Himalayan Languages (Bon Studies 3). Senri Ethnological Studies no. 19, p.155-180. Osaka: National Museum of Ethnology 国立民族学博物館. doi:10.15021/00002145
  3. Widmer, Manuel. 2014. "A tentative classification of West Himalayish." In A descriptive grammar of Bunan, 33-56. Ph.D. dissertation, University of Bern.
  4. Regmi, Dan Raj; Prasain, Balaram. 2017. A sociolinguistic survey of Dhuleli. Linguistic Survey of Nepal (LinSuN), Tribhuvan University, Kathmandu, Nepal.
  5. Widmer, Manuel. 2017. The linguistic prehistory of the western Himalayas: endangered minority languages as a window to the past. Presented at Panel on Endangered Languages and Historical Linguistics, 23rd International Conference on Historical Linguistics (ICHL 23), San Antonio, Texas.
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References
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