Dissertation
A Grammar of Sunwar. Descriptive Grammar, Paradigms, Texts and Glossary
This grammar provides a description of Sunwar, a Tibeto-Burman language spoken in eastern Nepal, based on data collected during twelve months of field work.
- Author
- Dörte Borchers
- Date
- 30 October 2007
- Links
- Full text in Leiden University Repository
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.
Two of the new discoveries depicted in this grammar pertain to the phonology and to the verbal morphology.
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..
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.