On the clause patterns of Sherpa and Jirel, Tibeto-Burman languages spoken in Nepal.

Among Asian languages, Tibetan is second only to Chinese in the depth of its historical record, with texts dating back as far as the eighth and ninth centuries, written in an alphabetic script that preserves the contemporaneous phonological features of the language. The Classical Tibetan Language is the first comprehensive description of the Tibetan language and is distinctive in that it treats the classical Tibetan language on its own terms rather than by means of descriptive categories appropriate to other languages, as has traditionally been the case. Beyer presents the language as a medium of literary expression with great range, power, subtlety, and humor, not as an abstract object. He also deals comprehensively with a wide variety of linguistic phenomena as they are actually encountered in the classical texts, with numerous examples of idioms, common locutions, translation devices, neologisms, and dialectal variations.

This edited volume brings together work on the evidential systems of Tibetan languages. This includes diachronic research, synchronic description of systems in individual Tibetan varieties and papers addressing broader theoretical or typological questions. Evidentiality in Tibetan languages interacts with other features of modality, interactional context and speaker knowledge states in ways that provide important perspectives for typologists and our general understanding of evidential systems. This book provides the first sustained attempt to capture this complexity and diversity from both a synchronic and diachronic perspective.

The Tibetan language comprises a wide range of spoken and written varieties whose known history dates from the 7th century AD to the present day. Its speakers inhabit a vast area in Central Asia and the Himalayas extending into seven modern nation states, while its abundant literature includes much of vital importance to the study of Buddhism. After surveying all the known varieties of Tibetan, including their geographical and historical background, this book concentrates on a phonological and grammatical description of the modern spoken Lhasa dialect, the standard spoken variety. The grammatical framework which has been specially devised to describe this variety is then applied to the written varieties of Preclassical and Classical Tibetan, demonstrating the fundamental unity of the language. The writing system is outlined, though all examples and texts are given in roman script and where appropriate, the International Phonetic Alphabet. The volume includes a comprehensive bibliography.

Egophoricity refers to the grammaticalised encoding of personal knowledge or involvement of a conscious self in a represented event or situation. Most typically, a marker that is egophoric is found with first person subjects in declarative sentences and with second person subjects in interrogative sentences. This person sensitivity reflects the fact that speakers generally know most about their own affairs, while in questions this epistemic authority typically shifts to the addressee. First described for Tibeto-Burman languages, egophoric-like patterns have now been documented in a number of other regions around the world, including languages of Western China, the Andean region of South America, the Caucasus, Papua New Guinea, and elsewhere. This book is a first attempt to place detailed descriptions of this understudied grammatical category side by side and to add to the cross-linguistic picture of how ideas of self and other are encoded and projected in language. The diverse but conceptually related egophoric phenomena described in its chapters provide fascinating case studies for how structural patterns in morphosyntax are forged under intersubjective, interactional pressures as we link elements of our speech to our speech situation.

In the past 20 years, Christians around the world have launched initiatives to reach Muslims, Communists, Hindus and other major unreached people groups but the Buddhist world has largely been overlooked. Hundreds of millions of Buddhists continue to live and die without any exposure to the Gospel. In Peoples of the Buddhist World, researcher and author Paul Hattaway graphically presents prayer profiles of more than 200 Buddhist people groups around the world, beautifully illustrated with color pictures throughout. In addition, experts have contributed articles on various aspects of Buddhism, helping the reader to learn, pray and work until that day when "the kingdom of the world has become the kingdom of our Lord and of his Christ and he will reign for ever and ever" (Rev. 11:15).--From publisher's description.

First published in 2002, this is a comprehensive grammatical documentation of Kham, a previously undescribed language from west-central Nepal, belonging to the Tibeto-Burman language family. The language contains a number of grammatical systems that are of immediate relevance to current work on linguistic theory, including split ergativity, a mirative system, and a rich class of derived adjectivals. Its verb morphology has implications for the understanding of the history of the entire Tibeto-Burman family. The book, based on extensive fieldwork, deals with all major aspects of the language including segmental phonology, tone, word classes, noun phrases, nominalizations, transitivity alterations, tense-aspect-modality, non-declarative speech acts, and complex sentence structure. It provides copious examples throughout the exposition and includes three short native texts and a vocabulary of more than 400 words, many of them reconstructed for Proto-Kham and Proto-Tibeto-Burman.

This book is a Festschrift volume dedicated to Emeritus Professor Nicholas C. Bodman, by his students, colleagues and friends and consists of a selection of contributions that match his interests in the descriptive, historical and comparative study of Chinese dialects (especially Min dialects) and the fields of Tibeto-Burman and Sino-Tibetan linguistics. The book is organized into sections: 1) General Compilation and Analysis (with articles by J.A. Matisov and M.J. Hashimoto), 2) Southeast Asian Languages (E.J.A. Henderson, R.B. Jones, W.J. Gedney, S. Egerod and M. Sherard), 3) Early Recorded Forms of Chinese (P. L-M Serruys, W.H. Baxter III, W. South Coblin and E.G. Pulleyblank), 4) Early Reconstructed Forms of Chinese (J. McCoy, J. Norman and K. Chang), 5) Modern Chinese Dialects (Y.C. Li, T. Light and A.R. Walton). These contributions by foremost scholars are significant. They throw new light and supply important new data on the linguistics of the Tibeto-Burman and Sino-Tibetan fields.

This landmark dictionary serves as a basis for historical-comparative research on Tibetan. Conceptualized empirically and etymologically, it builds on extensive data from the Tibetan dialects and establishes the relationship to Written Tibetan. It reflects historical sound change and semantic change in all of linguistic Tibet. Based on historical sound change and geographical distribution, the dictionary applies a new classification of the Tibetan dialects.