#reverse language shift

Kusunda (Kusanda, mihaq) is a language spoken by the Kusunda people in Nepal. It was originally thought to have died in 1985. But 2004, 3 speakers were discovered and most of the documentation we have today results from intense work with them. They belong to the ethnic group of Kusunda or Ban Raja, which is translated as “The Kings of the Forest”. It is an exonym, given by outsiders and not themselves, and it points to the fact that many Kusundas live in the forest. They have no problems with the term “Kusunda” (while in some regions of India it is used as an insult) but they refer to themselves as “mihaq” the peoples. Nowadays, there are only 160 ethnic Kusundas left. Of the 3 remaining speakers, none is monolingual, all of them also use Nepali. They all married outside their ethnic group and no child is raised in this language anymore, making Kusunda a moribund language. While most speakers vary widely in their fluency, Gyani Maiyi Sen is the most famous speaker and the most fluent if not only native one, she often gets referred to as the last speaker. (She is depicted in this video.)

The interesting thing about Kusunda is, while earlier researchers thought of it as a Tibeto-Burman variety, it is now evident that it is a language isolate, thus, not related to any other known language. It is probably the last remnant of languages that were spoken before the Tibeto-Burman and Indo-Iranian languages came to that region and it is not related to the Munda or Dravidian languages. The groundwork was laid by David Watters 2005 when he published the workings from the intense working with the three remaining speakers in a Kusunda grammar, which offers grammatical, typological and vocabulary insights. 

Kusunda Phonology

Kusunda hat some interesting features: - It has six vowels that oppose each other in vowel harmonies, making them phonologically only three phonemes. Normally, only /i, ə, u/ or only /e, a, o/ can be together in one word. Theoretically, one set could be replaced by the other set without changing the meaning. - Kusunda is phonologically very distinct to its surroundings: It has uvular and pharyngealized consonants that don’t appear in neighbouring languages, and while retroflex consonants are prevalent in that region they don’t occur in Kusunda. - While English contrasts sounds by the place of articulation and the articulator, in Kusunda, mostly only the active articulator is of importance. So, it wouldn’t matter where the tip of the tongue (apical consonants) produces a sound, but only that it is done by it. Throughout the words, one would find apical consonants that are dental, alveolar, retroflex and palatal without changing the meaning. Even voicing, like the difference between /p/ and /b/, seems to play a minor role, as does aspiration, and many sounds can be stops here and fricatives there.

Kusunda Grammar

Very strikingly and highly unique among the world’s languages is the way Kusunda distinguishes between marked and unmarked structures. Irrealis would be a marked feature in comparison to the unmarked realis, same goes for negativity versus affirmation and other features. Normally, languages would make use of affixes or other means to denote these structures. Kusunda however, deploys a harmonic autosegmental process (often called mutation) that applies to the whole word. An apical consonant would then shift to a laminal consonant, a velar consonant to a uvular one and the first set of vowels would change to the second one, in order to mark the irrealis in contrast to the realis of the negativity in contrast to the affirmative modus. Here is an example: If you say “I go” you would apply the realis because it is present time. The form would be /ts-əg-ən/, but if you want to say “I will go” you have to use the irrealis and thus change the consonants’ articulator: /tʃ-aɢʕ-an/ - as you see, the velar /g/ of the root becomes uvular /ɢʕ/ (among the other changes) and is thus marking the irrealis by mutation.

Verbs are roughly divided into two groups. Class I gets personal prefixes and numeral suffixes: First persons are indicated by /t-/ or /ts-/, second persons by /n-/ and the third persons by /g-/ or others. The singular is indicated by the suffix /-Vn/ (V stands for a vowel) and the plural by the suffix /-da-/ that comes directly after the root and is followed by /-n/. So, you can distinguish “I eat” (t-əm-ən) from “You eat” (n-əm-ən), or “I eat” (t-əm-ən) from “We eat” (t-əm-da-n). The prefixes also resemble the first consonants of the personal pronouns a lot, which are /tsi/ and /tok/ for the 1. P. Sg. & Pl., /nu/ and /nok/ for the 2. P. Sg. & Pl. and /gina/ for the 3. P. which has no distinction between plural or singular. The verbs from Class I are few in number and highly irregular.

Most verbs are in Class II, which differ in a lot of features from Class I verbs. If the verb is transitive, the conjugated forms of “I made, we made, you made, etc.” come after the verb root. So, if you want to put the verb “to buy” /dza/ in the first person singular you add /a-t-n̩/  which simply means “I made” > dza-a-t-n̩ (I made buying). If the verb is intransitive, you simply add the personal pronoun after the root and add a /-n/. From “to enter” /sip/ you would simply come to “I enter” by adding /tsi/ and /-n/ > /sip-tsi-n/. 

That is just a peek into the grammar, there are a lot of very interesting and unique features that Kusunda has to offer and it is definitely worth a further look into the grammar David Watters wrote.

Kusunda Phrases

The Australian National University in Canberra has some very good resources on Kusunda on their website. If you want to hear the sound files to the following phrases or other sentences or even texts, visit this website. 

Sodzaq! - Greetings! (hello or goodbye) Tsi gidzi Gyani Maiya - My name is Gyani Maiya Tsi tugun - I've come (I'm here) Nəti? - Who (is it)? Nu wee? - Are you well? Nətn nitn? - What did you say? Hampena nugun? - Where have you come from? Ni whi hampe? - Where is your house? Tsi whi Kulmor - My house is in Kulmore Garaw əni - It's hot Idang ugun - I'm hungry Pəwhəiran əni - I'm tired Aw təgəi! - Let's go! Hana nyhaan? - Where are you going? Kafera muitsidaq - We'll meet again 

Gyani Maiya’s words about the language loss: Ta gepən mi: əndzi - This language is going to be lost. Nətima gepən ədu - There is none to talk with. Mjaqa tsi toqdu ta qau nətn ba - I am alone and if I died, then there is nothing. Ləmbə ədi ta nəti ləmbə əgəndzi - Though I am ready to teach, is there anyone to learn? Toqdu bela ənin jiodze gepən əgu ta ləmbə əgu ta we: da - It would be better if they learnt since I am very old now.

Kusunda sources

See for further linguistic material the link to Glottolog and check the links under the Wikipedia article or the Links page of the ANU Kusunda Linguistics article.

Manchu (ᠮᠠᠨᠵᡠ ᡤᡳᠰᡠᠨ manju gisun) is a language of the Tungusic language family that consists of twelve relatively closely related language. It belongs to the southwestern branch together with the Xibe language and the Jurchen language which was the predecessor of the Manchu language when in 1635 Hong Taiji renamed the Jurchen people and their language to “Manchu”. The Xibe language is often considered a dialect of Manchu and has 30.000 speakers. The Manchu itself is a highly endangered language and has only 10 speakers left, according to the UNESCO, while there are 10.7 million ethnic Manchu people that speak mostly Mandarin Chinese now.

Manchu is of high historical value, it was one of the official languages of the Qing dynasty and still offers a lot of information that is not available in Chinese. But it was replaced more and more by Mandarin due to the increasing sinicisation of Qing officials. It was/is spoken in Manchuria in Northeast Asia.

Manchu is an agglutinative language and has a limited vowel harmony. It is written in the Manchu alphabet that derives from the Mongolian script and is written vertically, digitally it is often displayed horizontally, however.

Some scholars assume that Manchu and, thus, the Tungusic languages belong to the Altaic language family, but the Altaic family is probably rather a group of languages that have similarity to each other due to language contact and constitute a sprachbund rather than having a genetic history. Manchu resembles Korean and Mongolian in many grammar features.

Manchu grammar

Syntax

Manchu is strictly head-final, meaning that every phrase in a sentence has its head in final position resulting in a subject-object-verb (SOV) word order. In English this would look like this:

Adjectives are part of a noun phrase, so the noun is the head and comes at the end and the adjective precedes it, like in English: (the) beautiful flower.

In an adjective phrase there can occur adverbs, which precede the adjective, because the adjective is the head, like in English: very good.

The object is a part of the verb phrase, the verb is the head, and comes at the end, the object in front of it: (I) the book read. (Unlike English)

Here is a Manchu example, taken from Wikipedia (Manchu > interlinear translation > English):

bi  tere    niyalma+i    emgi  gene+he I    that  person+GEN   with   go+PAST I went with that person.

You can see that in the verb phrase “went with that person” the verb comes at the end, in the prepositional phrase “with that person” the preposition comes at the end of the phrase and in the noun phrase “that person” the noun comes at the last position. (The preposition “emgi” requires the genitive case.)

Manchu also has a lot of converbal structures. A converb is a form of a verb that is non-finite, like an infinitive, so it is not governed by a subject. In Manchu they are used to combine a subordinate clause and a following finite verb, which can be often translated with English “-ing” forms.

Here we have two finite sentences: (ABL=Ablative: out of/from)

tere   sargan    boo     ci         tuci+ke that   woman   house  ABL   go.out+PAST.FINITE That woman came out of the house.

tere   sargan  hoton   de     gene+he that    woman  town   DAT  go+PAST.FINITE That woman went to town.

In the first sentence, we have the verb stem tuci+ and now we can add converb endings to this stem, for example these meanings: +fi - past.converb; +me - imperfect.converb; +cibe - concessive.converb

We can then place the clause with the converb in front of another clause with a finite verb and get the following structure describing the circumstances:

tere sargan boo ci tuci+fi, hoton de gene+he. That woman, having come out of the house, went to town.

tere sargan boo ci tuci+me, hoton de gene+he That woman, coming out of the house, went to town.

tere sargan boo ci tuci+cibe, hoton de gene+he That woman, though she came out of the house, went to town.

Manchu cases

Manchu has five cases, expressed by particles, that follow the noun and are not affected by vowel harmony.

The nominative has no marking. Sargan tuci+ke. - (The) woman went out (of something). 

The accusative is marked by be or stays unmarked. I boo be weile+mbi. - He builds a house. (It is used to indicate the direct object of a verb.)

The genitive is marked by i or ni. han i jui - khan’s wife, boo i ejen - the house’s master/master of the house (It is used to indicate possession/the possessor.)

The dative is marked by de. I boo be ere niyalma de bu-mbi. - He gives a book to this man. (It is used to indicate the location in time or space or an indirect object/recipient.)

The ablative is marked by ci and in Classical manchu by deri. I boo ci tuci+ke. - He went away from/out of the house. (It is used to indicate the origin of an action and for comparions.)

There are also plenty of other endings and particles that could be interpreted as case markings. 

Baniha, sirame achaki - Thank you, goodbye

Further reading

Today, the world celebrates the International Mother Language Day where we honour cultural diversity and multilingualism. It was pronounced in the year 2000 by the UNESCO and goes back to the Bengali Language Movement Day when on the 21th February 1952 several Bengali protestors were killed by the police while protesting for the recognition of their language in East Pakistan.

This day stands for peace and for linguistic diversity and especially puts minority languages into focus. So, by spreading this message, I want to encourage you: