Rahul Sankrityayan, Tsetan Phuntsog and Tibetan Textbooks for Ladakh in 1933

In 1933 the Indian scholar and social activist Rahul Sankrityayan (1893-1963) compiled a set of four Tibetan-language readers and a grammar for use in Ladakhi schools, together with his Ladakhi colleague Tsetan Phuntsog. The readers contain a mix of material from Western, Indian, Ladakhi and Tibetan sources. This includes simple essays about ‘air’ and ‘water’, selections from Aesop’s fables, Indian folk stories, biographies of famous people in Ladakhi and Tibetan history, poems by Ladakhi authors, and extracts from the Treasury of Elegant Sayings by Sakya Pandita Kunga Gyaltsen (1182-1251). This essay begins with a review of earlier Tibetan-language schoolbooks published in British India, and then discusses the circumstances that led to Sankrityayan’s involvement in the Ladakh project. The second part of the essay examines the contents of the readers and the grammar, including—where possible—the authorship of particular sections. Finally, the essay briefly reviews linguistic developments in Ladakh since the publication of the textbooks

Exploring the focus-morphology interface: morpho-syntactic aspects of non prosodic focus : Selected Proceedings of the 2007 Mid American Linguistics Conference

This paper claims that a constraint-based theory (i.e, OT) can best account for the many manifestations of Focus in typologically diverse languages. We propose an interaction between Discourse Representation Theory (hereafter DRT) (Kamp, 1981; Kamp and Reyle, 1993) and Optimality Theory (OT) (Prince and Smolensky, 1993/2004) to best account for these facts, maintaining that constraint-ranking is the best way to achieve a descriptive and explanatorily adequate analysis of natural data. In particular, we provide a novel sketch of a theoretical account of natural languages that mark Focus morphologically but not prosodicall

Reflections on Hindi and history

textIn this paper, I consider historical periods, linguistic categories, and social theories in relation to Hindi in order to trace out the character and trajectory of the language. From sixteenth-century courtly contexts, to the adoption of the Devanagari script in the twentieth century by nationalists, Hindi has a polyvalent and yet specific history. I discuss these contexts in which social contact led to linguistic change and in which Hindi acquired many of the lexical, syntactical, and phonological characteristics by which it is recognized today. I conclude with a section that considers the motif of language and power, and I suggest that the production of knowledge and power in language use, offers both the means of distinction and expression or, in another sense, of hierarchy and communitas. A thread that runs throughout the paper is attention to the contexts in which language use enables elaboration and in which elaboration is eschewed in order to attain social unity. Pursuing a descriptive historical-linguistic project, I neither affirm nor deny the politics of such language use, but rather I indicate the ways in which actors and agents use Hindi to help articulate their agency.Asian Studie

The SCOTS Corpus: a resource for language contact study

The Scottish Corpus of Texts and Speech (SCOTS) is an ongoing project in the Department of English Language, University of Glasgow. The ultimate aim of the project is to create a large electronic corpus of both written and spoken texts for the languages of Scotland, which will reflect the linguistic situation in current-day Scotland. The corpus will be freely accessible and searchable on the Web. A corpus such as this of course can have any number of applications: in addition to studies of language contact, corpus methodology makes possible various types of self-contained investigation into the lexis, grammar, phraseology, pragmatics etc., of the languages of Scotland. The aim of this paper is to introduce the corpus, and highlight some of its possible applications in the study of language contact. Contact has been historically important for the languages of Scotland, and this is no less true today: I hope therefore to suggest ways in which the resource will be valuable for such research in the very near future

Bilingual Lexicography: Some Issues with Modern English Urdu Lexicography – a User's Perspective

The tradition of bilingual lexicography in the Indian subcontinent is more than two centuries old and goes back to as far as 1772 (Hadley). This article examines the development of bilingual lexicography in the Indian subcontinent with special reference to English-Hindustani or -Urdu dictionary development. It further explores some issues specific to this field and tries to suggest some solutions. First of all it describes the historical perspective of linguistic work in the subcontinent and then discusses issues relating to English-Urdu bilingual lexicography in particular