LANGUAGE ISOLATES

A Study of the Voice System in Burushaski From the Perspective of a Native Speaker of the Hunza Dialect Piar Karim University of North Texas This study is about voice system in Burushaski, focusing especially on the middle voice (MV) construction. It claims that the [dd-] verbal prefix is an overt morphological middle marker for MV constructions, while the [n-] verbal prefix is a morphological marker for passive voice. The data primarily come from the Hunza dialect of Burushaski, but analogous phenomena can be observed in other dialects. This research is based on a corpus of 120 dd-prefix verbs. This research has shown that position {-2} on the verb template is occupied by voice-marker in Burushaski. The author argues that the middle marker is a semantic category of its own and that it is clearly distinguished from the reflexive marker in this language. The analysis of the phenomenon in this study only comes from the dialect of Hunza Burushaski, so a lot of research remains to be done on the other three dialects of Burushaski: Yasin dialect, Nagar dialect and Srinagar dialect. ISBN 9783862889419 (Hardbound). LINCOM Studies in Asian Linguistics 89. 114pp. 2019. Urarina Texts Knut J. Olawsky Research Centre for Linguistic Typology, La Trobe University Urarina is a language isolate spoken by approximately 3000 people who live scattered in the Rio Chambira area of Loreto in the Peruvian rainforest. While the majority of Urarina speakers are monolingual, socio-economic changes have already lead to loss of certain cultural knowledge, including the capacity of story telling. This text collection intends to preserve the records of history from the Urarina perspective. Although very little is known about neighbouring ethnic groups (most of which are extinct), lexical and grammatical aspects indicate that the Urarina language is not genetically related to any of the tongues of the Rio Chambira or nearby areas. Therefore, it is still unclear from where the Urarinas may have descended. However, the content of the stories presented in this book may help to relate the way Urarinas view the world to that of other groups. For example, many cultures of Amazonia know a story of a flood in some way similar to the biblical account. Interestingly, the Urarinas recognize two quite different versions of a flood tale, which are both presented in this book. A short introduction to the cultural context offered in this collection helps to understand the way of living of the Urarinas. The sentences of each text include grammatical information in form of an interlinearised translation and a free translation. All data is based on recent fieldwork undertaken by the author. ISBN 9783895866937. Languages of the World/Text Collections 17. 150pp. 2002. A Student Grammar of Euskara Jon D. Patrick & Ilari Zubiri Ibarrondo This book is a practical handbook of the grammar of the basque language. It is aimed at the first three years of a University basque language curriculum. The book is built on the broad topic categories defined by HABE as important for the first 4 levels of basque language competence. The authors' experience of attending classes at the higher levels of 5- 12 have been drawn on to determine the remaining most common language features that a student will be exposed to in the street, from television programmes, newspapers and radio. Competency in all the contents of the book would ensure a student was at the uppermost end of the scale of 2nd language speaker competency. A unique feature of the text is its explanatory style. Each topic is discussed and then a series of sentence examples in basque are presented along with their english translation. In total there are about 2300 example pairs of sentences in the book. Importantly each example is used to focus on a particular aspect of the language. To aid the student special notes are added to English translations to explain variation in the translation from the literal form. The book also contains a set of Appendices of the auxiliary verb pardigms in a clearest format yet published. Also it contains a set of Appendices of the most common forms of compound and synthetic verbs. Chapters: 1. PHONETICS – FONETIKA. 2. INTRODUCTION TO MORPHOLOGY - MORFOLOGIARI SARRERA. 3. DECLENSION – DEKLINABIDEA. 4. MORPHOLOGY – MORFOLOGIA. 5. THE VERB – ADITZA. 6. SYNTAX – SINTAXIS. 7. NOTIONS / ELEMENTS – NOZIOAK ISBN 9783895864445. LINCOM Student Grammars 01. 460pp. 2002.