Central Eurasian Language Grammars First Attempt

<accesscontrol>CELG</accesscontrol> This page is for organising the first release in a potential set of volumes subsumed under the tentative Central Eurasian Language Grammars project.

What this is about

Linguists working with particular theories or typological questions often seek basic facts about some aspect of the grammar of many languages. However, most linguists have little access to information which they might find useful about Central Eurasian languages. Existing grammars, at best, are designed as quick references for reading knowledge for people (philologists, mostly) who may already know a not-distantly-related language. At worst, existing grammars make [lousy] paperweights.

This collection will attempt to provide grammatical sketches of the core languages of modern Central Asia. Its coverage of linguistic topics will not be complete, but it will focus on the most basic and essential elements of the grammar, which are poorly covered elsewhere anyway. These grammars will be written by Linguists who have good knowledge of the language they're describing. One result of this is that outstanding issues in the grammar will be pointed out—that is, topics needing further analysis or which do not lend themselves nicely to analysis within present theoretical models. This furthers the usefulness of the grammars both by being honest about places where our understandings fall short, and by providing research ideas for other linguists.

Who will be involved

Each language's grammar will have one or two authors: a linguist, and a potential native informant.

The volume will have a small team of editors who will communicate with the author(s) of each language's grammar to ensure (primarily) that all topics are well covered.

Ideas for a title

• (JNW) "The core/key languages of Central Asia" ("A reference for the desk or the field")

Okay, here goes again (previous effort to "SAVE PAGE" did not save it):

• (CIB) "The core (? or other word?) languages of Central Asia" (delete parenthetical subtitle "A reference for the desk or the field")

Coverage of Topics

Following is a basic list of topics which should be covered by the grammar of each language:

• An introduction, placing the language socio-politically and historically. (½ page)

I'd say ½ page to 1 page; in C. Eurasia this stuff is really important and most of the info in existing sources is wrong. (CIB)

• An overview of socio-linguistic issues such as dialectal distribution, koineisation, bilingualism (and diglossia), language shift, etc. (½-1 page)
• A reasonably complete account of the phonemic inventory, allophones, etc. (2 pages)

I would make the preceding and the following sections one section, "phonology", with the subsections as given here. (CIB)

• An account of interesting productive or semi-productive phonological processes (like vowel harmony, consonant assimilation, etc.) (2-4 pages)
• A nearly complete survey of the language's morphology, including reference to morpho-phonology and semantics of morphology covered (e.g. the general uses of each case morpheme, tense/mood/aspect/voice of each tense morpheme, etc). These should be covered more from a holistic semantic (top-down) view than from a morpheme-by-morpheme view (bottom-up) (e.g., individual uses of a single morpheme shouldn't be listed, but rather a given use should be included where appropriate). I think. (7-12 pages)
• Accounts of syntactic topics of interest and relevance to Central Asia, such as quotatives, relative clauses, questions, etc. (3-5 pages)

And stuff that 'does not exist', such as subjunctives (grammars of Tibetan say they don't have them, but I found them in all periods of the language, downt to the present). And classifiers--'There are no classifiers in Mongol, or language '__' (fill in the blank), blah blah, etc. (CIB) We need to provide a relatively complete list of wanted stuff (both for this and for other sections); here I think also of negation,

• A concise list of common and relevant vocabulary, grouped by topic (?); e.g., agricultural terms, body parts, nature-related vocabulary, etc. (1 page)

I think there should be two kinds of lists. One such as the above, and another one a morpheme (ideally; otherwise, 'word') frequency list. There should be lists for all these languages by now, or if not, it would be easy to make one from an online corpus, or in the case of unofficial or unwritten languages (Afghan Uzbek, Amdo, etc.), to make one from field notes, which by now are all computerized, I suppose... (CIB)

• Fully glossed and translated examples of the language in use. Probably one prose text in a modern literary variety, one transcription of spontaneous spoken language (be it conversation or monologue(?)), and one oral or textual example of verse. (6-9 pages @ 2-3 pages each)

I would say a minimum of 9 or 10 pages, including several different kinds of texts for each category. The most important one, in my opinion, would be the spoken language (not monologue), which should again be different in character, so as to get quotatives, questions & answers, etc. While thinking about the project this weekend I decided that this is the single most important part of it. I know when I use any of the more recent grammars of languages I am interested in but don't know, I am always looking for fully glossed sentences, and usually (invariably) not finding them or not finding enough of them or not finding examples of what I'm looking for. Maybe if you were to look at some existing grammars with such examples you would be able to identify the kinds of things to aim for in the texts... (CIB)

• A bibliography of reliable sources on the language (dictionaries, academic articles, and grammars). (½-1 page)

Reliable, eh? Very funny! (CIB) In all, each language's grammar should be no shorter than 25 pages and no longer than 40 pages. Given the language coverage, this should result in a volume of approximately 300-600 pages

Languages proposed

Justification

The justification for including the languages proposed here is that they're all large (medium density—in this case, they all have at least ½ million speakers, but no more than 25 million), and they're all in the heart of Central Asia / non-peripheral (e.g., not Tatar or Sakha or Ossetian or any Uralic languages).

The languages by geography

This volume covers the large "non-intrusive" languages of the core of Central Asia:

• Afghanistan (Pashto, Dari, Afghan Uzbek)
• Turkmenistan (Turkmen)
• Uzbekistan (Uzbek, Qaraqalpaq)
• Kazakhstan (Kazakh)
• Kyrgyzstan (Kyrgyz)
• Tajikistan (Tajik)
• Tibet (Amdo, Central Tibetan, Khams)
• Eastern Turkistan (Uyghur)
• Mongolia (Khalkha).

The languages, by family

Turkic

• Uzbek
  • UNESCO status: none
  • 23.5M speakers (estimate, wikipedia)
  • Who (idea): John Erickson
• Kazakh
  • UNESCO status: none
  • 12M speakers (estimate, wikipedia)
  • Who (last resort): Jonathan
• Uyghur
  • UNESCO status: none
  • 10M speakers (estimate, wikipedia)
  • Who (idea): Arienne Dwyer (recommended by Mahire Yakup (recommended by Eric Schluessel))
  • Who (other recommendations by Eric): "Reyhangul Abliz (Professor at Xinjiang Agricultural University, co-author of Uyghur: A manual for conversation and De Jong's grammar) rayhan10@hotmail.com, tell her I sent you; Abdurishit Yakup (in Germany, wrote an excellent grammar of Turpan Uyghur); Mahire Yakup (at University of Kansas, teaches Uyghur at SWSEEL, PhD student); Frederick de Jong (very, very senior professor at Utrecht, produced the above-mentioned learner's grammar of Uyghur with Reyhangul and others), frederick.dejong@let.uu.nl, again, tell him I sent you..."
  • Who (idea): Niko
• Turkmen
  • UNESCO status: none
  • 9M speakers (estimate, wikipedia)
• Kyrgyz
  • UNESCO status: none
  • 3.5M speakers (estimate, wikipedia)
  • Who (current gramar draft): Jonathan
• Uzbeki (Afghan Uzbek)
  • UNESCO status: none
  • 1,451,980 speakers (estimate, ethnologue)
• Qaraqalpaq (probably won't do)
  • UNESCO status: none
  • 0.5M speakers (estimate, wikipedia)

Mongolic

• Khalkha
  • UNESCO status: none
  • 2.6M speakers (estimate, wikipedia)
  • Who (current grammar draft): Andrew

Tibeto-Burman

• Central Tibetan
  • UNESCO status: none
  • ????? (estimate, how many speakers??)
• Khams Tibetan (probably won't do)
  • UNESCO status: none
  • 1.5M speakers (estimate, wikipedia)
• Amdo Tibetan
  • UNESCO status: none
  • 800'000 speakers (estimate, wikipedia)
  • Who (idea): Arienne Dwyer

IE

• Pashto
  • UNESCO status: none
  • ~26M speakers (estimate, wikipedia)
• Dari
  • UNESCO status: none
  • 7.6M speakers (estimate, ethnologue)
• Tajik
  • UNESCO status: none
  • 4.5M speakers (estimate, wikipedia)