by Rolf Hotz and Robert Schikowski and Ichchha Purna Rai and Anita Rai and Chandra Kumari Rai and Dayaram Rai and Durga Bahadur Rai and Durga Kumari Rai and Ganesh Rai and Janak Kumari Rai and Lash Kumari (Renuka) Rai and Manoj Rai and Rabindra Kumar Rai and Rikhi Maya Rai and Shanti Maya Rai and Goma Banjade and Toya Nath Bhatta and Dagmar Jung and Netra Prasad Paudyal and Judi Pettigrew and Sebastian Sauppe and Taras Zakharko and Martin Gaenszle and Novel Kishor Rai and Elena Lieven and Sabine Stoll and Balthasar Bickel
This dictionary contains an exhaustive list of lexemes in Chintang, a Sino-Tibetan (also known as Tibeto-Burman or Trans-Himalayan) language from Eastern Nepal. Along with native Chintang words, this dictionary encompasses numerous Nepali and Bantawa entries, which reflect the sociolinguistic reality of this community. This publication, which has largely grown out of the Chintang corpus (see Section 2), provides the most comprehensive insight into the lexical treasures of the Chintang language, for it encompasses a wide array of domains and semantic fields in addition to many translated examples.
Chintang (natively pronounced [ˈt̻s̻ʰiɳʈaŋ], ISO 639-3 code: ctn, Glottocode:
chhi1245) belongs to the Eastern Kiranti branch of Sino-Tibetan and is spoken
by approximately 4,000–5,000 speakers in the Dhankuta district of Eastern Nepal.
The name of the language is also the name of the area where the language is
spoken.1
In Nepali, the national language and lingua franca of Nepal, Chintang is
commonly referred to as Chintāṅge bhāṣā ‘Chintangish language’. Apart from
the Chintang area and neighboring settlement of Ahale, the language is spoken by
a considerable number of people who periodically or permanently migrated to
Dhankuta, the district capital, and to Kathmandu, the national capital.
Chintang is an endangered language. Although it still serves as the principal medium of communication among adults, the use of Nepali has expanded significantly in the Kiranti region. Over the last ten years, many families have shifted to using Nepali as the primary language when speaking to children, with the result that most children no longer acquire Chintang as a first language. A similar pattern can be observed in neighboring languages and reflects a general trend in the country.
The closest relatives of Chintang are the neighboring languages Chulung (Chɨlɨŋ), Yakkha, Belhare, and Athpare. Another neighboring language, Bantawa, belongs to a different branch of Kiranti (Central Kiranti), but it is in intensive contact with Chintang. Many speakers of Chintang are trilingual, also being fluent in Bantawa and Nepali.
Chintang presents a low degree of dialectal variation which is concentrated on its two main villages: Mulgaũ and Sambugaũ. In terms of lexical difference, apart from isolated words, the most prominent feature is the influence of Bantawa in parts of Sambugaũ. For example, speakers of Sambugaũ might say yɨŋ ‘language’ instead of rɨŋ, mirroring a phonological isogloss that separates the two branches to which Chintang and Bantawa belong (Bickel & Gaenszle 2015). Conversely, the common Kiranti stock of Chintang and Bantawa helped preserve ancestral words like piʔ for ‘cow’ (in both Chintang and local Bantawa), which is common in Sambugaũ but perceived as old-fashioned in Mulgaũ by some speakers who may prefer the Nepali word gāī.
In terms of morphology there are two issues that should be mentioned. The first is the prefix kha- [1nsO] in Mulgaũ that corresponds to the forms ma- [1nsOe] and mai- [1nsOi] in Sambugaũ in the transitive verbal paradigms. Hence, the latter variant has been taken as the standard in the present work. The second difference worth noting is the negative past marker -yokt, which only occurs in parts of Mulgaũ. Everywhere else -th prevails, a suffix which further marks the negative imperative in all dialects.
The speakers of Chintang identify themselves as “Rai” (Nep. Rāī), which is a ethnonym that refers to groups in Eastern Nepal, (Northern) West Bengal and Sikkim in India. These people speak, or have spoken, a Kiranti language and share the mundhum religion (Rai et al., 2009; Gaenszle 2016, 327f.). Rai is also the surname of most members of these groups, a practice that was established by the Nepali-speaking government from Gorkha in the aftermath of its conquests of what is now Nepal in the 19th century (Pradhan 1991).
The name Chintang has only recently become used an ethnonym, reflecting the linguistic difference from other Rai groups. However, in a localizing sense the adjectival term Chintange is also applied to all residents of the village, even when they do not speak the Chintang language. This includes various other Rai (mainly Bantawa, but also Puma, Kulung, Thulung etc.) as well as Chetri (Nep. Kṣētrī) or Kami (Kāmī) groups, Nepali-speaking groups originally identified as castes. Local history identifies the Chintang speakers as the “original settlers” of the area, with other Rai, especially Bantawa Rai from the Bhojpur district across the Arun river, arriving later. The groups have intermarried and often adopted the Chintang language as their first. Yet in terms of patrilineal clans, there is still a clear distinction between ethnic Chintange and localized Chintange. According to local myth, the original ancestors who settled in present day Chintang were Sambhoŋ, Chentaŋhaŋpa, Rahaŋba, and Khɨkkhaŋ, and each is considered a founding father of a distinct clan.
Budhahaŋ is a mythic ancestor worshipped on almost all major ritual celebrations in Chintang, as well as by neighboring Rai groups, such as the Belhare. He is said to have fought against the Shah king (whose Gorkha armies conquered the region in the 19th century; Pradhan 1991), using magical powers which made him successful initially, though he was later vanquished and disappeared mysteriously. However, Budhahaŋ is believed to still be alive and in fact immortal.
Well known beyond the village is the temple of Chintang Devi (Chintang goddess). Many visitors from various ethnic groups, including Indo-Aryan groups, journey there on a pilgrimage. In fact, the temple is en route to the ancient pilgrimage site of Barahakshetra (Nep. Varāhakṣetra) at the confluence of the Sunkoshi (Nep. Sunkośī), Arun (Nep. Aruṇ) and Tamur (Nep. Tāmur) rivers, and it seems that many generations of Kiranti people traveled down to the south along this major path (Rai et al. 2008–2009; Gaenszle et al. 2013, 100f.; Gaenszle et al. 2005, 33f.; Rai et al. 2009, 24f.).
Most inhabitants of Chintang practice subsistence agriculture with a focus on crops like millet, maize and rice as well as cash crops such as tomatoes, ginger, and chili. Most households also own livestock such as goats, cows, chicken, and pigs. Land is highly compartmentalized, and most households have one or more lots scattered across the area. Farming and animal husbandry is complemented by sporadically foraging the woods for edible roots such as yams. A relatively new development in the local economy was the large-scale introduction of mandarin orange trees, the fruit of which is sold in the nearby towns of Hile and Dhankuta and exported beyond (Rai et al. 2008–2009).
The Chintang dictionary is largely derived from the Chintang corpus, supplemented by some targeted elicitation2. The Chintang corpus is broadly divided into two parts. The largest part tracks first language acquisition longitudinally from six children (age 2 to 4), recording both what children produce and what they hear in their environment of adult and child speakers. This part was recorded without supervision. The other part focuses on adult speech across different genres. These recordings were mostly prompted by asking questions or showing stimuli (e.g. Pear stories), sometimes with specific instructions that aimed at increasing the use of specific patterns of interest (Schikowski 2013b):
The corpus is glossed and together with the dictionary derived from it, it has formed the basis for several detailed analyses of the linguistic structures of Chintang, often from a comparative angle. Several studies explore questions of valency and transitivity alternations (Bickel et al. 2010, Bickel 2011a, Bender et al. 2012, Schikowski 2013, Schikowski et al. 2013, Schikowski et al. 2015, Bickel and Gaenszle 2015), the complexities of verb morphology, with particular attention to variable orderings of agreement prefixes and their dependencies (Bickel et al. 2007, Samardžić et al. 2015, Mansfield et al. 2020), the phonological and syntactic cohesion of word-level (as opposed to phrase-level) phenomena (Bickel and Zúñiga 2017, Widmer et al. 2021), clause linkage and verb compounds (Paudyal et al. 2010, Hotz 2019), deixis (Dirksmeyer 2008) and ideophones (Rai et al. 2005). A sketch grammar is a available as a dissertation (Paudyal 2013), while an extensive reference grammar is in preparation.
The Chintang corpus was also instrumental for psycholinguistic work, with targeted studies of the acquisition of nouns vs. verbs (Stoll et al. 2012, Lester et al. 2019), ergativity (Stoll and Bickel 2012, Stoll and Bickel 2013) and case marking more generally (Rüst et al. 2022), verb morphology (Stoll et al. 2017), aspect (Mazara and Stoll 2021), the interrelation of speech acts and pointing (Mazara et al. 2022), the role of input patterns for acquisition (Zakharko 2009, Lester et al. 2022), development of code-switching an language mixing (Stoll et al. 2015). Other psycholinguistic work focused on the time course of speech production including Chintang among other languages (Seifart et al. 2018, Strunk et al. 2020, Seifart et al. 2021).
Turning to lexicography, Rai et al. 2011 is a dictionary produced chiefly for use by native speakers and learners of the language and was distributed in printed form in the village. An online version can be found here. During 2020-23, the dictionary was revised and sorted for its present publication. This endeavor included sorting out faulty or otherwise obscure entries and consulting native speakers on entries where there were doubts. Elicitation in this part was carried out online due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
Finally, some publications on Chintang focus on ethnography and social or historical aspect of the Chintang community: Gaenszle et al. 2013 analyze the Chintang incident of 1979 and the historically tense relation with the Nepalese state; Rai et al. 2009 and Gaenszle et al 2005 describe the religious and social tradition of the Mundhum ritual language.
A complete list of unpublished but downloadable papers and documentary material is available on the Chintang Language Research Program website.
The documentation program of Chintang was headed by Balthasar Bickel, Sabine Stoll, Elena Lieven, Martin Gaenszle, and Noval Kishore Rai. Over the years the research team included furthermore Manoj Rai, Netra Prasad Paudyal, Robert Schikowski, Goma Banjade, Ichchha Purna Rai, Toya Nath Bhatta, Sebastian Sauppe, Rikhi Maya Rai, Janak Kumari Rai, Lash Kumari (Renuka) Rai, Durga Bahadur Rai, Ganesh Rai, Dayaram Rai, Durga Kumari Rai, Anita Rai, Chandra Kumari Rai, Shanti Maya Rai, Rabindra Kumar Rai, Judith Pettigrew, Taras Zakharko, Dagmar Jung, and Rolf Hotz.
This section will address issues regarding how to navigate through the dictionary. It covers the most recurrent abbreviations and how to interpret the entries, especially regarding the verbs. We discuss the orthography in Section 3.4.
Full Entry – The leftmost column of the dictionary table provides access to the complete entry. Clicking on more expands the entry and displays all available information associated with the lexical item, including fields that do not appear as separate columns in the table. The search function also searches these expanded fields.
Headword – the lexical entry or lemma. Entries are arranged alphabetically according to this form. For verbs, the headword is given in its citation form, i.e. the infinitive -ma in Chintang and -nu in Nepali. For all other word classes, the headword corresponds to the lemma. For tetrasyllabic adverbs, the headword includes the adverbializer -wa.
Alternative Pronunciation – alternative pronunciations.
Regular Allomorphs – regular allomorphs.
Part of Speech – part of speech of the entry. See Section 3.2
Valency – valency of verbs. See Section 4.5.
Language – This field indicates the origin of the lexeme. C stands for
Chintang, B for Bantawa, N for Nepali, E for English and H for Hindi. The
combined form C/N stands for Nepali loanwords that have undergone unpredictable
phonological assimilation or semantic change, such as ubheni ‘morning’ from
Nepali bihāna or sojje ‘in vain’ (probably from Nep. sojho ‘straight’).
Furthermore, C/N also includes (i) compounds with both Chintang and Nepali
elements, (ii) names of places and people where the ultimate etymological origin
is unclear, (iii) old Indo-Aryan loanwords that have retained an archaic
phonology, and (iv) adverbs, sounds and ideophones that cannot unproblematically
be assigned to a particular language.
Similarly, B/C stands for Bantawa loanwords or are Bantawa-Chintang compounds.
However, given the state of the art in historical Kiranti linguistics, the
degree of phonological and semantic integration of Bantawa words into Chintang
can be less well established than the integration of Nepali words.
Etymology – etymology when known (mostly for compounds)
Citation form – This slot includes a genera of fixed noun combinations – termed ‘binomials’ – that are most prominent in the mundhum register (cf. Rai et al. 2009; Gaenszle et al. 2012).
Meaning (English and Nepali) – translation equivalents (‘glosses’) in English and Nepali. Some entries have more than one translation.
For some entries, such as ‘sound’ words, interjections, and ideophones (see Section 3.2), we give a usage description rather than translation.
Expanded Definition – semantic description in English and Nepali. For some entries there is an expanded explanation of the meaning beyond what is given in Meaning.
Derived Meaning – These are subentries with their corresponding gloss equivalents, i.e. for some entries, mostly verbs, there is a further meaning derived from their combination with another element, usually a noun, with varying degrees of lexicalization, e.g.: papa thokma ‘be.sinful’, from thokma ‘hit, bite’.
Examples – Example sentences in Chintang together with translations in English and Nepali. Most examples come from the Chintang Corpus (described in Section 2) and they can be located using a code which corresponds to the nomenclature of the corpus. Some examples have been adapted from the aforementioned community dictionary.
Stem – For verbs (including V2s), this field gives the verbal stem. Stem forms are included because morphophonological processes often conceal important distinctions that are not visible in the citation form. For example, lap- ‘catch’ and lapt- ‘catch for somebody’ share the same citation form lapma. The inclusion of stem forms therefore makes underlying morphological contrasts transparent. The previous edition of this dictionary (Rai et al. 2011) addressed this issue by listing verbs under their citation form and additionally providing a third-person singular past tense form (e.g. lapma, lapte) to reveal the underlying stem.
Register – This marker is only found in entries that correspond to a particular register. The most recurrent register in this dictionary is ritual, which stands for words that are specific to the religious register known as mundhum (cf. Rai et al. 2009; Gaenszle et al. 2012) plus words that refer to the spiritual dimension of life. Entries that are only found in child speech (as either uttered by children or adults speaking to children) are marked as child. Words that are deemed to be abusive by speakers have the marker abusive. The small set of words that are only found in Sambugaũ dialect (mostly borrowed from Bantawa language) are indicated by the name of the village.
Comment – For some entries there are comments of various types, such as indications on morphophonology, relation to other entries and remarks provided by consultants.
Question – The present dictionary has largely grown out of a corpus, as indicated above. This vast project allows for a deep insight into the language; but the vast size of the dictionary also includes several entries where the analysis is still unclear, e.g. uncertainty about meaning extensions, the origin of an entry, the exact valency pattern of a verb, etc. Such questions are expressed in this field.
This section provides a list with all abbreviations of part of speech (POS) found in the present dictionary.
adj – The label adjectives in Chintang amalgamates three categories: native adjectives, predicate nouns and Nepali adjectives. The first category has only two members (mi- and the-) and they must occur with a nominalizer. Predicate nouns, such as umaŋ ‘raw’ or beŋthe ‘angry’ can appear as arguments of verbs such as lis- ‘be’ and yuŋs- ‘be there’ as nouns would. However, they differ from nouns in their inability to both take case inflection and to occur in any other argument position that would require a case other than the nominative. Lastly, adjectives have been profusely borrowed from Nepali and often replace indigenous Chintang stative verbs that have an equivalent meaning, as in aptharo (from N.) ‘difficult’ for native chakt- ‘be.difficult’.
adv – Adverbs form an independent class that does not allow inflection and modifies predicates or whole clauses. Chintang has a large number of adverbs composed of duplicated and triplicated roots (termed ideophones, cf. Rai et al. 2005) with a variety of meanings such as: tenenewa ‘manner of shouting’ and sololowa ‘the sound of something big moving close to the ground, e.g. a big snake or also a river in its bed’.
gm – The term grammatical markers encompasses an ample number of heterogeneous suffixes and unbound words that carry semantic and grammatical information. These include clitics, morphology found in verbs, nouns and pronouns, particles, certain locatives, nominalizers, classifiers borrowed from Nepali and unbound topic markers.
interj – Interjections are independent lexemes that express a reaction or a feeling. They are uninflected and do not interact with other elements, hence building a clause of their own. An example would be hauk ‘used to keep somebody (particularly children) from doing or touching something’.
n – Nouns are independent lexemes that stand for referents. Nouns differ from other parts of speech in that they are inflected for number, case and possession. Chintang has borrowed many of nouns from Nepali.
pro – The label pronoun stands for lexemes that can replace a noun or noun phrase. Based on their morphosyntactic behavior we can distinguish three different groups: a) deictic references to 3 person (demonstratives), b) speech act participants, the only group that can be inflected for clusivity (for 1st person only) and c) question words sa- ‘who’ and them ‘what’ which share their complete morphosyntax (including case, number, and possession) with nouns but are similar to deictics in their mode of referring.
sound – Sound stands for an ample term that includes onomatopoetic or otherwise descriptive sounds. Sounds are distinguished from interjections and ideophones in that the former require a citative -mo.
vi/vt – The Chintang dictionary distinguishes between intransitive (vi) and
transitive (vt) verbs. S/O ambitransitive verbs such as dipt- ‘be covered’
/ ‘cover’ are represented by two separate entries. See
Section 4.5 for a more detailed discussion.
Verbs are inflected for tense, aspect, modus polarity and display agreement with
S, A and/or O in number, tense and clusivity. They form a closed class and
there is no morphological process to make new verbs. Verbs borrowed from Nepali
take a nativizer -e and are expressed with an auxiliary, as in: khic-e
num-ma [record-nativizer do-infinitive] ‘to record, to make pictures’.
Some verbs include a preverbal element. Although these form a single lexeme,
endoclitics and prefixes hosted by the verb may occur between preverb and the
verbal stem. Most prefixes seem to have their origin in nouns.
v2 – v2 indicates vector verbs, i.e. grammaticalized verb stems that can be concatenated with free verbs, e.g. in order to change their valency or to modify their temporal-aspectual profile. Vector verbs can host prefixes and suffixes and they impose their own agreement morphology and even their own tense morphology in some cases (Bickel & Zúñiga 2017, 177f.). Vector verbs will be described in further detail in Section 4.4.
The orthography used in the present dictionary is as close as possible to the phonology of the language. Tables 1 and 2 display the vowels (with their nasalized counterparts) and consonants of the language. The orthographic symbols are followed by the IPA realizations in square brackets.
| Front | Central | Back | |
|---|---|---|---|
| High | i ĩ [i ĩ] | ɨ [ɨ] | u ũ [u ũ] |
| Middle | e ẽ [e ẽ] | o õ [o õ] | |
| Low | a ã [a ã] |
| bilabial | coronal front | coronal back | velar | glottal | ||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| stop | non.asp | p [p], b [b] | c [t̻s̻], j [d̻z̻] | t [ʈ], d [ɖ] | k [k], g [g] | ʔ [ʔ] |
| asp. | ph [pʰ], bh [bʱ] | ch [t̻s̻ʰ], jh [d̻z̻ʱ] | th [ʈʰ], dh [ɖʱ] | kh [kʰ], gh [gʱ] | ||
| fricative | s [s] | h [ɦ] | ||||
| nasal | m [m] | n [ɳ] | ŋ [ŋ] | |||
| flap | r [ɾ] | |||||
| lateral | l [l] | |||||
| approx. | w [w] | y [j] |
The present dictionary incorporates an immense number of entries that encompass most aspects of the language. However vast the range of words in this dictionary is, it cannot be conclusive. As hinted in Section 2 the present dictionary is mostly based on a corpus and not on systematic lexicographic elicitation. Even though the number of entries is immense, especially for a minority language, and the possibility of extracting vocabulary from recordings of various registers and different levels of supervision is an asset, specific vocabulary and rare words may be lacking in some cases. This is especially the case for wild fauna and flora and other semantic fields that rarely occur in everyday speech. Furthermore, having a camera and a recording device might have hindered the use of swear words or other registers deemed less appropriate for a recorded setting. In this line, we can also refer to the case of religious terminology, the mundhum register; the precise meaning of some of the mundhum entries remains obscure mainly due to their spiritual character, which often escapes simple translations. Furthermore, the mundhum register is only known to mundhum experts and not to the layman. Finding a precise description of these words will require a larger ethnographic study (cf. Rai et al. 2009, 31f.).
A further issue is the variety of Nepali language that is spoken in Chintang. Chintang has borrowed extensively from Nepali, particularly nouns. Additionally, code switching is also very common in corpus recording, which explains the high number of entries of Nepali origin from all parts of speech. Here the reader must be warned about the quality of those Nepali words; in most cases, the type of Nepali that was recorded during the creation of the corpus corresponds to what we might call Chintang (or Kiranti) Nepali. In practical terms, this means that some phonological features of Nepali are neutralized, much in line with Chintang phonology. Most importantly we can mention the Nepali vowel /ʌ/ that merges with /a/ and the series of dental consonants that merge with their retroflex counterparts. Thus, we find in the dictionary two entries of Nepali origin under dhan: one meaning ‘wealth’, in N. /dhʌn/, and the other ‘growing.rice’, in N. /dhan/ (note the different quality of the vowels, both are pronounced [ɖʰan] in Chintang). Furthermore, under tin we find both ‘tin’ (an English loanword that entered Chintang through Nepali) N. /ʈin/ and ‘three’ (from N.) that is pronounced in Nepali as /t̪in/ (note the difference in the initial stop, both are pronounced [ʈin] in Chintang). In conclusion, the entries of Nepali origin (marked by a N) must be considered in relation to Chintang or Chintang Nepali at best, as they do not match the standard of a lexicographic study on their own.
This section will address several aspects of the grammar of Chintang that are deemed relevant for the use of the dictionary or are generally unavoidable for developing an understanding of the language. The topics are: stem alternation, interchangeability of prefixes, compound verbs and valency patterns. This section will start with a typological introduction to the language.
The typological profile of Chintang can be largely derived from its embedding into the Kiranti family and predominantly its Eastern branch. Phonologically, Chintang is inconspicuous: it has an average-sized phoneme inventory (6 vowels, 27 consonants) with the four-way contrast in stops typical of the whole South Asian region and the syllable structure (C)V(C). Chintang is, however, unusual by South (and Central) Asian standards when it comes to morphology and syntax. The language has a high degree of syntheticity (10 morphemes and more per word) and a wealth of morphological categories: nouns mark case, number, and possession (which includes clusivity), verbs index person, number, and clusivity of one or two arguments (depending on verb class and valency manipulation) and mark tense, mood, aspect, and polarity.
Both nouns and verbs have a complex morphological structure. There are 16 morphological cases (among them rare ones such as altitudinal locatives), many of which can be stacked to form composite meanings. An interesting morphological subsystem apart from nouns and verbs is presented by the small group of deictics. These words mark the relative location of an object including its altitude, its distance from the speaker, and subjectively perceived departures from standard distances.
The “basic” alignment pattern of Chintang is ergative, but this varies greatly across constructions and verb classes. Besides the morphological argument selectors of case and agreement, there are also many syntactic environments that treat one group of arguments differently from another, e.g. S/O detransitivization, coreference constraints for non-finite forms, and marginal agreement in non-finite forms. There is a large number of mechanisms available for clause joining. Relative clauses are expressed by participles or polyfunctional nominalizers, which can also form complement clauses. A diverse set of forms, including converbs and conjunctions, are used for adverbial subordination. Among the most complex forms used in subordination is the infinitive, which goes hand in hand with exceptional case marking and various kinds of long distance agreement (CLRP 2013).
Turning to verbal morphology, we may identify the morpheme types available in the language based on two variables (cf. Bickel & Zúñiga 2017, 161.): SELECTION and INFLECTION. SELECTION means that certain elements have combinatorial requirements in order to occur, such as English ed in played, regardless of their phonological dependency or whether they must occur directly adjacent to the host. It is thus the ‘specific combinatorial requirements of an element’ (Widmer et al. 2021, 711). INFLECTION accounts for a morpheme’s minimal morphological requirement to occur in a specific grammatical context (Bickel & Nichols 2007). Thus a verb may require tense, aspect, and agreement markers to occur in a specific clause context but only aspect in another context. (cf. Widmer et al. 2021, for a fuller discussion, especially on COHESION, which was not included in this brief account). Table 3 displays the morpheme types found in the verbal morphology of Chintang.
Verbs in Chintang inflect for S, A and P agreement, tense, aspect, mood, and polarity (TAMP). Valency markers register syntactic argument structure context with coronal stem augments apart from signaling voice alternations. Connectives (CON) include nominalization and clause linkage markers that respond to their syntactic environment (and are thus inflection in the sense of Bickel & Nichols 2007, 169). The morpheme type V2 is described in Section 4.4. Preverbs (PV) select specific verb (V) stems with which they form bipartite stems, e.g. nam selects nud to form a bipartite stem nam-nud ‘to smell (good)’, and they do not inflect, although some of them have been recruited from verbs. Differently from affixes, preverbs do not select V2 stems. Affixes, both prefixes and suffixes, express a number of verbal categories like tense, person, number, polarity, etc., and attach to either V or V2 elements. Prefixes are special in that they can be freely ordered and can host endoclitics (cf. Section 4.3). The morpheme type ‘clitics’ comprises a number of information structure markers which can attach to affixes, affix complexes, phrases and sentences alike (Bickel et al. 2007). The morpheme type “verbal phrasal affix” includes morphemes such as the optative marker ne and the insisting marker na, while the morpheme type “free phrasal suffix”, finally, includes various information structure markers and conjunctions (e.g. the coordinator ki) that attach to larger domains, but not to individual affixes (unlike clitics).
| Morpheme type | Selection | Inflection | Example |
|---|---|---|---|
| Verb (V) | – | TAMP, TR, VOICE, CONN, AGR | num- ‘do’ |
| Secondary Verb (V2) | V | TMP, TR, AGR | pid- ‘give’ |
| Affix (AFF) | V(2) | – | ma ‘NEG’, u ‘3O’ |
| Preverb (PV) | V | – | lak ‘dance’ (with lus) |
| Clitic (CL) | X(P) | – | ta ‘FOC’ |
| Verbal phrase affix (VPA) | VP | – | ne ‘OPT’ |
| Free phrasal affix (FPA) | XP | – | ki ‘SEQ’ |
Stem alternation is an overarching term that stands for changes in the verbal stem. For the Kiranti language family, it refers to the phonotactical interaction between the stem and a suffix in which the former undergoes a change based on the following sound, in this case, the next suffix's initial sound. It is therefore a purely phonological process with no effect on tense or aspect. Stem alternation is a pervasive phenomenon in the language family (cf. Herce 2020) and it is also present in several Tibeto-Burman varieties (cf. Jacques 2012).
In Chintang, stems consist of a root and an augment, which go back to Proto-Sino-Tibetan derivatives but lack an active synchronic function (Michailovsky 1985, Sprigg 1985, 1992, Bickel 2003). The basic rule is that augments only surface before vowels within the same phonological word (Bickel et al. 2007), creating an alternation of stem forms. In addition, root codas are subject to various additional alternations. Table 4 displays a maximally simple scheme for stem alternation in Chintang. All other combinations (e.g. before ŋ or -c) are predictable based on regular morphophonological rules. In the left-most column we find all different stems (its last consonant/vowel). These interact with vowels (any) and different consonants, which are displayed on the following columns of the table. For example, stems ending in -s do not undergo any change when succeeded by a vowel while -s is elided before an -m or any other consonant. The rightmost column has an example for each type of stem ending. In the dictionary, stem alternations of Chintang verbs are found under the Regular Allomorphs field, if available.
| underlying stem coda | -V | -{k, p, m, y, #} | example |
| -V | V-V | -V-C | tu- ‘take.place’ |
| -d | -d-V | -Ø-C | ŋed- ‘read’ |
| -g | -(g)-V | -ŋ-C | thag- ‘make(.clothes)’ |
| -p | -b-V | -p-C | thep- ‘get.stuck’ |
| -t | -d-V | -iʔ-C | rut- ‘collect’ |
| -tt | -tt-V | -iʔ-C | khatt- ‘take.away’ |
| -k | -g-V | -k-C | rek- ‘be.torn’ |
| -m | -m-V | -m-C | kam- ‘tie’ |
| -n | -n-V | -ĩ-C | phan- ‘move’ |
| -nd | -nd-V | -ĩ-C | lond- ‘take.out’ |
| -ĩs | -ĩs-V | -ĩ-C | loĩs- ‘take.out’ |
| -ŋ | -(ŋ)-V | -ŋ-C | reŋ- ‘be.finished’ |
| -r | -r-V | -Ø-C | por- ‘grab’ |
| -l | -l-V | -ĩ-C | al- ‘be.full’ |
| -s | -s-V | -Ø-C | tis- ‘put.into’ |
| -ʔs | -ss-V | -ʔ-C | iʔs- ‘be.not.good’ |
| -C{t, s} | -Cs/t-V | C-C | ams- ‘shoot’ |
The morphology of verbs in Chintang can be divided into prefixes and suffixes since different rules apply to each. In this section, we will delineate a property of the suffixes in which they can be interchanged without affecting the semantic or morphosyntactic structure of the predicate.
Free morpheme permutation is a rare phenomenon in the word's language and, when it is found, it mostly involves clitics. In the case of Chintang, Bickel et al. (2007) have demonstrated that prefixes are not clitics and that they form a grammatical word with the host verb. Nevertheless, the permutation of prefixes does not seem to affect information structure or semantics nor is it mediated by the choice of any dialect, sociolect, or idiolect. Let us look at one example:
(1) a. u-kha-ma-cop-yokt-e
3NS.A-1NS.P-NEG-see-NEG-PST
b. u-ma-kha-cop-yokt-e
3NS.A-NEG-1NS.P-see-NEG-PST
c. kha-u-ma-cop-yokt-e
1NS.P-3NS.A-NEG-see-NEG-PST
d. ma-u-kha-cop-yokt-e
NEG-3NS.A-1NS.P-see-NEG-PST
e. kha-ma-u-cop-yokt-e
1NS.P-NEG-3NS.A-see-NEG-PST
f. ma-kha-u-cop-yokt-e
NEG-1NS.P-3NS.A-see-NEG-PST
All: ‘They didn't see us.’
In this list of examples, we observe all possible combinations in a complex verb with three prefixes. This phenomenon is explained by a prosodic subcategorization in which each prefix and each stem projects a phonological word. Each projected word can carry a prefix at any position.
Multiverb constructions are present in all members of the Kiranti language family. According to Doornenbal (2009, 473f.), they possess enough similarities to be described under one single term: Kiranti compound verbs. The grammaticalized verbs employed in this construction are also known as: vector verbs, aspectualizers or v2s. For the author, who has written a comparative analysis of multiverb constructions in this language family, Kiranti compound verbs are an asymmetrical sequence of two or more verbs where the first verb adds both the main semantic content and the argument structure while the following verb or verbs adjust the meaning by providing additional information (such as valency or aspect).
The Chintang compound verb is very similar to the cognate constructions in the Kiranti family. They are complex verbs in which each element shares part of the final suffixal chain on verb# (the final verb). All affixes apply to the whole compound even if they are not present on all elements. V2 stems select not only a general class of verbs but impose various constraints on valency and Aktionsart specific to each v2. Some v2s specify whether they combine with monovalent or polyvalent verbs. Other v2 stems combine with verbs of any valency, e.g. -loĩs ‘move out’ combines both with monovalent and bivalent predicates (whereas closely related -lond ‘go out’ seems to be limited to monovalent stems). Such differences are not predictable, and they thus represent selection properties intrinsic to each v2 (Bickel & Zúñiga 2017, 176f.).
V2 stems behave morphologically like other verb stems, except that they require a two-syllable template as their host. This template consists of a verb stem and as much finite verb morphology as is needed to fulfill the two-syllable constraint (Bickel et al. 2007, 49f.). If there is no suitable inflectional material available, as happens to be the case for example in third person subjunctive forms, a dummy syllable na is inserted in order to meet the two-syllable constraint. This is displayed in (2), where the v2 stem ca- denotes a kind of self-benefaction:
(2) mai-met-th-a, joso-ta num-na-ca-ne-na
NEG-do-NEG-IMP[2sS] whatever-FOC do-NA-v2:enjoy.for.oneself[3sS.SBJV]-OPT-INSIST
‘Don't do that, let her do whatever she wants on her own.’ [CLLDCh1R02S04.0781]
(3) jo-go-yaŋ, na-khutt-i-ca-i-hatt-i-bid-i
whatever-NMLZ-ADD 3[S]>2-steal-2pO-v2:eat2pO-v2:move.away.TR-2pO-v2:do.for-[SBJV]2pO
‘It (a cat) may steal everything from you and eat it all up!’ [story.cat.204]
Some v2 elements control the agreement morphology of their V1 (e.g. those with a causative or benefactive meaning component like in (2)) and temporal-aspectual v2s not only control their V1's tense morphology but come close to being tense-aspect markers such as -a ‘PST’ or -nok ‘IND.NPST’ (Schikowski 2022 p.c.). Other v2s follow the agreement and TAMP pattern of their host.
Most v2s bear etymological resemblance to regular, non-selecting verb stems, and it is sometimes unclear whether there is one morpheme used in two ways or two morphemes. Compare the use of thand- as an independent verb in (4) and as a v2 in (5):
(4) ba som-ce-ta a-thand-u-ce haŋ iss-a-kt-e?
DEM.PROX sort-ns-FOC 2[s]s-move.down-3O-3nsO-[SBJV] if be.not.good- PST-IPFV-IND.PST
‘Wouldn't it be good if you brought down this sort of (stuff)?’ [CLLDCh3R12S04.448]
(5) yo dhukkhur-a apt-u-thand-u-ku-ŋ paĩ
DEM.ACROSS dove-NTVZ shoot-3[s]O-v2:move.down.TR-3[s]O-IND.PST-1sA today
‘I'll shoot that dove over there down today.’ [CLLDCh3R05S05.303]
Similar examples can be found with several other v2 stems. For example, ca- has an abstract meaning in (2) but a very concrete one of eating in (3). In the concrete meaning, ca- is a regular stem that can also be used as such (e.g. ca! ‘eat!’). Whether or not speakers have acquired a generalized representation or a dense association network covering all such usages is an open issue. There may be variation across individuals. From a diachronic point of view, it seems clear that v2 stems originate from regular verb stems and have gradually acquired the selection properties of v2 stems (Bickel & Zúñiga 2017, 163f.).
The description of valency in Chintang concerns the number of arguments of a verb, the semantic roles occupied by these arguments, the way morphosyntactic markers such as case, agreement or even word order are linked to these arguments and how these patterns are determined by lexical classes (cf. Schikowski et al. 2015).
The frame is a central concept in the analysis of valency: it is defined as a specific type of argument realization, as established by case marking and agreement. In describing frames, the following formalism (adopted from the database used in the Leipzig Valency Classes Project, Hartmann et al. 2012 also cf. Bickel 2011a) will be used:
Frames are basically lexically determined and then modified by syntactic factors. A list of all valency patterns found in Chintang is available at the ValPal database. In this dictionary, the valency pattern is indicated for most verbs under the abbreviation val. We shall describe the three most common valency patterns found in the corpus:
There are two crucial remarks in relation to these verbal frames: a) arguments are covert most of the time and generally have a low referential density (cf. Bickel 2003). This means that verbal agreement in practice seldom appears along with an overt corresponding semantic role. B) The second point concerns the relation between frames and specific verbs. While a number of verbs only allow an intransitive frame, many verbs that license a monotransitive frame can also license an intransitive frame.3 This is possible through detransitivization, a productive process of valency manipulation (cf. Schikowski 2013a, 21f.; Bickel et al. 2010; Bickel 2011b). For the present dictionary we shall mention the two major strategies thereof.
I. S/A detransitivization. A transitive frame is linked to a detransitivized version: The Agent, normally marked with ergative case, is marked with the nominative (unmarked) and is linked to Subject agreement on the verb. The Object, usually marked by the nominative case and triggering Patient agreement on the verb, is not indexed in the detransitivized frame. The semantic effect of this process is to render the Object non-specific, let us look at two contrastive examples:
(6) a. Debi-ŋa seu kond-o-ko
a.name-ERG apple look.for-3[s]O-IND.NPST[.3sA]
‘Debi is looking for the/an apple.’ (Schikowski 2013a, 39)
b. Debi seu kon-no
a.name apple look.for-IND.NPST[.3sS]
‘Debi is looking for apples.’ (idem.)
In (6a) we observe an indexation of both Agent and Patient agreement on the verb (kond-o-ko ‘look.for-3O-IND.NPST’) and the A marked with ergative case. In (6b) we find the same verb licensing a detransitivized frame (instead of the bipersonal form) but here A is in the nominative case (i.e. unmarked). The semantic distinction is expressed in English by the use of a definite or indefinite article for the Object (‘the/an apple’) as opposed to a zero article plus the noun in plural (‘apples’).
II. S/O detransitivization. Similarly to the aforementioned S/A detransitivization, S/O detransitivization also applies to a transitive frame but this time it entails an outright removal of Agent indexation plus a reinterpretation of the Patient as Subject (that maintains its unmarked nominative case), forming an intransitive frame. This detransitivization process has two possible semantic interpretations: it implies either that the event described occurred spontaneously, without an Agent instigator, or that the result continues without the involvement of an Agent. The following examples will illustrate this process:
(7) a. hani-karaŋ oiʔ para akka ŋi-ŋa-nɨŋ
2p.POSS-rib break[.SBJV.NPST.3sS] COND 1sg know-[SBJV.]1sS-NEG.NPST
‘If your rib should break I won’t know (i.e. I won’t care).’ [CLLDCh4R14S02.0045]
b. huŋ-khiya ta od-u-m
DEM-SORT TOP break-[SBJV.]3O-1NSA
‘Let's break it like this!’ [CLLDCh2R04S01.0228]
In (7a) and (7b) we encounter the same verb showing two different frames. While (7b) has a monotransitive frame and its corresponding indexing on the verb (od-u-m), in (7a) we find the verb displaying only Subject agreement with the thematic Patient (‘your rib’) and the thematic Agent is not indexed on the verb. This detransitivization is equivalent to causative-inchoative alternations (unaccusativity) in other languages, however, in Chintang this process is fully productive (cf. Schikowski et al. 2015, 680).
Lastly, there is one point concerning how this detransitization strategy has been integrated into the dictionary. Verbs that allow a transitive frame but also occur in the corpus licensing an intransitive frame (through the productive S/O detransitivizing process) have been integrated into the dictionary as two entries: one with a transitive and another with an intransitive frame. An example would be the verb lett which hence occurs as both ‘plant’ and ‘be.planted’.
1 The rough area where it is spoken was formerly the ‘Chintang Village Development Committee’ (VDC) but it has recently merged with other VDCs into the Shahidbhumi Rural Municipality.
2 More information regarding the corpus can be found at: Chintang Language Research Program. An updated version of the corpus is to be released soon.
3 The formalism for certain frames may contain a number e.g. (‘T-NOM(1)’). These numbers identify the argument that correspond across several frames licensed by a single verbal lexeme (but possibly split into more than one entry). For instance, a S/O ambitransitive verb such as ‘break’ has S-NOM(1) V-s(S) in the vi entry and A-ERG P-NOM(1) V-a(A).o(P) in the vt one because both S and P represent the thing that breaks. There are also a few complex cases where an additional index (2) is required.
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| Full Entry | Headword | Part of Speech | Meaning Description | Nepali | Stem | Examples |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Primary Text | Analyzed Text | Gloss | Translation | IGT |
|---|---|---|---|---|