What is the language called in English and the language itself? - The language is called Tamang in English and तामाङ / རྟ་དམག་ or རྟ་མང་ in the language itself.
Where is the language spoken? - It is spoken in Nepal and India.
How many people speak the language? - It is spoken by 1.35 million people in Nepal and 20,154 people in India. Which language family does it belong to? What are some of its relative languages? - Tamang is a Sino-Tibetan language and some of its language relatives are Gurung, Thakali, Manang, Chantyal, Ghale, Kutang and Kaike.
What writing system does the language use? - Tamang is written in Tam-Yig script, Tibetan script, and Devanagari.
What kind of grammatical features does the language have? - Tamang has a SOV word order; it is an ergative–absolutive language; Tamang is a highly agglutinative language with monosyllabic characteristics; Tamang has postpositions rather than prepositions; Tamang has two collective noun markers; gender is specified only by compounding nouns with inherently gender-specific words; Tamang personal pronouns are distinguished by person, number, inclusivity/exclusivity, politeness, and proximity; Tamang uses intonation or a question particle to indicate yes-no questions.
What do you personally find interesting about the language? - I find interesting the way gender is specified in Tamang by compounding nouns with inherently gender-specific words. For example, to say “girl” you say would say “mriŋ” (woman) + “kola” (child) = “mriŋkola” and to say “rooster” you would say “naga” (chicken) + whaba (male animal) = nagawhaba.
The Yolmo evidential system includes a category for generally known facts. Things like lemons are sour or tea is sweet (in Nepal at least) are marked using the general fact evidential òŋge. The form òŋ is also the verb ‘to come’.
This evidential turns up in every dialect of Yolmo documented to date, but it doesn’t exist in any other Tibetic language, not the specific form, or the even the semantic category. There is one language with a similar category though, and that’s the variety of Tamang spoken near the Melamchi Yolmo villages. The Tamang form kha-pa covers similar evidential semantics, and is also based on the lexical verb ‘come’.
In this paper we look at these similar forms, and how the similarities between them and social history of the area indicates the Yolmo òŋge is likely a calque from the Tamang kha-pa. I’m very grateful to my colleagues Thomas Owen-Smith for working with me on this paper. Thomas was working on the documentation of this variety of Tamang while I was writing my thesis about Yolmo evidentiality. Chatting with him helped me make sense of this unique feature of Yolmo and I’m so happy we’ve turned our long conversations into a not very long paper setting out our analysis.
Abstract
This paper examines the similarity of the Yolmo ‘general fact’ evidential and the ‘generic fact’ evidential in the Tamang dialect spoken in the valley of the Indrawati Khola. Yolmo òŋge is unlike any evidential attested in other Tibetic languages, but shares features with 1kha-pa in the local dialect of Tamang. Semantically, they both are used for situations that are generally known facts. Structurally, both are copulas with evidential functions that are formed using the lexical verb ‘come’. We argue that language contact between Tamang speakers of the Indrawati Khola area and Yolmo speakers in the Melamchi Valley led to the Yolmo language calquing the Tamang form. We illustrate these copulas and their relationship because grammaticalisation of copulas from a lexical verb ‘come’ is cross-linguistically uncommon.
Reference
Gawne, L. & T. Owen-Smith. 2022. The General Fact/Generic Factual in Yolmo and Tamang. Studies in Language. Issue number forthcoming. doi: 10.1075/sl.21049.gaw
