Lepcha language, or Róng language (
Lepcha: ; ''Róng ríng''), is a
Himalayish language spoken by the
Lepcha people
The Lepcha (; also called Rongkup ( Lepcha: , ''Mútuncí Róngkup Rumkup'', "beloved children of the Róng and of God") and Rongpa ( Sikkimese: )) are among the indigenous peoples of the Indian state of Sikkim and Nepal, and number around 80,0 ...
in
Sikkim
Sikkim (; ) is a state in Northeastern India. It borders the Tibet Autonomous Region of China in the north and northeast, Bhutan in the east, Province No. 1 of Nepal in the west and West Bengal in the south. Sikkim is also close to the Siligur ...
,
India
India, officially the Republic of India (Hindi: ), is a country in South Asia. It is the seventh-largest country by area, the second-most populous country, and the most populous democracy in the world. Bounded by the Indian Ocean on the so ...
and parts of
West Bengal
West Bengal (, Bengali: ''Poshchim Bongo'', , abbr. WB) is a state in the eastern portion of India. It is situated along the Bay of Bengal, along with a population of over 91 million inhabitants within an area of . West Bengal is the fourt ...
,
Nepal
Nepal (; ne, नेपाल ), formerly the Federal Democratic Republic of Nepal ( ne,
सङ्घीय लोकतान्त्रिक गणतन्त्र नेपाल ), is a landlocked country in South Asia. It is mai ...
and
Bhutan
Bhutan (; dz, འབྲུག་ཡུལ་, Druk Yul ), officially the Kingdom of Bhutan,), is a landlocked country in South Asia. It is situated in the Eastern Himalayas, between China in the north and India in the south. A mountainous ...
.
Population
Lepcha is spoken by minorities in the Indian states of
Sikkim
Sikkim (; ) is a state in Northeastern India. It borders the Tibet Autonomous Region of China in the north and northeast, Bhutan in the east, Province No. 1 of Nepal in the west and West Bengal in the south. Sikkim is also close to the Siligur ...
and
West Bengal
West Bengal (, Bengali: ''Poshchim Bongo'', , abbr. WB) is a state in the eastern portion of India. It is situated along the Bay of Bengal, along with a population of over 91 million inhabitants within an area of . West Bengal is the fourt ...
, as well as parts of
Nepal
Nepal (; ne, नेपाल ), formerly the Federal Democratic Republic of Nepal ( ne,
सङ्घीय लोकतान्त्रिक गणतन्त्र नेपाल ), is a landlocked country in South Asia. It is mai ...
and
Bhutan
Bhutan (; dz, འབྲུག་ཡུལ་, Druk Yul ), officially the Kingdom of Bhutan,), is a landlocked country in South Asia. It is situated in the Eastern Himalayas, between China in the north and India in the south. A mountainous ...
. Where it is spoken, it is considered to be an aboriginal language, pre-dating the arrival of the
Tibetan languages
The Tibetic languages form a well-defined group of languages descended from Old Tibetan (7th to 9th centuries).Tournadre, Nicolas. 2014. "The Tibetic languages and their classification." In ''Trans-Himalayan linguistics, historical and descripti ...
(
Sikkimese,
Dzongkha, and others) and more recent
Nepali language
Nepali (; , ) is an Indo-Aryan language native to the Himalayas region of South Asia. It is the official, and most widely spoken, language of Nepal, where it also serves as a '' lingua franca''. Nepali has official status in the Indian st ...
. Lepcha speakers comprise four distinct communities: the Renjóngmú of
Sikkim
Sikkim (; ) is a state in Northeastern India. It borders the Tibet Autonomous Region of China in the north and northeast, Bhutan in the east, Province No. 1 of Nepal in the west and West Bengal in the south. Sikkim is also close to the Siligur ...
; the Támsángmú of
Kalimpong,
Kurseong
Kurseong is a town and a municipality in Darjeeling district in the Indian state of West Bengal. It is the headquarters of the Kurseong subdivision.
Located at an altitude of , Kurseong is from Darjeeling and has a pleasant climate throughout ...
, and
Mirik
Mirik is a small town and a Notified Area of Darjeeling district in the state of West Bengal, India. It is the headquarters of the Mirik subdivision. The name ''Mirik'' comes from the Lepcha words ''Mir-Yok'' meaning "place burnt by fire".
H ...
; the ʔilámmú of
Ilam District
Ilam district ( ne, इलाम जिल्ला) is one of 14 districts of Province No. 1 of eastern Nepal. It is a Hill district and covers . The 2011 census counted 290,254 population. The municipality of Ilam is the district headquar ...
,
Nepal
Nepal (; ne, नेपाल ), formerly the Federal Democratic Republic of Nepal ( ne,
सङ्घीय लोकतान्त्रिक गणतन्त्र नेपाल ), is a landlocked country in South Asia. It is mai ...
; and the Promú of southwestern
Bhutan
Bhutan (; dz, འབྲུག་ཡུལ་, Druk Yul ), officially the Kingdom of Bhutan,), is a landlocked country in South Asia. It is situated in the Eastern Himalayas, between China in the north and India in the south. A mountainous ...
. Lepcha-speaking groups in India are larger than those in Nepal and Bhutan.
[
The Indian census reported 50,000 Lepcha speakers,] however the number of native Lepcha speakers in India may be closer to 30,000.[
]
Classification
Lepcha is difficult to classify, but George van Driem
George "Sjors" van Driem (born 1957) is a Dutch linguist associated with the University of Bern, where he is the chair of Historical Linguistics and directs the Linguistics Institute.
Education
* Leiden University, 1983–1987 (PhD, ''A Gramma ...
(2001) suggests that it may be closest to the Mahakiranti languages
The Mahakiranti or Maha-Kiranti ('Greater Kiranti') languages are a proposed intermediate level of classification of the Sino-Tibetan languages, consisting of the Kiranti languages and neighbouring languages thought to be closely related to them ...
, a subfamily of the Himalayish languages
The Tibeto-Burman languages are the non-Sinitic members of the Sino-Tibetan language family, over 400 of which are spoken throughout the Southeast Asian Massif ("Zomia") as well as parts of East Asia and South Asia. Around 60 million people spe ...
.
Lepcha is internally diverse, showing lexical influences from different majority language groups across the four main Lepcha communities. According to Plaisier (2007), these Nepali and Sikkimese Tibetan influences do not amount to a dialectical difference.[
]Roger Blench
Roger Marsh Blench (born August 1, 1953) is a British linguist, ethnomusicologist and development anthropologist. He has an M.A. and a Ph.D. from the University of Cambridge and is based in Cambridge, England. He researches, publishes, and works ...
(2013) suggests that Lepcha has an Austroasiatic substratum, which originated from a now-extinct branch of Austroasiatic that he calls "Rongic".
Features
Lepcha is a non- tonal Sino-Tibetan language, although it does have phonemic stress or pitch that may be marked in the Lepcha script
The Lepcha script, or Róng script, is an abugida used by the Lepcha people to write the Lepcha language. Unusually for an abugida, syllable-final consonants are written as diacritics.
History
Lepcha is derived from the Tibetan script, and ma ...
.[ Much of its lexicon is composed of monosyllabic elements.]
Notably, words that are commonly considered obscene
An obscenity is any utterance or act that strongly offends the prevalent morality of the time. It is derived from the Latin ''obscēnus'', ''obscaenus'', "boding ill; disgusting; indecent", of uncertain etymology. Such loaded language can be us ...
or taboo
A taboo or tabu is a social group's ban, prohibition, or avoidance of something (usually an utterance or behavior) based on the group's sense that it is excessively repulsive, sacred, or allowed only for certain persons.''Encyclopædia Britannica ...
in other languages are not treated as such by native speakers.[
]
Script and romanization
The Lepcha script
The Lepcha script, or Róng script, is an abugida used by the Lepcha people to write the Lepcha language. Unusually for an abugida, syllable-final consonants are written as diacritics.
History
Lepcha is derived from the Tibetan script, and ma ...
(also known as "róng") is a syllabic
Syllabic may refer to:
*Syllable, a unit of speech sound, considered the building block of words
**Syllabic consonant, a consonant that forms the nucleus of a syllable
*Syllabary, writing system using symbols for syllables
*Abugida, writing system ...
script featuring a variety of special marks and ligatures. Its genealogy is unclear. Early Lepcha manuscripts were written vertically, a sign of Chinese
Chinese can refer to:
* Something related to China
* Chinese people, people of Chinese nationality, citizenship, and/or ethnicity
**''Zhonghua minzu'', the supra-ethnic concept of the Chinese nation
** List of ethnic groups in China, people of ...
influence. Prior to the development of the Lepcha script, Lepcha literary works were composed in the Tibetan script
The Tibetan script is a segmental writing system (''abugida'') of Indic origin used to write certain Tibetic languages, including Tibetan, Dzongkha, Sikkimese, Ladakhi, Jirel and Balti. It has also been used for some non-Tibetic langua ...
.[
Lepcha language is romanized according to varying schemes, the prevailing system being that of Mainwaring (1876). Most linguists, including Plaisier (2007), whose system is used in this article, have followed modified versions of Mainwaring's system. Other linguists and historians have used systems based on European languages such as English, French, and German.][
]
Phonology
Consonants
Lepcha consonants appear in the chart below, following Plaisier (2007):[
Retroflex phonemes /ʈ/, /ʈʰ/, and /ɖ/ are written in ]Lepcha script
The Lepcha script, or Róng script, is an abugida used by the Lepcha people to write the Lepcha language. Unusually for an abugida, syllable-final consonants are written as diacritics.
History
Lepcha is derived from the Tibetan script, and ma ...
as ᰀᰥ''kr'', ᰝᰥ ''hr'', and ᰃᰥ ''gr'', respectively. Most, though not all, instances of retroflex consonants indicate a word is of Tibetan
Tibetan may mean:
* of, from, or related to Tibet
* Tibetan people, an ethnic group
* Tibetan language:
** Classical Tibetan, the classical language used also as a contemporary written standard
** Standard Tibetan, the most widely used spoken dial ...
origin. To distinguish this retroflex sound in Lepcha script
The Lepcha script, or Róng script, is an abugida used by the Lepcha people to write the Lepcha language. Unusually for an abugida, syllable-final consonants are written as diacritics.
History
Lepcha is derived from the Tibetan script, and ma ...
, a dot may be written underneath: ᰀᰥ᰷, ᰝᰥ᰷, and ᰃᰥ᰷. Native instances of non-retroflex ᰀᰥ ''kr'', ᰝᰥ ''hr'', and ᰃᰥ ''gr'' may be pronounced either as written or as , , and . For example, ''tagrikup'', "boy," may be said either or .[
Lepcha has three glide consonants that may occur after certain initial consonants: , , and . When the phoneme operates as a glide, it can combine with as a double-glide: ᰕᰥᰤᰩᰮ ''mryóm'', "to spread over the ground, creep." Notably, syllables with the glide are given their own independent forms in the ]Lepcha script
The Lepcha script, or Róng script, is an abugida used by the Lepcha people to write the Lepcha language. Unusually for an abugida, syllable-final consonants are written as diacritics.
History
Lepcha is derived from the Tibetan script, and ma ...
.[
Velar consonants and preceding front vowels or are palatalized as and , respectively. Fricatives and are merged before .][
Lepcha speakers tend not to distinguish between and , pronouncing both as ~~. Additionally, initial is occasionally realized as . Under the influence of Nepali, some Lepcha speakers have lost the distinction between and , and between and .][
Of the above phonemes, only , and may be syllable-final. Native speakers tend to neutralize the difference between final and . In syllable-final position, stops are realized as an unreleased stop, usually pronounced with a simultaneous : for example, becomes .][
]
Vowels
According to Plaisier (2007), Lepcha has eight vowels:[
The phoneme denoted by is shortened and appears in closed syllables; is longer and appears in open syllables. The phoneme /e/ is realized as in open syllables and in closed syllables before or . Closed syllables ending in /p/, /m/, /l/, /n/, /r/, and /t/ show free variation between , , and even . Distinctions between /o/ and /ɔ/ are often lost among non-literate speakers, particularly those highly fluent in ]Nepali language
Nepali (; , ) is an Indo-Aryan language native to the Himalayas region of South Asia. It is the official, and most widely spoken, language of Nepal, where it also serves as a '' lingua franca''. Nepali has official status in the Indian st ...
, which does not contrast the sounds.[
]
Grammar
Lepcha grammar features nouns, pronouns, adjectives, adverbs, and verbs. Word order is typically subject–object–verb
Subject ( la, subiectus "lying beneath") may refer to:
Philosophy
*'' Hypokeimenon'', or ''subiectum'', in metaphysics, the "internal", non-objective being of a thing
**Subject (philosophy), a being that has subjective experiences, subjective con ...
(SOV). Lepcha morphology is somewhat agglutinative
In linguistics, agglutination is a morphological process in which words are formed by stringing together morphemes, each of which corresponds to a single syntactic feature. Languages that use agglutination widely are called agglutinative langu ...
, though most bare Lepcha lexicon is made up of one- or two-syllable words. Nouns are arranged into either head-first or head-last noun phrases. Relative clauses and genitive phrases precede nouns, whereas markers for demonstratives, definiteness, number, case, and other particles follow the noun. Lepcha is an ergative language, where the ergative case indicates transitivity and completedness of the event. There is no grammatical agreement between different parts of speech (i.e. verb conjugation). Adjectives follow nouns they modify, function as predicates, or stand independently as nominal heads. Adverbs generally directly precede verbs, and reduplication
In linguistics, reduplication is a morphological process in which the root or stem of a word (or part of it) or even the whole word is repeated exactly or with a slight change.
The classic observation on the semantics of reduplication is Edwa ...
is generally productive for adverbs of time (e.g. ''nám'', "year" → ''nám-nám'', "yearly").[
]
Nouns
According to Plaisier (2007), Lepcha has only two true " cases" that modify the noun morphologically: the definite article
An article is any member of a class of dedicated words that are used with noun phrases to mark the identifiability of the referents of the noun phrases. The category of articles constitutes a part of speech.
In English, both "the" and "a(n)" ar ...
-''re'' and the dative case
In grammar, the dative case (abbreviated , or sometimes when it is a core argument) is a grammatical case used in some languages to indicate the recipient or beneficiary of an action, as in "Maria Jacobo potum dedit", Latin for "Maria gave Jacob a ...
marker -''m''. All other noun markers, including for example the genitive marker, are actually invariable postpositions. A series noun markers may follow a single noun. Together, these cases and postpositions are:[
Plurals are marked differently according to whether they are human (-''sang'') or non-human (-''pong'') nouns. Notably, the plural is not used when the noun is followed by a number.][
According to Plaisier (2007), Lepcha ]personal pronoun
Personal pronouns are pronouns that are associated primarily with a particular grammatical person – first person (as ''I''), second person (as ''you''), or third person (as ''he'', ''she'', ''it'', ''they''). Personal pronouns may also take dif ...
s are as follows:[
Oblique forms appear in italics above. Lepcha personal pronouns can refer only to humans; otherwise demonstratives are used. Personal pronouns may take the definite article ''-re''.][
]
Thematic classes
Many Lepcha nouns can be grouped into one of several classes based on associated characteristics. For example, many animal names begin with the Lepcha script
The Lepcha script, or Róng script, is an abugida used by the Lepcha people to write the Lepcha language. Unusually for an abugida, syllable-final consonants are written as diacritics.
History
Lepcha is derived from the Tibetan script, and ma ...
syllabic /sâ/: ᰠᰲᰶ ''sâr'' means "goat," ᰠᰶᰛᰤᰨᰮ ''sâryom'' means "otter," ᰠᰶᰜᰩᰭ ''sâlók'' means "rhinoceros," and ᰠᰝᰪ ''sâhu'' means "monkey." Other noun classes include /sâ/ and /ka/ for plants, and /pe/ or /pâ/ for snakes and bamboo products.[ (multiple entries)]
Verbs
Lepcha verbs generally function predicate
Predicate or predication may refer to:
* Predicate (grammar), in linguistics
* Predication (philosophy)
* several closely related uses in mathematics and formal logic:
**Predicate (mathematical logic)
**Propositional function
**Finitary relation, o ...
s or, in relative clause
A relative clause is a clause that modifies a noun or noun phraseRodney D. Huddleston, Geoffrey K. Pullum, ''A Student's Introduction to English Grammar'', CUP 2005, p. 183ff. and uses some grammatical device to indicate that one of the arguments ...
s, as modifiers before a head-noun. Verbs may also be nominalized by a combination of suffixes. For example, ''zo'', "eat," may be suffixed to produce ''zo-shang-re'', "eating."[
Many ]intransitive verb
In grammar, an intransitive verb is a verb whose context does not entail a direct object. That lack of transitivity distinguishes intransitive verbs from transitive verbs, which entail one or more objects. Additionally, intransitive verbs are ...
s incorporate a causative
In linguistics, a causative (abbreviated ) is a valency-increasing operationPayne, Thomas E. (1997). Describing morphosyntax: A guide for field linguists'' Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. p. 173–186. that indicates that a subject either ...
-/y/- infix, sometimes followed by a -/t/ suffix, to take a transitive sense: ᰕᰦᰭ ''mák'', "die" → ᰕᰤᰦᰭ ''myák'', "kill;" ᰏᰶ ''plâ'', "come forth" → ᰏᰤᰶ ''plyâ'', "bring forth;" ᰄᰫ ''glú'', "fall down" → ᰄᰤᰳ/ᰄᰤᰬᰳ ''glyat/glyet'', "drop."[
Verbs are followed by grammatical suffixes and particles. Verbal particles indicating sureness, polite requests, authoritativeness, dubiousness, and other nonlexical information follow clauses. Below is a chart of such verb- and clause-final suffixes and particles largely following Plaisier (2007):][
Verbs are negated by a circumfix, ''ma–n(e)'': ''khut'', "to be able," becomes ''ma-khut-ne'', "to be unable."][
]
Vocabulary
According t
freelang.net
ref>
See also
*Lepcha script
The Lepcha script, or Róng script, is an abugida used by the Lepcha people to write the Lepcha language. Unusually for an abugida, syllable-final consonants are written as diacritics.
History
Lepcha is derived from the Tibetan script, and ma ...
* Sikkimese Tibetan language
*Languages of Nepal
Languages of Nepal constitutionally called Nepalese languages are the languages having at least an ancient history or origin inside the sovereign territory of Nepal spoken by Nepalis. The 2011 National census lists 123 languages spoken as a mot ...
*Languages of India
Languages spoken in India belong to several language families, the major ones being the Indo-European languages spoken by 78.05% of Indians and the Dravidian languages spoken by 19.64% of Indians, both families together are sometimes known ...
*Languages of Bhutan
There are two dozen languages of Bhutan, all members of the Tibeto-Burman language family except for Nepali, which is an Indo-Aryan language, and Bhutanese Sign Language. Dzongkha, the national language, is the only native language of Bhutan with ...
References
Further reading
*
*
{{DEFAULTSORT:Lepcha Language
Bodish languages
Languages of Sikkim
Languages of Nepal
Languages of Bhutan
Unclassified Sino-Tibetan languages