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Sawi Language (Dardic)
Sawi, Savi, or Sauji, is an endangered Indo-Aryan language spoken in northeastern Afghanistan and north-western Pakistan. It is classified as a member of the Shina language cluster within the Dardic subgroup. It is spoken in the village of Sau, on the east bank of the Kunar River, around south of the town of Arandu, which is on the border with Pakistan's Chitral region. Sawi speakers consider themselves part of the Gawar ethnic group, which is found in half a dozen of the surrounding villages and whose language is Gawarbati. In communicating with them, the people of Sau reportedly resort to using Pashto. During the long period of unrest, the population of the village was displaced into refugee camps in Chitral and Dir, but reportedly many people have now returned to Afghanistan. History The closest relative of the Sawi language is the southern variety of Palula spoken in Ashret further up the Kunar Valley in Chitral. Many Sawi speakers are aware of the similarity between ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Afghanistan
Afghanistan, officially the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan,; prs, امارت اسلامی افغانستان is a landlocked country located at the crossroads of Central Asia and South Asia. Referred to as the Heart of Asia, it is bordered by Pakistan to the east and south, Iran to the west, Turkmenistan to the northwest, Uzbekistan to the north, Tajikistan to the northeast, and China to the northeast and east. Occupying of land, the country is predominantly mountainous with plains in the north and the southwest, which are separated by the Hindu Kush mountain range. , its population is 40.2 million (officially estimated to be 32.9 million), composed mostly of ethnic Pashtuns, Tajiks, Hazaras, and Uzbeks. Kabul is the country's largest city and serves as its capital. Human habitation in Afghanistan dates back to the Middle Paleolithic era, and the country's strategic location along the historic Silk Road has led it to being described, picturesquely, as the ‘rounda ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Ashret
Ashirate ( ur, اَشْريٹ), sometimes written Ashiret or Asherate, is a settlement and an administrative unit, known as a Union Council, of Chitral District in the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province of Pakistan. It lies in the south of the district, on the road to the Lowarai Pass and Dir. The population speak the Palula language. See also * Chitral District Chitral District ( ur, ) was the largest district in the Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa province of Pakistan, covering an area of 14,850 km², before splitting into Upper Chitral District and Lower Chitral District in 2018. Part of the Malakand Div ... References External linksKhyber-Pakhtunkhwa Government website section on Lower Dir [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Khowar
Khowar () or Chitrali, is an Indo-Aryan language primarily spoken in Chitral and surrounding areas in Pakistan. Khowar is the lingua franca of Chitral, and it is also spoken in the Gupis-Yasin and Ghizer districts of Gilgit-Baltistan, as well in the Upper Swat district. Speakers of Khowar have also migrated heavily to Pakistan's major urban centres, with Peshawar, Islamabad, Lahore and Karachi having significant populations. It is also spoken as a second language by the Kalash people. Names The native name of the language is ''Khō-wār'', meaning "language" (''wār'') of the Kho people. During the British Raj it was known to the English as ''Chitrālī'' (a derived adjective from the name of the Chitral region) or ''Qāshqārī''. Among the Pashtuns and Badakhshanis it is known as ''Kashkār''. Another name, used by Leitner in 1880, is ''Arnyiá'' or ''Arniya'', derived from the Shina language name for the part of the Yasin (a valley in Gilgit-Baltistan) where Khowar is ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Kalasha-mun
Kalasha (locally: ) is an Indo-Aryan language spoken by the Kalash people, in the Chitral District in Pakistan. There are an estimated 5,000 speakers of Kalasha. It is an endangered language and there is an ongoing language shift to Khowar. Kalasha should not be confused with the nearby Nuristani language Waigali (Kalasha-ala). According to Badshah Munir Bukhari, a researcher on the Kalash, "Kalasha" is also the ethnic name for the Nuristani inhabitants of a region southwest of the Kalasha Valleys, in the Waygal and middle Pech Valleys of Afghanistan's Nuristan Province. The name "Kalasha" seems to have been adopted for the Kalash people by the Kalasha speakers of Chitral from the Nuristanis of Waygal, who for a time expanded up to southern Chitral several centuries ago. However, there is no close connection between the Indo-Aryan language Kalasha-mun (Kalasha) and the Nuristani language Kalasha-ala (Waigali), which descend from different branches of the Indo-Iranian la ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Nominal (linguistics)
In linguistics, the term ''nominal'' refers to a category used to group together nouns and adjectives based on shared properties. The motivation for nominal grouping is that in many languages nouns and adjectives share a number of morphological and syntactic properties. The systems used in such languages to show agreement can be classified broadly as gender systems, noun class systems or case marking, classifier systems, and mixed systems. Typically an affix related to the noun appears attached to the other parts of speech within a sentence to create agreement. Such morphological agreement usually occurs in parts within the noun phrase, such as determiners and adjectives. Languages with overt nominal agreement vary in how and to what extent agreement is required. History The history of research on ''nominals'' dates back to European studies on Latin and Bantu in which agreement between ''nouns'' and ''adjectives'' according to the class of the ''noun'' can be seen overtly. ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Animacy (linguistics)
Animacy (antonym: inanimacy) is a grammatical and semantic feature, existing in some languages, expressing how sentient or alive the referent of a noun is. Widely expressed, animacy is one of the most elementary principles in languages around the globe and is a distinction acquired as early as six months of age. Concepts of animacy constantly vary beyond a simple animate and inanimate binary; many languages function off of a hierarchical general animacy scale that ranks animacy as a "matter of gradience". Typically (with some variation of order and of where the cutoff for animacy occurs), the scale ranks humans above animals, then plants, natural forces, concrete objects, and abstract objects, in that order. In referring to humans, this scale contains a hierarchy of persons, ranking the first- and second-person pronouns above the third person, partly a product of empathy, involving the speaker and interlocutor. Examples The distinction between ''he'', ''she'', and other pers ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Grammaticalise
In historical linguistics, grammaticalization (also known as grammatization or grammaticization) is a process of language change by which words representing objects and actions (i.e. nouns and verbs) become grammatical markers (such as affixes or prepositions). Thus it creates new function words from content words, rather than deriving them from existing bound, inflectional constructions. For example, the Old English verb 'to want', 'to wish' has become the Modern English auxiliary verb ''will'', which expresses intention or simply futurity. Some concepts are often grammaticalized, while others, such as evidentiality, are not so much. For an understanding of this process, a distinction needs to be made between lexical items or content words, which carry specific lexical meaning, and grammatical items or function words, which serve mainly to express grammatical relationships between the different words in an utterance. Grammaticalization has been defined as "the change whereb ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Torwali Language
Torwali () is an Indo-Aryan language mainly spoken in the Bahrain and Chail areas of the Swat District in Pakistan. The language and other non-Pashtun communities are often referred to as "Kohistani" which is a name given by the Swat Pashtuns. Fredrik Barth says "The Pathans call them, and all other Muhammadans of Indian descent in the Hindu Kush valleys, Kohistanis". The Torwali language is said to have originated from the pre-Muslim communities of Swat. It is the closest modern Indo-Aryan language still spoken today to ''Niya'', a dialect of Gāndhārī, a Middle Indo-Aryan language spoken in the ancient region of Gandhara. Torwali is an endangered language: it is characterised as "definitely endangered" by UNESCO's Atlas of Endangered Languages, and as "vulnerable" by the Catalogue of Endangered Languages. There have been efforts to revitalize the language since 2004, and mother tongue community schools have been established by Idara Baraye Taleem-o-Taraqi (IBT). Phonolog ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Grammatical Agreement
In linguistics, agreement or concord (abbreviated ) occurs when a word changes form depending on the other words to which it relates. It is an instance of inflection, and usually involves making the value of some grammatical category (such as gender or person) "agree" between varied words or parts of the sentence. For example, in Standard English, one may say ''I am'' or ''he is'', but not "I is" or "he am". This is because English grammar requires that the verb and its subject agree in ''person''. The pronouns ''I'' and ''he'' are first and third person respectively, as are the verb forms ''am'' and ''is''. The verb form must be selected so that it has the same person as the subject in contrast to notional agreement, which is based on meaning. By category Agreement generally involves matching the value of some grammatical category between different constituents of a sentence (or sometimes between sentences, as in some cases where a pronoun is required to agree with its ante ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Participle
In linguistics, a participle () (from Latin ' a "sharing, partaking") is a nonfinite verb form that has some of the characteristics and functions of both verbs and adjectives. More narrowly, ''participle'' has been defined as "a word derived from a verb and used as an adjective, as in a ''laughing face''". “Participle” is a traditional grammatical term from Greek and Latin that is widely used for corresponding verb forms in European languages and analogous forms in Sanskrit and Arabic grammar. Cross-linguistically, participles may have a range of functions apart from adjectival modification. In European and Indian languages, the past participle is used to form the passive voice. In English, participles are also associated with periphrastic verb forms ( continuous and perfect) and are widely used in adverbial clauses. In non-Indo-European languages, ‘participle’ has been applied to forms that are alternatively regarded as converbs (see Sireniki Eskimo below), gerunds, ge ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Grammatical Person
In linguistics, grammatical person is the grammatical distinction between deictic references to participant(s) in an event; typically the distinction is between the speaker ( first person), the addressee ( second person), and others ( third person). A language's set of ''personal'' pronouns are defined by grammatical person, but other pronouns would not. ''First person'' includes the speaker (English: ''I'', ''we'', ''me'', and ''us''), ''second person'' is the person or people spoken to (English: ''you''), and ''third person'' includes all that are not listed above (English: ''he'', ''she'', ''it'', ''they'', ''him'', ''her'', ''them''). It also frequently affects verbs, and sometimes nouns or possessive relationships. Related classifications Number In Indo-European languages, first-, second-, and third-person pronouns are typically also marked for singular and plural forms, and sometimes dual form as well (grammatical number). Inclusive/exclusive distinction Some ot ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Grammatical Tense
In grammar, tense is a category that expresses time reference. Tenses are usually manifested by the use of specific forms of verbs, particularly in their conjugation patterns. The main tenses found in many languages include the past, present, and future. Some languages have only two distinct tenses, such as past and nonpast, or future and nonfuture. There are also tenseless languages, like most of the Chinese languages, though they can possess a future and nonfuture system typical of Sino-Tibetan languages. In recent work Maria Bittner and Judith Tonhauser have described the different ways in which tenseless languages nonetheless mark time. On the other hand, some languages make finer tense distinctions, such as remote vs recent past, or near vs remote future. Tenses generally express time relative to the moment of speaking. In some contexts, however, their meaning may be relativized to a point in the past or future which is established in the discourse (the moment b ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
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