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Lhokpu
Lhokpu, also ''Lhobikha'' or ''Taba-Damtoe-Bikha'', is one of the autochthonous languages of Bhutan spoken by the Lhop people. It is spoken in southwestern Bhutan along the border of Samtse and Chukha Districts. Van Driem (2003) leaves it unclassified as a separate branch within the Sino-Tibetan language family. Phonology Vowels Consonants Classification George van Driem (2001:804) notes that Lhokpu, although unclassified, may be more closely related to the Kiranti languages than to Lepcha. Gerber, et al. (2016) also notes a particularly close relationship between Lhokpu and Kiranti. Furthermore, van Driem (2001:804–805) notes that Dzongkha, the national language of Bhutan, may in fact have a Lhokpu substratum. Grollmann & Gerber (2017) consider Lhokpu to have a particularly close relationship with Dhimal and Toto. Name Lhokpu is spoken by the Lhop—a Dzongkha term meaning "Southerners"—, who "represent the aboriginal dungDung population of western Bhutan. Ge ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Dhimalish Languages
The Dhimalish languages, Dhimal and Toto, are a small group of Sino-Tibetan languages spoken in Nepal, Bhutan, and the Jalpaiguri division of West Bengal, India. Classification Hammarström, et al. note in Glottolog that Dhimalish is best considered to be a separate Sino-Tibetan branch rather than as a subgroup of Brahmaputran (Sal), and consider Dhimalish as failing to show sufficient Brahmaputran diagnostic vocabulary. Sotrug (2015) considers Dhimalish to be particularly closely related to the Kiranti languages rather than to the Sal languages. Grollmann & Gerber (2017) consider Lhokpu to have a particularly close relationship with Dhimal and Toto. Gerber & Grollmann (2018) group Dhimal, Toto, and Lhokpu within Central-Eastern Kiranti. Comparative vocabulary Sanyal (1973:77–81) provides a comparative word list of Toto from Sunder (1895) and George Abraham Grierson's ''Linguistic Survey of India'', and Dhimal from Brian Houghton Hodgson Brian Houghton Hodgson (1 Februa ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Sino-Tibetan Languages
Sino-Tibetan (also referred to as Trans-Himalayan) is a family of more than 400 languages, second only to Indo-European in number of native speakers. Around 1.4 billion people speak a Sino-Tibetan language. The vast majority of these are the 1.3 billion native speakers of Sinitic languages. Other Sino-Tibetan languages with large numbers of speakers include Burmese (33 million) and the Tibetic languages (6 million). Four United Nations member states (China, Singapore, Myanmar, and Bhutan) have a Sino-Tibetan language as a main native language. Other languages of the family are spoken in the Himalayas, the Southeast Asian Massif, and the eastern edge of the Tibetan Plateau. Most of these have small speech communities in remote mountain areas, and as such are poorly documented. Several low-level subgroups have been securely reconstructed, but reconstruction of a proto-language for the family as a whole is still at an early stage, so the higher-level structure of Sino-Tibetan re ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Tibeto-Burman 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 speak Tibeto-Burman languages. The name derives from the most widely spoken of these languages, Burmese and the Tibetic languages, which also have extensive literary traditions, dating from the 12th and 7th centuries respectively. Most of the other languages are spoken by much smaller communities, and many of them have not been described in detail. Though the division of Sino-Tibetan into Sinitic and Tibeto-Burman branches (e.g. Benedict, Matisoff) is widely used, some historical linguists criticize this classification, as the non-Sinitic Sino-Tibetan languages lack any shared innovations in phonology or morphology to show that they comprise a clade of the phylogenetic tree. History During the 18th century, several scholars noticed paral ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Kiranti Languages
The Kiranti languages are a major family of Sino-Tibetan languages spoken in Nepal and India (notably Sikkim, Darjeeling, Kalimpong, and Bhutan) by the Kirati people. External relationships George van Driem had formerly proposed that the Kiranti languages were part of a Mahakiranti family, although specialists are not completely certain of either the existence of a Kiranti subgroup or its precise membership. LaPolla (2003), though, proposes that Kiranti may be part of a larger " Rung" group. Classification There are about two dozen Kiranti languages. Among the better known are Limbu, Sunuwar, Bantawa, Chamling, Khaling, Bahing, Yakkha, Wayu, Dungmali, Lohorung, and Kulung. Kiranti verbs are not easily segmentable, due in large part to the presence of portmanteau morphemes, crowded affix strings, and extensive (and often nonintuitive) allomorphy. Thus their relationship to each other has been a subject of debate. Overall, Kiranti languages are classified: ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Lhop People
The Lhop or Doya people (Dzongkha: ལྷོབ་ ་ཡང་ན་ དྲོ་ཡ) are a little-known tribe of southwest Bhutan. The Bhutanese believe them to be the aboriginal inhabitants of the country. The Lhop are found in the low valleys of Dorokha Gewog and near Phuntsholing in the Duars. The dress of the Lhop resembles the Lepcha, but they bear little similarity with the Bhutia in the North and the Toto in the west. The Doya trace their descent matrilineally, marry their cross cousins, and embalm the deceased who are then placed in a foetal position in a circular sarcophagus above the ground. They follow a blend of Tibetan Buddhism mixed with animism. See also *Ethnic groups in Bhutan Numerous ethnic groups inhabit Bhutan, with the Ngalop people who speak the Dzongkha language being a majority of the Bhutanese population. The Bhutanese are of four main ethnic categories, which themselves are not necessarily exclusive – the p ... * Sharchop References External ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Samtse District
Samtse District (Dzongkha: བསམ་རྩེ་རྫོང་ཁག་; Wylie: ''Bsam-rtse rdzong-khag''; older spelling "Samchi") is one of the 20 dzongkhags (districts) comprising Bhutan. It comprises two subdistricts (''dungkhags''): Tashicholing and Dophuchen. They are further subdivided into 15 gewogs (village blocks). The Samtse district covers a total area of 1304 km2. History and culture Historically, Samtse was sparsely populated as the mountain-dwelling Bhutanese considered the low-lying district to be prone to tropical disease. During the early 20th century, the district experienced a large influx of Nepali people who were invited to the area to assist in forest-clearing. Overall, the district population has been increasing, and there have been housing shortages in Samtse as reported by Kuensel. Samtse is also home to the Lhop (Doya) people, a little-studied ethnic group of approximately 2,500 persons. The Bhutanese believe them to be the aboriginals who pred ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Bhutan
Bhutan, officially the Kingdom of Bhutan, is a landlocked country in South Asia, in the Eastern Himalayas between China to the north and northwest and India to the south and southeast. With a population of over 727,145 and a territory of , Bhutan ranks List of countries and dependencies by area, 133rd in land area and List of countries and dependencies by population, 160th in population. Bhutan is a Democracy, democratic constitutional monarchy with a King of Bhutan, King as the head of state and a Prime Minister of Bhutan, prime minister as the head of government. The Je Khenpo is the head of the state religion, Vajrayana Buddhism. The Himalayas, Himalayan mountains in the north rise from the country's lush subtropical plains in the south. In the Mountains of Bhutan, Bhutanese Himalayas, there are peaks higher than above sea level. Gangkhar Puensum is Bhutan's highest peak and is the highest unclimbed mountain in the world. The wildlife of Bhutan is notable for its diversi ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Chukha District
Chukha District (Dzongkha: ཆུ་ཁ་རྫོང་ཁག་; Wylie: ''Chu-kha rdzong-khag''; officially spelled "Chhukha" ) is one of the 20 dzongkhag (districts) comprising Bhutan. The major town is Phuentsholing. Languages In Chukha, the main native languages are Dzongkha, the national language, and Nepali, spoken by the Lhotshampa in the south. The Bhutanese Lhokpu language, spoken by the Lhop minority, is also present in the southwest along the border with Samtse District. Administrative divisions Chukha District is divided into eleven village blocks (or '' gewogs''): * Bjacho Gewog * Bongo Gewog * Chapcha Gewog * Dala Gewog * Dungna Gewog * Geling Gewog * Getena Gewog * Logchina Gewog * Metakha Gewog * Phuentsholing Gewog * Sampheling Gewog Environment Chukha Dzongkhag covers 1,880 sq. km, but unlike most other districts, Chukha, along with Samtse, contain no protected areas of Bhutan. Although much of southern Bhutan contained protected areas in the ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Voiced Palatal Stop
The voiced palatal plosive or stop is a type of consonantal sound in some spoken languages. The symbol in the International Phonetic Alphabet that represents this sound is , a barred dotless that was initially created by turning the type for a lowercase letter . The equivalent X-SAMPA symbol is J\. If the distinction is necessary, the voiced alveolo-palatal plosive may be transcribed , (both symbols denote an advanced ) or ( retracted and palatalized ), but they are essentially equivalent since the contact includes both the blade and body (but not the tip) of the tongue. The equivalent X-SAMPA symbols are J\_+ and d_-' or d_-_j, respectively. There is also a non-IPA letter ; ("d" with the curl found in the symbols for alveolo-palatal sibilant fricatives ) that is used especially in Sinological circles. is a less common sound worldwide than the voiced postalveolar affricate because it is difficult to get the tongue to touch just the hard palate without also touching the b ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Voiced Velar Stop
The voiced velar plosive or stop is a type of consonantal sound used in many spoken languages. Some languages have the voiced pre-velar plosive, which is articulated slightly more front compared with the place of articulation of the prototypical velar plosive, though not as front as the prototypical palatal plosive. Conversely, some languages have the voiced post-velar plosive, which is articulated slightly behind the place of articulation of the prototypical velar plosive, though not as back as the prototypical uvular plosive. IPA symbol The symbol in the International Phonetic Alphabet that represents this sound is , and the equivalent X-SAMPA symbol is g. Strictly, the IPA symbol is the so-called single-storey G , but the double-storey G is considered an acceptable alternative. The Unicode character renders as either a single-storey G or a double-storey G depending on font; the character is always a single-storey G, but it is generally available only in fonts supporti ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Aspirated Consonant
In phonetics, aspiration is a strong burst of breath that accompanies either the release or, in the case of preaspiration, the closure of some obstruents. In English, aspirated consonants are allophones in complementary distribution with their unaspirated counterparts, but in some other languages, notably most South Asian languages and East Asian languages, the difference is contrastive. Transcription In the International Phonetic Alphabet The International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) is an alphabetic system of phonetic notation based primarily on the Latin script. It was devised by the International Phonetic Association in the late 19th century as a standard written representation ... (IPA), aspirated consonants are written using the symbols for voiceless consonants followed by the aspiration modifier letter , a superscript form of the symbol for the voiceless glottal fricative . For instance, represents the voiceless bilabial stop, and represents the aspirat ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Voiced Dental And Alveolar Stops
The voiced alveolar, dental and postalveolar plosives (or stops) are types of consonantal sounds used in many spoken languages. The symbol in the International Phonetic Alphabet that represents voiced dental, alveolar, and postalveolar plosives is (although the symbol can be used to distinguish the dental plosive, and the postalveolar), and the equivalent X-SAMPA symbol is d. There are only a few languages that distinguish dental and alveolar stops, among them Kota, Toda, Venda and some Irish dialects. Features Features of the voiced alveolar stop: * There are three specific variants of : ** Dental, which means it is articulated with either the tip or the blade of the tongue at the upper teeth, termed respectively '' apical'' and ''laminal''. ** Denti-alveolar, which means it is articulated with the blade of the tongue at the alveolar ridge, and the tip of the tongue behind upper teeth. ** Alveolar, which means it is articulated with either the tip or the blade ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
