Grammar

Burushaski is a language isolate not known to be related to any other language of the world. It is spoken by some 87,000 (as of 2000) Burusho people in the Hunza,Nagar, Yasin, and parts of the Gilgit valleys in the Northern Areas in Pakistan. It is also spoken by some 300 speakers in Srinagar, India. Other names for the language are Kanjut (Kunjoot), Werchikwār, Boorishki, Brushas (Brushias) and Miśa: ski.

Today Burushaski contains numerous loanwords from Urdu (including English and Sanskrit words received via Urdu), and from neighboring Dardic languages such as Khowar and Shina, as well as a few from Turkic languages and from the neighboring Sino-Tibetan language Balti, but the original vocabulary remains largely intact. The Dardic languages also contain large numbers of loanwords from Burushaski.

There are three divergent dialects, named after the main valleys: Hunza, Nagar, and Yasin (also called Werchikwār). The dialect of Yasin is thought to be the least affected by contact with neighboring languages and is generally less similar to the other two than those are to each other; nevertheless all three dialects are mutually intelligible.

Relationships

No connection has been established between Burushaski and any other language or language family. Several attempts have been made to establish a genealogic relationship between Burushaski and the Caucasic languages,^] or to include Burushaski in the Dené-Caucasianproposal. George van Driem attempted to establish links between Burushaski and Yeniseian (another putative member of Dene-Caucasian) in a language family he calls Karasuk. However, in 2008 Yeniseian was convincingly shown to be related to Na-Dene in a Dene-Yeniseianfamily, and the evidence does not appear to extend to Burushaski. An attempt to link Burushaski to the Paleo-Balkan and Balto-Slavic languages has also been made. None of these efforts have met with scholarly acceptance.

Following Berger (1956), the American Heritage dictionaries suggested that the word *abel (apple), the only name for a fruit (tree) reconstructed for Proto-Indo-European, may have been borrowed from a language ancestral to Burushaski. (Today “apple” and “apple tree” are /balt/ in Burushaski.) Others, however, reconstruct the Proto-Indo-European word for “apple (tree)” as *mel-, while yet others don’t think Proto-Indo-European had a word for “apple” at all and consider the different words of different Indo-European subgroups to be separate loans from different unidentified non-Indo-European languages.

Writing System

Usually Burushaski is not written. Occasionally, the Urdu version of the Arabic alphabet is used, but a fixed orthography does not exist.Partawi Shah has written poetry in Burushaski in the Arabic alphabet.

Tibetan sources record a Bru-sá language of the Gilgit valley, which appears to have been Burushaski. The Bru-sá are credited with bringing the Bön religion to Tibet and Central Asia, and their script is alleged to have been the ancestor of the Tibetan alphabet. Thus Burushaski may once have been a significant literary language. However, no Bru-sá manuscripts are known to have survived.

Linguists working on Burushaski use various makeshift transcriptions based on the Latin alphabet, most commonly that by Berger (see below), in their publications. The Burushaski Research Academy, in cooperation with Karachi University, has recently published the first volume (A toC̣) of a Burushaski-Urdu Dictionary using this transcription.

Phonology

Burushaski primarily has five vowels, /i e a o u/. Various contractions result in long vowels; stressed vowels (marked with acute accents in Berger’s transcription) tend to be longer and less “open” than unstressed ones ([i e a o u] as opposed to [ɪ ɛ ʌ ɔ ʊ]). Long vowels also occur in loans and in a few onomatopoeic words (Grune 1998). All vowels have nasal counterparts in Hunza (in some expressive words) and in Nager (also in proper names and a few other words).

Burushaski is a double-marking language and word order is generally Subject Object Verb.

Nouns in Burushaski are divided into four genders: human masculine, human feminine, countable objects, and uncountable ones (similar tomass nouns). The assignment of a noun to a particular gender is largely predictable. Some words can belong both to the countable and to the uncountable class, producing differences in meaning: for example, when countable, /balt/ means “apple”, when uncountable, it means “apple tree”. (Grune 1998)

Noun and Verbs

 morphology consists of the noun stem, a possessive prefix (mandatory for some nouns, and thus an example of inherent possession), and number and case suffixes. Distinctions in number are singular, plural, indefinite, and grouped. Cases include absolutive, ergative oblique, genitive, and several locatives; the latter indicate both location and direction and may be compounded.verbs have three basic stems: past tense, present tense, and consecutive. The past stem is the citation form and is also used forum and nominalization; the consecutive stem is similar to a past participle and is used for coordination. Agreement on the verb has both nominative and ergative features: transitive verbs mark both the subject and the object of a clause, while intransitive verbs mark their sole argument as both a subject and an object. Altogether, a verb can take up to four prefixes and six suffixes.

Original source at wikipedia.