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Book Reviews
A Grammar of the Thangmi Language: With an Ethnographic Introduction tothe Speakers and Their Culture. MARK TURIN. 2 vols. Brill’s Tibetan Studies
Library 5/6. Leiden: Brill, 2012. Pp. xxxviii + 958. $232.00 (hardcover).
Reviewed by David Bradley, La Trobe University
This is an excellent and comprehensive grammar of a Tibeto-Burman language spoken innorth central Nepal (more often called Thami in the literature, from the Nepali name forthe group). It includes forty-five texts (pp. 485—754) from a variety of genres and a very
extensive Thangmi-to-English lexicon (pp. 755—918), which make it an extremely valuable record of this endangered language.
The book starts with a chapter on the linguistic classification of Thangmi. In theearliest classification of Tibeto-Burman by Grierson (1909), usually followed by later
scholars such as Benedict (1972) and Shafer (1974), Thangmi is grouped most closelywith Baram and then with Tibeto-Burman languages of far northwestern Nepal and tothe west in India. But following recent work by van Driem (2001), Turin has now clearly
demonstrated that Thangmi is indeed closely related to Baram, and should be linked
further instead with Newar, Chepang, and related languages, and only more distantlywith the Kiranti langages to which it is geographically closest. There are minor problems
with some of the evidence adduced for this connection. The negative verb prefix ma¤ is
not just found in Thangmi and a few surrounding languages (p. 7); in fact, it is nearuniversal throughout Tibeto-Burman, as correctly noted later (p. 371). It is clear that thenumeral classifier systems of Tibeto-Burman languages are secondary, and as Thangmi
has been in extensive contact with Dolakha Newar for over a millennium, it would besurprising if the systems did not line up closely (pp. 13—16); one might also wonder
whether the Thangmi classifier gore for houses, Newari gar/gur, should also be linked
with Nepali and other Indo-Aryan ghar ‘house’. Similarly, some of the lexical similarities
between Newar and Thangmi cited (pp. 25—28) may be due to contact, as Turin indicates,and some have Tibeto-Burman etymologies outside this subgroup, but there are many
shared innovations in basic vocabulary, such as Thangmi da× ‘year’, Newar da/daY,among many others; this may be further related to the Kiranti form *to× reconstructed inMichailovsky (2003:246) as a bound form for ‘year’.
The second chapter (pp. 31—161) begins with an extremely comprehensive overviewof all the literature on Thangmi, including popular as well as more scholarly efforts. It
then moves on to a thorough discussion of ethnic group names, location and population information (38,500 people in the ethnic group, including about five thousand in
Darjeeling and Sikkim in India, but mainly in northern central Nepal and scatteredfurther east), discussion of the two dialects of Thangmi with extensive examples andcomparison with materials collected since 1901 by previous scholars, and a discussion of
the degree of vitality of the language (it is most fluently spoken by those over fifty, lessfluently spoken by young people under twenty). The Thangmi origin story is briefly summarized (pp. 108—29); this includes the source and meaning of the original seven patriclans and seven matriclans, with additional clans resulting from contact with Dolakha
Newar and others. There is a thorough discussion of the Thangmi kinship system (pp.
130—49), with numerous excellent charts showing kinship terminology (pp. 919—33). The
chapter concludes with a brief discussion of Thangmi ritual life, led by the shaman who iscalled guru (using the Nepali word for ‘teacher’), the rites of passage in which he assists,
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and a brief speculative history of the long-standing contact between Dolakha Newar andThangmi.
Chapter 3 is on phonology. Thangmi has a typical Indic system with four types ofstop or affricate consonants (voiceless unaspirated, voiceless aspirated, voiced andbreathy voiced), and five places of articulation for these consonants including bilabial,
dental, retroflex, and velar stops, as well as alveolar affricates c [ts], ch [tsÓ], j [dz], and jhê[dz ]; these last are typical of Nepali and other surrounding languages, replacing thepalatals found elsewhere in the Indian linguistic area. The only unusual consonant is abreathy voiced nasal, contrasting with a normal n. The fricative system is also unusual,with only s (realized as [‹] or [ ò ] but never [s]), and h (realized as cavity friction, misdescribed [p. 90] as “glottal approximant”, voiceless [h] initially, and usually breathy
voiced [ê] intervocalically. There are six vowels i e u o, plus a, which is [a] or [æ], and a©,which is [ó] or [ô]. It is indicated that the last “occurs only infrequently” (p. 166);
however, it is found in the very frequent nominal object suffix ¤ka©i, the first person
singular pronoun ga©i, and the frequent modal ma©i ‘must’, as well as in Nepali loans suchas maka©i ‘maize’. Unfortunately, the diacritic distinguishing a© from a is missing inchapter 6 and nearly all of chapter 7; apart from this, the entire volume is remarkably
free of typographical problems.
Chapter 4 discusses various morphophonological processes of sandhi. The main topic
of this chapter is a sandhi process that inserts w, y, or h between a vowel-final verb stem
and a vowel-initial suffix (pp. 209—21). Rather than stating this vowel by vowel according
to stem-finals, it would have been better to attempt a partial generalization: (1) inserth (phonetically [ê]) before u, (2) insert y before or after a front vowel i e (with two
exceptions: h can variably instead be inserted after i and before u in conformity withrule 1, and w is inserted between e and o), (3) insert w after a back vowel u o when it isbefore a and between e or u and o, and (4) insert h elsewhere (between a and a, andbetween a or o and o). Not surprisingly, semispeakers do not always have these alternations (p. 120). One may also wonder whether the sandhi forms represent earlier stemfinal consonants which verbs lose in most or all sandhi environments, as in Newar; forexample, the Thangmi verb pi ‘give’ usually gets y inserted; its Tibeto-Burman reconstruction (Benedict 1972:102) is *biy.
Chapters 5, 6, and 7 deal with the Thangmi nominals, verbs, and complex verbal
constructions, respectively. One could wish for more on discourse features and someconcluding remarks, but the analysis is thorough and convincing.
In the chapter on nominals, as expected in a Tibeto-Burman language, nearly all theaffixes are suffixes, and their degree of boundness to the preceding nominal stem differs;
some are clitics, others are postpositions, and others appear to be independent words.
The claim is made (pp. 349—51) that there are relatively few nominal compounds andthat those that do exist are unproductive, but there seem to be a substantial number inthe lexicon (pp. 755—918). Some of the nominal morphology is similar to that of Nepali,for example, the genitive ¤ko (p. 248) as well as some other instances that are identified
as such. The marking of gender also sometimes uses Nepali suffixes, but there are a few
kinship terms that contain Thangmi cognates ¤ma and ¤pa of the Tibeto-Burman female
and male suffixes. The first person plural pronoun ni can be related to a widespread
Tibeto-Burman etymon *ni, not just to forms in nearby languages such as Chepang(p. 300).
The lexicalized time ordinals (pp. 338—43), days and years in the past and in thefuture, like English ‘yesterday’ and ’tomorrow’, are very widespread in Tibeto-Burmanlanguages; Michailovsky (2003) has documented them for the Kiranti languages, andCaughley (2000) gives the forms for eight days and years before and after the present dayor year in Chepang. The Thangmi forms for up to four days in the past and in the future(p. 338) and four years in the past and two years in the future (p. 442) provide another

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example of this area of lexicon. Some of the ordinal forms are also cognate with the mostclosely-related languages; for example, Thangmi cit.ya×, Chepang tsit.nœm ‘day beforeyesterday’; Thangmi cit.abas, Chepang tsit.sœy ‘day after tomorrow’; Thangmi kimit.ya×,Chepang kÓuk.nœm ‘four days ago’, Thangmi kitri×.bas, Chepang kÓuk.sœy ‘four days inthe future’. These time ordinal forms often do not follow regular sound change patterns
seen in noun and verb stems; furthermore, cognacy among these forms is restricted tovery small subgroups of Tibeto-Burman–the Thangmi and Chepang forms show little
similarity to the Kiranti forms, let alone forms elsewhere. However, unlike many TibetoBurman languages as well as Nepali and some other Indo-Aryan languages, Thangmi
has no birth ordinal terms (p. 145).
As in most languages in this part of Tibeto-Burman, there is very extensive verb
agreement morphology, both for agent or subject and for object. This shows a split
ergative pattern: first person shows ergative-absolutive agreement, while other persons
have nominative-accusative agreement. A substantial part of this morphology is cognatewith that of the nearby Tibeto-Burman languages including Kiranti, such as the reflexive, Thangmi si and Proto-Kiranti *nši (p. 376). There are some minor contradictions
between statements about this agreement morphology in different places; at the beginning of the verb chapter, it is stated that it is obligatory (p. 353), but in various places itturns out to be optional, for example the plural marking on the verb may be omitted
when the subject is marked with the nominal plural suffix ¤pali (p. 232), on negatedverbs (p. 382) where plural marking is usually absent, and in a variety of nonfinite
clauses discussed in chapter 7 where most or all agreement morphology is absent–forexample, on transitive preterite participles in ¤to (pp. 470—73) among others.
The copulas discussed in chapter 7 (pp. 407—18) are very interesting. There are threepossibilities: tha, hok and a zero copula. Data from the entire two volumes, including thetexts in volume 2, indicates that the zero copula is relatively infrequent and occurs
mainly in equative copula environments with two noun phrases, and sporadically elsewhere–for example, when combining a noun phrase and a numeral in the meaning ‘to beof a particular age’ (p. 496, sentence 2, p. 497 sentence 17, and so on) or for either of theother two copulas in context. The tha form is also used as an equational, for change ofstate (‘become’), as an assertive ‘be the case’, after a predicate adjective, negated in a tagquestion, and occasionally as a locational (p. 411, sentence 17). The hok form is related toa verb meaning ‘sit’, and thus unsurprisingly is the usual locational (it can be given
translations such as ‘sit’, ‘stay’, ‘live’, ‘be at’); it is also used for existential (‘there is’)
where no change is involved, and for possessive (‘have’). One place where both tha andhok occur regularly is after a noun phrase plus uni× ‘like’, in the meaning ‘be like’. One
may wonder whether the adverbial form tha×un ‘maybe’ is derived from the copula thaplus ×un, the postposition ‘within’.
Chapter 7 also discusses the interesting inventory of converbs and related constructions marking the temporal relationship linking clauses in sequence, which show
contrasting patterns of agreement marking. These are mainly clause-final markers ofnonfinal clauses; some are nonfinite (that is, no agreement morphology appears on thepreceding verb) and others cooccur with agreement. Verb stems followed by the immediate sequence marker ¤ca, completed action ¤tini×, transitive preterite ¤to, sequential¤×a, and the continuous background marker ¤a©i (pp. 464—73, 479, 483—84) show noagreement, while imperfective participial ¤le, intransitive preterite ¤ta, and negative
participial ¤ki (pp. 469—78) have agreement on the associated verb; the ¤le form is always
followed by the copula verb hok with agreement, the ¤×a form is always followed by libi
‘after’, and the ¤a©i form is always preceded by a reduplicated verb. Though ¤le and ¤kihave the agreement before the sequence marker, the intransitive preterite form ¤ta
precedes agreement marking. One may wonder whether the ¤×a form is related to theverb ×a ‘say’, a widespread source of complementizers. There is also a Nepali conditional

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form, Thangmi ¤thyo, which is quite frequent in the texts and is also preceded byagreement-marked verbs; this occurs in final clauses.
One might have wished for a chapter on discourse structure and genres, drawing
examples from the extensive texts in volume 2, as well as some conclusions and summary. Also, if the lexicon were to be used to assist the community in language maintenance efforts, it would have been better to use a Devanagari alphabet like that of Nepali,
and to cite forms in Devanagari alphabetical order for maximum ease of use, but that is
not the purpose of this scholarly study.
Overall, this grammar is an ideal model that provides a thorough background on thelanguage and its cultural context, especially concerning kinship, with a great deal of
additional cultural information embedded in the texts provided in volume 2. It also
discusses phonology, morphology, and all major areas of clause syntax, and all claims caneasily be verified and exemplified in the texts as well as from the extensive text-derived
examples throughout the grammar. A large lexicon for comparative and other purposesis also provided. The author is to be congratulated for this excellent and comprehensivework.
References
Benedict, Paul K.
1972
Sino-Tibetan: A Conspectus. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Caughley, Ross C.
2000
Dictionary of Chepang: A Tibeto-Burman Language of Nepal. Pacific Linguistics 502. Canberra: Research School of Pacific and Asian Studies,
Australian National University.
Driem, George van
2001
Languages of the Himalayas: An Ethnolinguistic Handbook of the Greater
Himalayan Region. 2 vols. Leiden: Brill.
Grierson, George A.
1909
Linguistic Survey of India. Vol. 3: Tibeto-Burman Family. Calcutta: Officeof the Superintendent of Government Printing.
Michailovsky, Boyd
2003
Suffix-Runs and Counters in Kiranti Time-Ordinals. In Language Variation: Papers on Variation and Change in the Sinosphere and in the Indosphere in Honour of James A. Matisoff, edited by David Bradley, Randy
LaPolla, Boyd Michailovsky, and Graham Thurgood, 237—51. Pacific Linguistics 555. Canberra: Research School of Pacific and Asian Studies,
Australian National University.
Shafer, Robert
1974
Introduction to Sino-Tibetan. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz.

Creoles, Their Substrates, and Language Typology. Edited by CLAIRE LEFEBVRE.
Typological Studies in Language 95. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2011. Pp. x + 626.
$158.00, €105.00 (hardcover).
Reviewed by Jeffrey Heath, University of Michigan
This is a very focused collective volume. Flanked by the editor’s introduction and aconcluding commentary by Bernard Comrie on creoles and typology are twenty-fivechapters on specific creole-substrate pairings: nine on the Atlantic coast of Africa and theNew World, eight on Asia, and eight on Australia and the Pacific Islands.