LSASL 01: A Grammar of Athpare

A Grammar of Athpare

Karen Ebert
University of Zürich

Athpare is a Kiranti language spoken in a few villages around Dhankuta in eastern Nepal. The number of speakers is probably less than 2000, but unlike other small Kiranti languages, Athpare is still learned by children.

Athpare has SOV word order, all modifiers precede their head. The verb morphology is highly complex; subject and object person markers are realized partly as prefixes, partly as suffixes. There are separate number suffixes and tense markers, some of them followed by a copy of the person marker. Periphrastic tense-aspects (perfect and progressive) are fully grammaticalized. Athpare is morphologically ergative, with a split between 1st person and the rest. Minimal use is made of nonfinite verb forms: Compound verbs consist of two verbs marked for person and tense, subordinators follow inflected verbs.

The Athpare data are from a short field trip to Dhankuta. There are no previous descriptions of Athpare except for some data used in earlier publications by the author.

ISBN 9783895861468. LINCOM Studies in Asian Linguistics 01. 270pp. 1997.