A Magar Kaike-Nepali-English Dictionary
Ambika Regmi
This is a tri-lingual dictionary of Magar Kaike, a Tibeto- Burman language, spoken by 1225 speakers as mother tongue in the four villages, viz., Sahartara, Tupatara, Tarakot and Belawa of Dolpa district in Nepal. Magar Kaike has a sustainable orality. This is a tonal and consistently ergative language. Syntactically, it is characterized by a complex verb agreement pattern referred to as conjunct-disjunct. Till the day, no dictionary is available in Magar Kaike.
This dictionary is organized into four sections. Section I looks at the origin, geo-linguistic situation and classification of Magar Kaike. It also presents sociolinguistic, phonological and morpho-syntactic properties of the language. At the end, it gives a guide to the users of the dictionary.
Section II presents a Magar Kaike-Nepali-English dictionary. Section III offers a Nepali-Magar Kaike index whereas Section IV provides an English-Magar Kaike index. As a preliterate language, it has around 1961 headwords. They are placed in the left hand margin in Devanagari bold face letters. Following the headword, the pronunciation is given in IPA (International Phonetic Alphabet) within slanted slashes. The word class of headwords is given both in Nepali and English in abbreviated forms. Nepali and English meanings of headword are given following word class.
The author, Dr. Ambika Regmi, PhD in linguistics, has worked as a senior researcher in Linguistic Survey of Nepal (LinSuN), Central Department of Linguistics, Tribhuvan University, Nepal. She has specialized in Tibeto-Burman linguistics, language documentation and sociolinguistic survey. At present, she is the Vice-president of Linguistic Society of Nepal.
ISBN 9783969391884 (Hardcover). Languages of the World/Dictionaries 81. 100pp. 2024.
