LWM 516: A Sketch of Nubri Morphosyntax

Nubri is a Tibeto-Burman language spoken in the high mountainous areas in Gorkha district of western Nepal. The Government of Nepal enumerates the Nubri community as ‘Larke’. It is tonal, and bears a number of features of Sinospheric languages. Nubri has distinct sets of plain and honorific vocabularies of nouns and verbs.

      The nouns inflect for classifier, emphasis, number and case. The definiteness and indefiniteness in Nubri is expressed by using the clitics. It seems that Nubri is an ergative-absolutive language, but the ergativtity is optional. Most of the pronouns in Nubri resemble to that in Tibetan varieties. Although there are a very few monosyllabic adjectives, most adjectives are polysyllabic. The comparative and superlative forms are morphologically derived.

      The past conjunct suffix is -hin and the past disjunct suffix is -soŋ. Nubri has the finite forms of verbs particularly in the past tense, which was traditionally described as ‘conjunct/disjunct’ in some other languages. Some aspects are generally expressed by serial verb constructions.

      Nubri shares a number of features of SOV languages in its word-order correlations. Some modifiers precede the head noun in the noun phrases whereas others follow it. The negative suffix is -m. The complement clauses are marked by the suffix -ken, and -tsi in Nubri along with the grammaticalized form of the verb lap 'say'. Nubri permits different kinds of suffixes in relative clauses decided by the semantic role of the noun which is modified. The adverbial clauses in Nubri typically precede the main clauses. There are three non-finite forms of verbs used in the converbal constructions in Nubri. Nubri shares a number of morphological features with Kyirong Tibetan.