A Grammar of Chhatthare Limbu
Govinda Bahadur Tumbahang
Centre for Nepal and Asian Studies, Tribhuvan University, Kirtipur
Chhatthare Limbu is spoken in parts of Dhankuta and Terhathum districts of eastern Nepal by approximately 30,000 populations. It is a complex pronominalized, Sino-Tibetan, Tibetan, eastern Himalayish, eastern Kiranti language. It has 20 consonants /p/, /t/, /k/, /c/, /ʔ/, /b/, /g/, /ph/, /th/, /kh/, /ch/, /s/, /ɦ/, /m/, /n/, /ŋ/, /l/, /r/, /w/ and /y/. It has 7 vowels: /i/, /u/, /e/, /o/, /ɛ/, /ɔ/ and /a/. The canonical shape of the syllable contains (a) vowel (b) vowel and consonant (c) consonant and vowel (d) consonant, vowel and consonant (e) consonant, consonant and vowel and (f) consonant, consonant, vowel and consonant. A word may contain up to five syllables.
Morphophonological changes are attributed to deletion, epenthesis, assimilation and vowel harmony. Nouns inflect for singular, dual and plural and have twelve cases. Pronouns inflect for exclusivity in nonsingular forms. Verbs are of three types: intransitive, reflexive and transitive. It is an agglutinative, suffix prominent, verb final language. A verb may have seven affixes, two prefixes and five suffixes. Generally the word order is subject, object and verb (SVO). A noun phrase can be formed of determiner, numeral, adverb, adjective and head. It has simple, compound and complex sentence forms.
ISBN 9783862887583. Languages of the World/Materials 507. 244pp. 2017.
