Download or read book Kalasha Language Texts and Translations Vocabulary and Grammar written by Georg Morgenstierne and published by Ishi Press. This book was released on 2016-02-19 with total page 282 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Kalasha is a language spoken by three thousand speakers in the three Kalash Valleys of Bumboret, Birir and Rumbur in Chitral, Pakistan. Kalasha is also spoken by an estimated eight hundred people in the nearby former Kalash Valleys of Urtsun and Jinjoret. Those people have been reported to all be converted to Islam, but they still speak Kalasha in their homes. Gul Sharakat who has been conducting her own research by interviewing Kalasha speakers throughout Pakistan estimates there are fifteen thousand Kalasha speakers altogether. It is known that Kalasha is an old language, definitely two thousand years old and probably four thousand years old. Georg Morgenstierne says in his books that Kalasha has been spoken "for thousands of years." Morgenstierne describes them as "among the first wave of Indo-Aryan Immigrants." Rudyard Kipling wrote in "The Man Who Would Be King" "These women are whiter than you or me. . . . It's a mountainous country, and the women of those parts are very beautiful." These people are said to be descendants of the soldiers of Alexander the Great.
Download or read book Popular Buddhist Texts from Nepal written by Todd T. Lewis and published by State University of New York Press. This book was released on 2000-09-07 with total page 260 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book demonstrates how popular ritual texts and story narratives have shaped the religious life and culture of the only surviving South Asian Mahayana Buddhist society, the Newars of Kathmandu. It begins with an account of the Newar Buddhist community's history and its place within the religious environment of Nepal and proceeds to build around five popular translations, several of which were known across Asia: the Srngabheri Avadana, the Simhalasarthabahu Avadana, the Tara, the Mahakala Vratas, and the Pancaraksa. Lewis documents how the respective texts have been domesticated in Nepal's art and architecture, healing traditions, and rituals. He shows how they provide paradigmatic case studies that transcend the Nepalese context, illustrating universal practices or issues in all Buddhist communities, such as gender relations and stupa veneration, the role of merchants, ethnicity, violence, devotions to celestial bodhisattvas by kings and women, and the role of mantra recitations and healing rituals in the lives of Buddhists.
Download or read book Pagan Christmas written by Augusto S. Cacopardo and published by Gingko Library. This book was released on 2017-02-15 with total page 169 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This authoritative work sheds light on the religious world of the Kalasha people of the Birir valley in the Chitral district of Pakistan, focusing on their winter feasts, which culminate every year in a great winter solstice festival. The Kalasha are not only the last example of a pre-Islamic culture in the Hindu Kush and Karakorum mountains but also practice the last observable example anywhere in the world of an archaic Indo-European religion. In this book, Augusto S. Cacopardo takes readers inside the world of the Kalasha people. Cacopardo outlines the history and culture of this ancient but still extant people. Exploring an array of relevant literature, he enriches our understanding of their practices and beliefs through illuminating comparisons with both the Indian religious world and the religious folklore of Europe. Bringing together several disciplinary approaches and drawing on extensive ethnographic fieldwork, this book offers the first extended study of this little-known but fascinating Kalasha community. It will take its place as a standard international reference source on the anthropology, ethnography, and history of religions in Pakistan and Central South Asia.
Download or read book Tellings and Texts written by Francesca Orsini and published by Open Book Publishers. This book was released on 2015-10-05 with total page 568 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Examining materials from early modern and contemporary North India and Pakistan, Tellings and Texts brings together seventeen first-rate papers on the relations between written and oral texts, their performance, and the musical traditions these performances have entailed. The contributions from some of the best scholars in the field cover a wide range of literary genres and social and cultural contexts across the region. The texts and practices are contextualized in relation to the broader social and political background in which they emerged, showing how religious affiliations, caste dynamics and political concerns played a role in shaping social identities as well as aesthetic sensibilities. By doing so this book sheds light into theoretical issues of more general significance, such as textual versus oral norms; the features of oral performance and improvisation; the role of the text in performance; the aesthetics and social dimension of performance; the significance of space in performance history and important considerations on repertoires of story-telling. The book also contains links to audio files of some of the works discussed in the text. Tellings and Texts is essential reading for anyone with an interest in South Asian culture and, more generally, in the theory and practice of oral literature, performance and story-telling.
Download or read book Our Women are Free written by Wynne Maggi and published by University of Michigan Press. This book was released on 2001 with total page 306 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An exploration of the lives of women among the Kalasha, a tiny, vibrant community in Pakistan's North West Frontier Province
Download or read book Kalash Solstice written by Jean-Yves Loude and published by Ishi Press. This book was released on 2017-06-18 with total page 436 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Kalash are a tribe living high in the Hindu Kush mountains of NorthWest Pakistan. This book is the most complete and detailed study ever undertaken of the Kalash people. The authors, a French couple, lived among the Kalash and became so absorbed into the Kalash that they became as much as possible Kalash themselves. The woman in the partnership, Viviane Liever, even had her hair done in the Kalash way and had a black gown made in the way of Kalash women. She wore a Kalash headgear that Kalash women wear. They did this over a period of many years starting in 1976, coming to visit the Kalash valleys every one or two years with only a few gaps. The Solstice in English occurs twice each year, around June 20 and December 22, as the Sun reaches its most northerly or southerly excursion. The Kalash explain that they are looking at the sun every morning at sunrise time. As the Kalash live high in the mountains, the sun appears in between the high peaks each morning. Each day the sun appears at a slightly different place. The Kalash have names for each of these individual places in between the peaks. They look at the place in the mountains where the sun shines through. Each morning, the sun moves from 22 December to 20 June and then moves back. So the Kalash calculate the days and months of the year by these movements of the sun relative to the mountain peaks.
Download or read book Kalasha Dictionary with English and Urdu written by Abdul Khaliq and published by Ishi Press. This book was released on 2016-02-21 with total page 532 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Kalash are known in Chitral as the "Black Kafirs" because they are not Muslims and their women wear black robes. There are or were two kinds of Kafirs: Red and Black. The Red Kafirs were known because of their red or pale skin. The Black Kafirs are known because their women wear black robes. These people first became known to the outside world because of an 1888 story by Rudyard Kipling entitled "The Man Who Would Be King." That story was made into a movie in 1975 staring Sean Connery who usually played James Bond. It is considered to be one of the greatest movies of all time. Kalasha is a language spoken by three thousand speakers in the three Kalash Valleys of Bumboret, Birir and Rumbur in Chitral, Pakistan. Kalasha is also spoken by an estimated eight hundred people in the nearby former Kalash Valleys of Urtsun and Jinjoret. Those people have been reported to all be converted to Islam, but they still speak Kalasha in their homes. There are also Kalasha speakers in the Chitral Villages of Suwir and Kalkatuk. There are also Kalasha speakers who have moved out of the Kalash Valleys and live in Lower Pakistan in places such as Peshawar and Karachi. There is no way to determine how many Kalasha speakers there are, but Gul Sharakat who is on the cover here has been conducting her own research by interviewing Kalasha speakers throughout Pakistan and estimates there are fifteen thousand Kalasha speakers altogether. It is known that Kalasha is an old language, definitely two thousand years old and probably four thousand years old. Georg Morgenstierne says in his books that Kalasha has been spoken "for thousands of years." The first and probably still the only qualified professional linguist to study the Kalash Language was Georg Morgenstierne. Although there is a wide-spread belief that Chitralis are descended from the soldiers of Alexander the Great who passed through the area in 327 BC, nobody who has studied the subject seriously believes that. Rather, the prevailing view is that Kalasha, Khowar and Latin are descended from a common source, Proto-Indo-European, a language or family of languages that originated north of the Black and Caspian Seas around four thousand years ago and spread in all directions from there.
Download or read book Indian Pa dits Engaged in Tibetan Translations of Buddhist Logic written by Dr. Mantosh Mandal and published by Lulu.com. This book was released on 2014-12-29 with total page 107 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: It is an interesting fact that though Hindu Religion was limited in India and other few countries. Buddhism did not have any such limitation and hence out side India Buddhism was spreaded over all most all countries of East Asia. So it is expected that with the religion it's philosophy was spreaded also. It is also true that the inhabitants of Tibet were intelligent enough ro accept new lights of Buddhist philosophy.
Download or read book Evidentiality egophoricity and engagement written by Henrik Bergqvist and published by Language Science Press. This book was released on with total page 302 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The expression of knowledge in language (i.e. epistemicity) consists of a number of distinct notions and proposed categories that are only partly related to a well explored forms like epistemic modals. The aim of the volume is therefore to contribute to the ongoing exploration of epistemic marking systems in lesser-documented languages from the Americas, Papua New Guinea, and Central Asia from the perspective of language description and cross-linguistic comparison. As the title of the volume suggests, part of this exploration consists of situating already established notions (such as evidentiality) with the diversity of systems found in individual languages. Epistemic forms that feature in the present volume include ones that signal how speakers claim knowledge based on perceptual-cognitive access (evidentials); the speaker’s involvement as a basis for claiming epistemic authority (egophorics); the distribution of knowledge between the speech-participants where the speaker signals assumptions about the addressee’s knowledge of an event as either shared, or non-shared with the speaker (engagement marking).
Download or read book European Language Matters written by Peter Trudgill and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2021-11-11 with total page 289 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Bringing together Trudgill's columns for the New European, this collection explores the influence of European language on English.
Download or read book Kalash Siaposh Kafirs History and Customs by Charles Masson written by Charles Masson and published by . This book was released on 2017-09-07 with total page 86 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is one chapter, Chapter XI, of the book "Narrative of various journeys in Balochistan, Afghanistan, the Panjab and Kalat 1826-1838" by Charles Masson. This chapter describes the "Siaposh Kafirs" or "Wearers of the Black Robes." The Siaposh Kafirs are now known as the Kalash. They inhabit three valleys in Chitral in NorthWest Pakistan. The valleys are Bumboret, Birir and Rumbur. There are now only three thousand of these Kalash left. The rest have converted to Islam. However, their numbers are increasing, with more babies being born and a decline in the infant mortality rare. There are two kinds of Kafirs: Red and Black. The Red Kafirs are now called the Nuristanis. They inhabit the area of Nuristan in Afghanistan. There are also some Nuristani villages in the far upper parts of Bumboret, Birir and Rumbur. The Black Kafirs are known for wearing Black dress. You will see references to the color Black in the pages here. For example: "The males of the infidels, whose souls are said to have been more black than their garments," This book was first published in 1844. In spite of the passage of 127 years, little has changed. The females still wear the same black outfits with a headdress made of corwie shells and they dance in the same way. There are differences of opinion as to whether the Kalash have or had the same religion as the Nuristanis and whether they are the same people. The similarities between them are that they both do not bury their dead but put their dead in wooden boxes above ground, and both sit on small wooden stools and do not sit on the ground.
Download or read book The Middle East South Asia Folklore Bulletin written by and published by . This book was released on 1999 with total page 36 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Grammatical gender and linguistic complexity I written by Francesca Di Garbo and published by Language Science Press. This book was released on 2019 with total page 350 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The many facets of grammatical gender remain one of the most fruitful areas of linguistic research, and pose fascinating questions about the origins and development of complexity in language. The present work is a two-volume collection of 13 chapters on the topic of grammatical gender seen through the prism of linguistic complexity. The contributions discuss what counts as complex and/or simple in grammatical gender systems, whether the distribution of gender systems across the world’s languages relates to the language ecology and social history of speech communities. Contributors demonstrate how the complexity of gender systems can be studied synchronically, both in individual languages and over large cross-linguistic samples, and diachronically, by exploring how gender systems change over time. In addition to three chapters on the theoretical foundations of gender complexity, volume one contains six chapters on grammatical gender and complexity in individual languages and language families of Africa, New Guinea, and South Asia. This volume is complemented by volume two, which consists of three chapters providing diachronic and typological case studies, followed by a final chapter discussing old and new theoretical and empirical challenges in the study of the dynamics of gender complexity.
Download or read book Heirs to Forgotten Kingdoms written by Gerard Russell and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2014-11-20 with total page 470 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Despite its reputation for religious intolerance, the Middle East has long sheltered many distinctive and strange faiths: one regards the Greek prophets as incarnations of God, another reveres Lucifer in the form of a peacock, and yet another believes that their followers are reincarnated beings who have existed in various forms for thousands of years. These religions represent the last vestiges of the magnificent civilizations in ancient history: Persia, Babylon, Egypt in the time of the Pharaohs. Their followers have learned how to survive foreign attacks and the perils of assimilation. But today, with the Middle East in turmoil, they face greater challenges than ever before. In Heirs to Forgotten Kingdoms, former diplomat Gerard Russell ventures to the distant, nearly impassable regions where these mysterious religions still cling to survival. He lives alongside the Mandaeans and Ezidis of Iraq, the Zoroastrians of Iran, the Copts of Egypt, and others. He learns their histories, participates in their rituals, and comes to understand the threats to their communities. Historically a tolerant faith, Islam has, since the early 20th century, witnessed the rise of militant, extremist sects. This development, along with the rippling effects of Western invasion, now pose existential threats to these minority faiths. And as more and more of their youth flee to the West in search of greater freedoms and job prospects, these religions face the dire possibility of extinction. Drawing on his extensive travels and archival research, Russell provides an essential record of the past, present, and perilous future of these remarkable religions.
Download or read book The Indo Aryan Languages written by Danesh Jain and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2007-07-26 with total page 1039 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Indo-Aryan languages are spoken by at least 700 million people throughout India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Nepal, Sri Lanka and the Maldive Islands. They have a claim to great antiquity, with the earliest Vedic Sanskrit texts dating to the end of the second millennium B.C. With texts in Old Indo-Aryan, Middle Indo-Aryan and Modern Indo-Aryan, this language family supplies a historical documentation of language change over a longer period than any other subgroup of Indo-European. This volume is divided into two main sections dealing with general matters and individual languages. Each chapter on the individual language covers the phonology and grammar (morphology and syntax) of the language and its writing system, and gives the historical background and information concerning the geography of the language and the number of its speakers.
Download or read book Returning to Religion written by Jonathan Benthall and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2008-09-30 with total page 238 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How can one explain the resurgence of religion, even in a western context of rationality, postmodernity and scientific endeavour? The persistence of religious expression has compelled even diehard secularists, or proponents of the 'secularization thesis', to rethink their positions. Jonathan Benthall explains precisely why societies are not bound to embrace western liberal rationality as an evolutionary inevitability. He shows that the opposite is true: that where a secular society represses the religious imagination, the human predisposition to religion will in the end break out in surprising, apparently secular, modes and outlets.Concentrating on what he calls 'para-religion', a kind of secular spirituality that manifests itself within movements and organisations who consider themselves motivated by wholly rational considerations, Benthall uncovers a paradox: despite themselves, they are haunted by the shadow of irrationality. Arguing that humanitarianism, environmentalism, the animal rights movement, popular archaeology and anthropology all have 'religiod' aspects, his startling conclusion is that religion, rather than coming 'back', in fact never went away. A human universal, the 'religious inclination' underlies the fabric of who we are, and is essential for the healthy functioning of any society.
Download or read book Advances in Proto Basque Reconstruction with Evidence for the Proto Indo European Euskarian Hypothesis written by Juliette Blevins and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2018-09-03 with total page 444 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book presents a new reconstruction of Proto-Basque, the mother language of modern Basque varieties, historical Basque, and Aquitanian, grounded in traditional methods of historical linguistics. Building on a long tradition of Basque scholarship, the comparative method and internal reconstruction, informed by the phonetic bases of sound change and phonological typology, are used to explain previously underappreciated alternations and asymmetries in Basque sound patterns, resulting in a radically new view of the proto-language. The comparative method is then used to compare this new Proto-Basque with Proto-Indo-European, revealing regular sound correspondences in basic vocabulary and grammatical formatives. Evaluation of these results supports a distant genetic relationship between Proto-Basque and Proto-Indo-European, and offers new insights into specific linguistic properties of these two ancient languages. This comprehensive volume, which includes a detailed appendix including Proto-Basque/Proto-Indo-European cognate sets, will be of general interest to linguists, archeologists, historians, and geneticists, and of particular interest to scholars in historical linguistics, phonetics and phonology, language change, and Basque and Indo-European studies. Errata for the book can be found at: https://julietteblevins.ws.gc.cuny.edu/proto-basque/
