Lars Borin

Anju Saxena

Kanashi, a Sino-Tibetan (ST) language belonging to the West Himalayish (WH) subbranch of this language family, is spoken in one single village (Malana in Kullu district, Himachal Pradesh state, India), which is surrounded by villages where – entirely unrelated – Indo-Aryan (IA) languages are spoken. Until we started working on Kanashi, very little linguistic material was available. Researchers have long speculated about the prehistory of Kanashi: how did it happen that it ended up spoken in one single village, completely cut off from its closest linguistic relatives? Even though suggestions have been made of a close genealogical relation between Kanashi and Kinnauri (another WH language), at present separated by over 200 km of rugged mountainous terrain, their shared linguistic features have not been discussed in the literature. Based on primary fieldwork, this volume presents some synchronic and diachronic aspects of Kanashi. The synchronic description of Kanashi includes a general introduction on Malana and the Kanashi language community (chapter 1), linguistic descriptions of its sound system (chapter 2), of phonological variation in Kanashi (chapter 4), of its grammar (chapter 3) and of its intriguing numeral systems (chapter 5), as well as basic vocabulary lists (Kanashi-English, English-Kanashi) (chapter 9). As for the diachronic and genealogical aspects (chapters 6–8), we compare and contrast Kanashi with other ST languages of this region (in particular languages of Kinnaur, notably Kinnauri), thereby uncovering some intriguing linguistic features common to Kanashi and Kinnauri which provide insights into their common history. For instance: a subset of borrowed IA nouns and adjectives in both languages end in -(a)ŋ or -(a)s, elements which do not otherwise appear in Kanashi or Kinnauri, nor in the IA donor languages (chapter 6); and both languages have a valency changing mechanism where the valency increasing marker -jaː alternates with the intransitive marker -e(d) in borrowed IA verbs (again: elements without an obvious provenance in the donor or recipient language) (chapter 7). These features are neither found in IA languages nor in the WH languages geographically closest to Kanashi (Pattani, Bunan, Tinani), but only in Kinnauri, which is spoken further away. Intriguingly, traces of some of these features are also found in some ST languages belonging to different ST subgroups (both WH and non-WH), spoken in Uttarakhand in India and in western Nepal (e.g. Rongpo, Chaudangsi, Raji and Raute). This raises fundamental questions regarding genealogical classification, language contact and prehistory of the WH group of languages and of this part of the Indian Himalayas, which are also discussed in the volume (chapter 8).

Synchronic and Diachronic Aspects of Kanashi

Yang Xu

Nina Tahmasebi

Adam Jatowt 

Simon Hengchen 

Semantic change — how the meanings of words change over time — has preoccupied scholars since well before modern linguistics emerged in the late 19th and early 20th century, ushering in a new methodological turn in the study of language change. Compared to changes in sound and grammar, semantic change is the least understood. Ever since, the study of semantic change has progressed steadily, accumulating a vast store of knowledge for over a century, encompassing many languages and language families. Historical linguists also early on realized the potential of computers as research tools, with papers at the very first international conferences in computational linguistics in the 1960s. Such computational studies still tended to be small-scale, method-oriented, and qualitative. However, recent years have witnessed a sea-change in this regard. Big-data empirical quantitative investigations are now coming to the forefront, enabled by enormous advances in storage capability and processing power. Diachronic corpora have grown beyond imagination, defying exploration by traditional manual qualitative methods, and language technology has become increasingly data-driven and semantics-oriented. These developments present a golden opportunity for the empirical study of semantic change over both long and short time spans. A major challenge presently is to integrate the hard-earned knowledge and expertise of traditional historical linguistics with cutting-edge methodology explored primarily in computational linguistics. The idea for the present volume came out of a concrete response to this challenge. The 1st International Workshop on Computational Approaches to Historical Language Change (LChange'19), at ACL 2019, brought together scholars from both fields. This volume offers a survey of this exciting new direction in the study of semantic change, a discussion of the many remaining challenges that we face in pursuing it, and considerably updated and extended versions of a selection of the contributions to the LChange'19 workshop, addressing both more theoretical problems — e.g., discovery of "laws of semantic change" — and practical applications, such as information retrieval in longitudinal text archives.

Lars Borin

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