Sherpa language
Encyclopedia
Sherpa also called Nagari , is an abugida alphabet of India and Nepal...
: शेर्पा; also Sharpa, Sharpa Bhotia, Xiaerba, Serwa; ISO 639-3: xsr) is a language spoken in parts of Nepal
Nepal
Nepal , officially the Federal Democratic Republic of Nepal, is a landlocked sovereign state located in South Asia. It is located in the Himalayas and bordered to the north by the People's Republic of China, and to the south, east, and west by the Republic of India...
and Sikkim
Sikkim
Sikkim is a landlocked Indian state nestled in the Himalayan mountains...
mainly by the Sherpa
Sherpa people
The Sherpa are an ethnic group from the most mountainous region of Nepal, high in the Himalayas. Sherpas migrated from the Kham region in eastern Tibet to Nepal within the last 300–400 years.The initial mountainous migration from Tibet was a search for beyul...
community. About 130,000 speakers live in Nepal
Nepal
Nepal , officially the Federal Democratic Republic of Nepal, is a landlocked sovereign state located in South Asia. It is located in the Himalayas and bordered to the north by the People's Republic of China, and to the south, east, and west by the Republic of India...
(2001 census), some 20,000 in India
India
India , officially the Republic of India , is a country in South Asia. It is the seventh-largest country by geographical area, the second-most populous country with over 1.2 billion people, and the most populous democracy in the world...
(1997), and some 800 in Tibet
Tibet
Tibet is a plateau region in Asia, north-east of the Himalayas. It is the traditional homeland of the Tibetan people as well as some other ethnic groups such as Monpas, Qiang, and Lhobas, and is now also inhabited by considerable numbers of Han and Hui people...
(1994).
| English | Sherpa |
|---|---|
| Sunday | Ngi`ma (Ng' is the phoneme / ŋ / Velar nasal The velar nasal is the sound of ng in English sing. It is a type of consonantal sound, used in some spoken languages. The symbol in the International Phonetic Alphabet that represents this sound is , and the equivalent X-SAMPA symbol is N.... .) |
| Monday | Dawa |
| Tuesday | Mingma |
| Wednesday | Lhakpa |
| Thursday | Phurba |
| Friday | Pasang |
| Saturday | Pemba |
Note that the above days of the week is derived from Tibetan language ("Pur-gae").
Sherpa is a SOV language.
Some grammatical aspects of Sherpa are as follows:
- Nouns are defined by morphology when a bare noun occurs in the genitive and this extends to the noun phrase. Defined by syntactic co-occurrence with the locative clitic, comes first in the noun phrase after demonstratives.
- Demonstratives are defined syntactically by first position in the NP directly before the noun.
- Quantifiers: Number words occur last in the noun phrase with the exception of the definite article.
- Adjectives occur after the noun in the NP and morphologically only take genitive marking when in construct with a noun.
- Verbs may morphologically be distinguished by differing or suppletive roots for the perfective, imperfective, and imperative. Occur last in a clause before the verbal auxiliaries.
- Verbal Auxiliaries occur last in a clause.
- Postpositions occur last in a postpositional NP.
Other typological features: 1. Split Ergativity based on Aspect 2. SO & OV (SOV) 3. N-A 4. N-Num 5. V-Aux 6. N-Post