Himalayan Linguistics

Abstract

Areal patterns of numeral classifiers have been studied in several Asian languages for a long time. Emeneau (1956) was probably the first work that focused on the distribution of classifiers for defining India as a ‘linguistic area’. Although classifiers (except some ‘measure words’) are virtually absent in western Indo-Aryan languages like Hindi, they are extremely common in a number of Eastern Indo-Aryan languages. There are several studies on the classifier systems of Bengali, Assamese, Maithili and so on. But as yet there has been no study on Khortha, an eastern Indo-Aryan language that also has several classifiers. Some of these classifiers are borrowed from neighboring Munda (Austro-Asiatic) languages because of the prolonged contact between Indo-Aryan and Austro-Asiatic speakers in the eastern part of India. The classifier phenomenon in Khortha and Austro-Asiatic may profitably be seen as being part of a wider areal context, one that is out of kilter with respect to the ongoing exploration of South Asia as a linguistic area, as pointed out by Emeneau. This study provides a detailed description of previously unstudied classifiers, their functions and their distributions in Khortha, an Eastern Indo-Aryan language predominantly spoken in Jharkhand. Additionally, an intriguing aspect highlighted in this study is the postnominal use of certain classifiers to mark the specificity or definiteness of the object. Notably, this specificity is absent when the classifiers are combined with numerals. This paper investigates the distribution of classifiers in detail and illustrates how some of the Khortha classifiers can attach not only to numerals but also to nouns, demonstratives, adjectives, genitives and (past) participles.