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What’s with this “Wren” thing?
The oldest extant version of the fable
we
are presenting here appeared in 1913 in the first volume of a two-volume anthology
of Low
Saxon folktales (Plattdeutsche
Volksmärchen “Low German Folktales”)
collected by Wilhelm Wisser (1843–1935). Read
more ...
Nepālī
Nepali (Nepalese)
Kathmandu,
capital of Nepal, where India meets Tibet
Language
information: Nepali (also known as “Nepalese,” “Gorkhali,” “Gurkhali,” “Khaskura” or “Parbatiya”)
is the main language of Nepal, currently being used by nearly twelve million
people. It is the native language of about half of Nepalis, namely of those
that inhabit the country’s lowlands. Other Nepalis, most of whom are native
speakers of Tibeto-Burman languages, use Nepali as a second language.
In
addition, Nepali is used as a lingua franca in the Darjeeling region of Western
Bengal, in Sikkim, in Bhutan and in parts of Tibet. It came into its own
right as a literary language in the 19th century as Literary Sanskrit was
losing ground.
Nepali is one of the eastern members of the Pahari subgroup
of Indo-Aryan. Like its Indo-Aryan cousins Hindi, Marathi, Kashmiri, Sindhi,
Bihari, Bhili, Konkani, Bhojpuri and their ancestor Sanskrit, it
is written
with the Devanāgarī (“devine royal city”) script (seen on the inital Nepali translation page).
Most
languages of the Indian subcontinent have a dental and
a retroflex consonant series where European languages have
only one. Most Germanic and Slavonic languages have only
an alveolar series for t, d,
n, r and l, most Romance and
Celtic languages only a dental one.
Like
closely related languages, Nepalese has two noteworthy phonological features:
aspiration of both voiceless and voiced plosives and, probably owing to an
ancient Munda or Dravidian substrate, a retroflex series of consonants. Furthermore,
it has two contrastive series of consonants where European languages have only
one. It has a dental series (in which the tip of the tongue touches the front
teeth) and a retroflex series (in which the tip of the tongue is bend back
or upward to touch an area behind the alveolar ridge). They lack a corresponding
alveolar series, which is the default in Germanic languages. In rendering loanwords
and names from English and other Germanic languages, speakers of Nepalese and
related languages thus must choose dental or retroflex substitution. Interestingly,
they tend to choose the retroflex series since it sounds more closely related
to them. This is why retroflexion is a striking characteristic of South Asian “accents” in English.
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