New book: Indo-Aryan linguistics

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Dhivehi (Maldivian)

BRUCE D. CAIN & JAMES W. GAIR, Cornell University

Dhivehi (Maldivian) is the national language of the Republic of
Maldives, an island nation located in the Indian Ocean south of India
and to the west of Sri Lanka. Dhivehi is an Indo-Aryan language closely
related to Sinhala, and with it forms the southernmost branch.   Dhivehi
has more than 240,000 speakers in the Maldives, and an additional 5,000
in Minicoy of India where the language is known as Mahal.  As the
national language of the Maldives, Dhivehi is fully developed and
thriving.  It has a literary history that spans at least nine centuries,
and employs its own unique right-to-left script called Thaana.  Dhivehi
printed materials are abundant, and it is the language of radio and
television.  Dhivehi is the medium of education, and literacy in the
Maldives exceeds 95%.
While enjoying a privileged status within the Maldives, very little is
known about Dhivehi in the outside world.  The inventory of published
works on Dhivehi is sparse.  In more recent years, the Maldives has
become more accessible to researchers, and interest in Dhivehi has
grown.   This sketch describes standard Dhivehi, the dialect spoken in
the capital Male' and surrounding atolls, and is based on a corpus of
published materials and elicited information gathered on site.   Some of
the more notable phonological features of Dhivehi include development of
prenasalized stops, compensatory lengthening of consonants from vowel
loss, and alternations of several consonants with the glottal stop.
Morphologically, Dhivehi has a system of volitivity marking for verbal
forms.  Dhivehi syntax features a cleft-like construction in which the
focused item is generally post-verbal, and a predicate nominal
construction with an equative marker on the subject.

ISBN 3 929075 16 4.
Languages of the World/Materials 63.
Ca. 70pp. Ca. EUR 25.46 / USD 32.50 / DM 53.00 / # 19.90.



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Dorothy Disterheft schrieb:
>
> Dear Dr. Lueders,
> HISTLING has about 520 subscribers. And please do send us annoucements
> on any topic (conferences, workshops, jobs, etc.) as long as they have
> some connection (even slight) to historical linguistics.
>
> Best,
>
> Dorothy