Gerard Jacobus

The Kulung language is spoken by about 15,000 people in ten villages along the upper Hongu River in eastern Nepal. Tolsma, now a practicing government linguist, conducted his research in the region and gained detailed understanding of the purest form of the language spoken in the two primary villages as well as the less significant dialects of the remaining eight. He provides a comprehensive introduction to the language, which belongs to the Kiranti branch of the Tibeto-Burman family, along with summaries of the culture, clans, mythologies and ritual traditions that serve as foundations for idioms. He covers phonology, nominal categories, verb stem morphology, verbal affixes, compound verbs, subordination and subordinators, verbal derivation, non-finite verbal constructions, mood and particles. Also provided are sample conversations, a series of songs and even a recipe, and a Kulung-English lexicon and a guide to kinship terms. Annotation 穢2006 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)