Word lists

This verb list is extracted from a volume of word lists edited by Austin Hale. The volume was dedicated to a comparison of the languages of Nepal, and the words are presented in English, Nepali and then in a few minority languages of Nepal (Jirel, Sherpa, Sunwar, Khaling, Newari, Chepang). The volume can be found at the following URL:

Le présent matériel a été élaboré dans le contexte d’une étude phonologique de plusieurs langues chibcha du Costa Rica (bribri, cabécar, malecu), plus précisément dans le cadre d'une thèse de doctorat de l'Université Lumière Lyon 2 et du Laboratoire Dynamique Du Langage (UMR 5596), menée par Natacha Chevrier et encadrée par Sophie Manus (Lyon 2, DDL) et Gérard Philippson (Inalco, DDL).

These checklists are added as appendices in her book Linguistic Fieldwork: A practical guide (2008) mostly intended for linguistic fieldwork students.

"There are two main reasons for the development of this wordlist. First, many of the existing African wordlists simply do not contain enough lexical items to allow one to do serious comparative analysis. Second, many existing African wordlists are specific to a particular language family, and thus, a pan-African list offers the potential of serious comparative research. [...]

It was developed to examine strategies for causativizing and decausativizing. For further discussion, see: Nichols, Johanna, David Peterson, and Jonathan Barnes. 2004. Transitivizing and detransitivizing languages. Linguistic Typology 8:149–211.

"In the nature of our design, and our discussion, we rely heavily on Talmy's (1985) notion of lexicalization patterns, in particular his cross-linguistic discussion of systems of motion description. We are interested, for instance, in patterns of semantic conflation (that is, what other semantic information besides 'motion' may be encoded in a verb root) and patterns of semantic distribution (that is, what types of information are encoded in the different morphemes that come together to build a description of a motion event)." (Wilkins et al., 1998: 1).

"STEDT is a long-term linguistics research project at the University of California at Berkeley. It is directed by Professor James A. MATISOFF of Berkeley's Linguistics Department. Our goal is the publication of an etymological dictionary of Proto-Sino-Tibetan (PST), the ancestor language of the large Sino-Tibetan language family. This family includes Chinese, Tibetan, Burmese, and over 200 other languages spoken in South and Southeast Asia." (from the STEDT website)

This wordlist builds upon the Swadesh wordlist, adapting it to South East Asia. Where available, lexemes are accompanied by Sino-Tibetan reconstructions.