In the 1930s, the term “Bodish languages”, from Tibetan Bod “Tibet”, was coined by Robert Shafer as a linguistically more satisfactory way of referring to what Tibetologists called “Tibetan dialects”. These distinct languages derive from Old Bodish or “Old Tibetan”, of which Classical Tibetan is the earliest written exponent. East Bodish languages form a sibling subgroup which derives from a sister language of Old Bodish. However, Shafer also used “Bodish” in yet another sense, i.e. to denote the stage ancestral to both these branches. The obvious solution for this terminological ambiguity would be to repurpose Shafer's now defunct higher-order label “Bodic” to designate the taxon comprising both Bodish and East Bodish.
Instead, Nicolas Tournadre coined “Tibetic languages” to denote Shafer's Bodish minus East Bodish. In this volume, Lauren Gawne and Nathan Hill just write “Tibetan languages”. Some Drenjongke speakers in Sikkim might not object to their language being called “Tibetic” or “Tibetan”. However, applying either label to Dzongkha sits less well in Bhutan, a nation which has waged several wars against Tibet. The sole native speaker of a Bodish language contributing to this volume was nonplussed to discover after the fact that his native language had been categorized as a “Tibetan language”. In English parlance, the adjective Tibetan is construed as pertaining to the country Tibet. Since both Sikkim, historically a Tibetan ally, and Bhutan have existed as nation states independently of Tibet, Shafer's conventional term “Bodish” remains preferable.
The volume begins with a 37½-page discussion on evidentiality by Hill and Gawne, who, quoting from the Aṣṭādhyāyī, credit Pāṇini with being the first to observe the grammatical marking of evidentiality. Shiho Ebihara studies Tibetan sna n̂ “shine, seem, appear” and its usage as a sensory evidential in Western Archaic, Central, Kham, Amdo and Shar lects. To capture the meaning of sna n̂, she draws a semantic map, following Haspelmath. I fail to see how Ebihara's drawing is more illuminating than the English glosses that I have provided above. In 33½ pages, Gawne whisks her readers past categories of meaning in various Bodish languages to which she collectively affixes the label “egophoric”, a term coined by Claude Hagège, who beginning in 1974 introduced such terms as logophorique, anthropophorique, égophorique and médiaphorique. Gawne also takes a fleeting peek at seemingly similar categories of meaning elsewhere in the world in an attempt to arrive at a conceptualization of egophoricity as a typological phenomenon.
In 35 pages, Tournadre provides a typological sketch of evidentiality in well-documented Bodish languages. “Core categories” of meaning which he identifies include sensory, assumed, hearsay/reported, inferential and epistemic, which he then further subdivides. Comparing categories of meaning in various languages, he ventures to make generalizations regarding evidentiality as a grammatical phenomenon whilst advancing the hypothesis that egophoricity represents the final stage in the evolution of evidential systems. Hill's 28½-page study focuses on perfect experiential categories and the semantics of inference and direct evidence. Hill's sensitive treatment illustrates the language-specific meanings of grammatical categories in individual languages. Beyond Bodish, Hill observes that categories of perfect experiential meaning in other languages likewise each show their own language-specific interaction between direct evidence and inference.
In 23 pages, Guillaume Oisel derives the modern Lhasa Tibetan relative deictic system from the Middle Tibetan personal deictic evidentials so n̂ and byu n̂, which in that earlier stage of the language still contrasted with the relative deictic verbs phyin and ḥo n̂s. A 37½-page study dating from 1975 by Yasutoshi Yukawa, who died in 2014 at the age of 73, treats the meanings of Lhasa Tibetan evidential categories. The morphological simplicity of the system is contrasted with the unfamiliarity for non-Tibetans of the meanings of these categories. Yukawa's study distinguishes between the Type I auxiliaries yöö, ’yöö-ree, duu, yoŋ and čuŋ and Type II auxiliaries yin and ree, and their corresponding negative, polar and non-polar interrogative forms. His valuable exposition was translated from the Japanese by Hill. In her 33-page study of diaspora Tibetan, Nancy Caplow distinguishes evidential markers expressing current vs. past perception, personal vs. conscious knowledge, “happened to me”, “guess”, “think”, “seems”, general state, reported situation and inferences based on current perception, personal knowledge or unspecified evidence.
Purik is spoken in Kargil by some 100,000 Shia Muslims. Marius Zemp, who wrote a brilliant grammar of Purik, provides a 36-page overview of the evidential categories in this language, where equative yin is not contrasted with some other copula. This exposition is replete with apt examples, lucidly explained. The Drenjongke language of Sikkim is also referred to by the Indo-Aryan exonym Bhūṭiyā. In his 53-page study of copulas, Juha Yliniemi calls the language both “Drenjongke” and “Bhutia”. Yliniemi distinguishes equative ī́ː, negative equative mɛ̃̀, existential jø̀ʔ, negative existential mèʔ, sensorial duʔ, negative sensorial mìnduʔ, neutral bɛʔ, negative neutral mɛ̀mbɛʔ, interrogative bo ~ mo and negative interrogative mɛ̀mbo. After 34 example sentences, the greater part of his study is devoted to a comparison between the Drenjongke categories and those of Dzongkha and Lhasa Tibetan.
Gwendolyn Hyslop and Karma Tshering provide a 15-page synopsis of Dzongkha epistemic categories in terms of speculative, mirative, inferential, egophoric, alterphoric, hearsay and evidential notions. Zoe Tribur provides a 55-page synthesis of three large studies of Amdo Tibetan evidential markers by Jackson Sun, Felix Haller and Shiho Ebihara. In 22 pages, Hiroyuki Suzuki illustrates the use of over a dozen evidential categories in the moribund Khams dialect spoken in the three hamlets comprising Źollam. In her 14½-page instalment, Chirkova finally acknowledges that Dwags-po (or Báimă, as she calls the language in Mandarin) is a Bodish language, so no longer kowtowing to Sūn Hóngkāi's view that Dwags-po is not Bodish but represents some altogether distinct subgroup within the Trans-Himalayan language family. Copyediting could have been more attentive, for typographical errors such as “Geo-linguitsic” (p. 55), “Standand Tibetan” (p. 311) are not infrequent.
