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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 ...
Sirāīkī
Siraiki
Most Siraiki
people are Muslims
and live in the southern part
of
Pakistan’s Punjab Province.
Language
information: The Siraiki language is also known under the names Seraiki, Saraiki, Multani,
Derawali, Riasiti and Bahawalpuri. Its core geographical area is the southern
part
of
Pakistan’s Panjab (Punjab) Province and some northern parts of Sindh Province, an area
(Siraikistan) for which a movement is seeking provincial-
or state-level
independence.
Almost
all ethnic Siraikis speak Siraiki as their native language, and almost all of
them are Muslims and write their language with the Perso-Arabic-based Shahmukhi script that is used by Muslim speakers of neighboring languages as well (such
as Urdu, Panjabi, Sindhi and Balochi).
Siraiki speakers
can be found in other countries as well, especially in India and the United Kingdom.
Furthermore, Siraiki is used as a foreign language by a good number of
people
of
other
ethnicities
that have regular contacts with
Siraikis. To write Siraiki, some of them as well as some native speakers, especially
non-Muslim
speakers, use
the Devanagari script (which is used for instance for Hindi) or the Gurmukhi script (which is the primary script among non-Muslim speakers
of Panjabi).
Seraiki has a long and noted literary history. Especially noted is its poetic
tradition.
Being
an Indo-Aryan language, Siraiki is more or less closely related to languages
such as Sanskrit, Hindi, Urdu,
Sindhi, Rajasthani, Gujarati, Marathi, Bengali and Nepali. It may be considered a link between Panjabi and Sindhi. There are some scholarly
discussions considering it Sindhi with Panjabi influences or Panjabi with
Sindhi
influences.
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, Siraiki 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 Siraiki 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.
Unlike other Indo-Aryan languages but like Sindhi, Siraiki has implosive consonants.
(Technically speaking, these are plosives with a glottalic
ingressive
airstream
mechanism.)
This feature is widely believed to be due to substrates of Munda varieties that
used to be spoken in the area before the arrival of Indo-European speakers.
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