Sherpa language

Sherpa (ཤེར་པཱ།, EWTS: sher-pA, Devanagari: शेर्पा; also Sharpa, Sharpa Bhotia, Xiaerba, Serwa; ISO 639-3: xsr) is a language spoken in parts of Nepal and Sikkim mainly by the Sherpa community. About 130,000 speakers live in Nepal (2001 census), some 20,000 in India (1997), and some 800 in Tibet (1994).

Note that the above days of the week is derived from Tibetan language ("Pur-gae").

Sherpa is a SOV language.

Some grammatical aspects of Sherpa are as follows:

• Nouns are defined by morphology when a bare noun occurs in the genitive and this extends to the noun phrase. Defined by syntactic co-occurrence with the locative clitic, comes first in the noun phrase after demonstratives.
• Demonstratives are defined syntactically by first position in the NP directly before the noun.
• Quantifiers: Number words occur last in the noun phrase with the exception of the definite article.
• Adjectives occur after the noun in the NP and morphologically only take genitive marking when in construct with a noun.
• Verbs may morphologically be distinguished by differing or suppletive roots for the perfective, imperfective, and imperative. Occur last in a clause before the verbal auxiliaries.
• Verbal Auxiliaries occur last in a clause.
• Postpositions occur last in a postpositional NP.

Other typological features: 1. Split Ergativity based on Aspect 2. SO & OV (SOV) 3. N-A 4. N-Num 5. V-Aux 6. N-Post

Script

Sherpa is written in Tibetan script and Devanagari.

External links

• Himali Sherpa:sherpa Culture dictionary
• Ethnologue: Languages of the World : Sherpa
• Sherpa dictionary