Hunza Proverbs

Etienne Tiffou

About the Book

Etienne Tiffou has provided here a critical review of proverbs and riddles in the Burushaski language of the Hunza Valley, site of the legendary Shangri-la. Each entry is accompanied by linguistic and ethnologic commentaries. There are over 550 proverbs, riddles and manners of expression from Hunza. The book was undertaken to enrich the documentation already available on Burushaski, a spoken and isolated language of Karakoram, in the extreme north of Pakistan. It was hoped that the chosen stylistic form would bring to light particularities in syntactic turns and expressions; this hope was not betrayed.

In addition, the text yields ample and valuable information on the Hunzukuts' customs and on their conception of the world. The reader will also find stylistic art form and folkloric psychology in these proverbs. Texts are translated word-for-word, with relevant sociological, cultural, literary and linguistic information. A brief grammatical outline of the language is provided in the introduction. Three indexes, at the end of the book, make consultation with the text easy.

About the Author

Etienne Tiffou is a Professor in the Département de linguistique et philologie, Université de Montréal. He has been working on Burushaski since 1975, and is chiefly involved in the study of the Yasin dialect.

Table of Contents

1. Introduction
2. Proverbs
3. Jussive Formulas
4. Questions and Exclamations
5. Comparisons
6. Phatic Phrases
7. Riddles
   
   Index of Proverbs
   Index of Burushaski Words
   Index of English Words
   Index of Proper Names
   Bibliography

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