A Year in Language, Day 110: Burushaski
Burushaski is a language isolate, having no known or, at least, no demonstrable relatives. It is spoken by 90-100,000 people in Northern Pakistan and, depending on who's maps you're looking at, India as well. As with Saanich I get to claim some distant scholarly connection to the language through one of my professors; Sadaf Munshi, who studies specifically the variety of Burushaski spoken on the Indian side of the border and has been more influenced by Hindi and Urdu.
Burushaski is an ergative language, meaning instead of marking subjects and objects with the familiar nominative and accusative cases you may find in Greek, Latin, or German (to name just a few) it uses the ergative and absolutive cases. The distinction lies in which case gets to claim the subject of an intransitive verb, which in English means a verb that cannot take a direct object. In nominative languages the nominative case gets it, along with the subjects of transitive verbs. In ergative languages the absolutive claims it, along with the objects of intransitive verbs.
Burushaski patterns consonants in 6 places; bilabial, dental, palatal, retroflex, velar, and uvular, which upon rereading I think would make for a good power rangers theme team. The stops in these places all have a three-way voicing distinction, between voiced (vibrating vocal chords), voiceless (no vibration), and voiceless aspirated (with a puff of air). When languages do make three way distinctions in stops this is the most common pattern cross linguistically.
Burushaski verbs are known for their complexity. Including the root each verb can consist of up to 11 parts, inflecting for tense, negation, agreement (with both subject and object), and more, though most verbs will only consist of a few of these. Another interesting feature of the language are obligatorily marked possesives, meaning there are words, like body parts and familiar relations, which must always be expressed in the possessive i.e. that arm of father must belong to someone.
