West Himalayish

My own research indicates that West Himalayish is more closely related to the Far Western Sino-Tibetan linkage consisting of Raji-Raute, Dura, Kham-Magar-Chepang, and Newaric. There are many Tibetic loanwords in West Himalayish, but this is due to recent influence within the last two millennia.

The ancestors of West Himalayish speakers would have migrated westward along the Himalayan foothills from Northeast India through Nepal and into the foothills of Uttarkhand. They were subsequently pushed into deeper into the hills and up onto the Tibetan Plateau by the expansion of Indo-Aryan speakers during the Bronze Age (4,000 B.P. - 2,500 B.P.) (Widmer 2014).

My preliminary Proto-West Himalayish reconstruction is given below. Thanks to Manuel Widmer for pointing out Indo-Aryan loanwords in West Himalayish, which I have subsequently weeded out.

Sources

Widmer, Manuel. 2014. "A tentative classification of West Himalayish." In A descriptive grammar of Bunan, 33-56. Bern: University of Bern.

Widmer, Manuel. 2017. The linguistic prehistory of the western Himalayas: endangered minority languages as a window to the past. Presented at Panel on Endangered Languages and Historical Linguistics, 23rd International Conference on Historical Linguistics (ICHL 23), San Antonio, Texas.

Bruhn, Daniel; Lowe, John; Mortensen, David; Yu, Dominic (2015). Sino-Tibetan Etymological Dictionary and Thesaurus Database Software. Software, UC Berkeley Dash. doi:10.6078/D1159Q

List of reconstructions (Hsiu 2018)