Annotated Swadesh wordlists for the Brahui group (Dravidian family).

Languages included: Brahui [bra-bra].

DATA SOURCES

Bray 1934 = Bray, Denys. The Brāhūī Language. Part III. Etymological Vocabulary. Delhi: Manager of publications. // The only representative dictionary of the Brahui language, still the most authoritative source on the lexicon of this language. Bray's etymological notes are generally reliable for filtering out traces of external (areal) influences, but somewhat obsolete for material of Dravidian origin.

NOTES

I. General.

The only detailed and easily available source on Brahui lexicon is the dictionary by Denys Bray, based on the "standard" dialect of the Kalat district. Subsequent fieldwork has been limited in scale and, for the most part, confirms the accuracy of Bray's records, although, since the dictionary is essentially monodialectal, it remains unclear just how much dialectal variation actually exists in between Brahui dialects.

In the wordlists, most of the borrowings (around 25% on the 100-wordlist) have been rounded up and annotated, following Bray's own notes; considering that quite a few Brahui words remain without either a Dravidian or an areal etymology, the real percentage might actually be slightly higher.

II. Transliteration.

Bray's orthography reflects certain conventions typical of the latinized transcription for Indian languages, as well as some of his individual peculiarities. The complete list of symbols transliterated into the UTS standard is as follows:

Bray 1934	UTS
bh, ph...	bʰ, pʰ...
ḍ	ɖ
ṛ	ɽ
ṭ	ʈ
sh	š
zh	ž
ch	ɕ
j	ʓ
l_h_	ɬ
k_h_	x
g_h_	ɣ
ng	ŋg
V̄	Vː

Database compiled by: G. Starostin (June 2013).