Acknowledgments
My deepest thanks go to Roland Bielmeier, who did not live to see the completion of my dissertation by a week. I am still sad to have lost the person to whom I owe what caused me so much joy in these last years: my work on Purik. He was the one who taught me historical linguistics and sent me off in 2005 to describe the Purik dialect spoken in Kargil, the Muslim western part of Ladakh, a district of Jammu and Kashmir in northwestern India, that had not in his opinion received the attention it deserved. This turned out to be a brilliant suggestion, as I am convinced today that Purik Tibetan indeed has a lot to offer, and as I hope this book demonstrates. Roland was always there to support me and my project to produce a comprehensive grammar of Purik. I hope that my thanks reach him somewhere.
I also want to express my thanks to Manuel Widmer, who has become both a dear friend and an inspiring linguistic companion. I deeply appreciate both, and I hope that our continuing discussions and future publications will do their part to keep it this way. I would also like to thank Thomas Preiswerk for similarly inspiring debates in the initial phase of this book. I am also grateful to the people who have participated in the Comparative Dictionary of the Tibetan Dialects (CDTD) and who supported me in various ways, namely Marianne Volkart, Brigitte Huber, Felix Haller, Veronika Hein, and Katrin Häsler. I want to thank also the first advisor of my dissertation, George van Driem, for his ongoing support, and Fernando Zúñiga for stepping in as my second advisor.
I owe my fervent thanks to Chris Donlay for his meticulous reading of an earlier version of this book and his countless valuable suggestions on how to improve it. A short review by an anonymous reader was also helpful in many respects. I would also like to thank Bernard Kovalski for helping me find the right English words to translate the wide variety of flowery adjectives used in Purik. Nevertheless, it is clear that I bear sole responsibility for any remaining mistakes and shortcomings.
I want to express my sincerest gratitude to all the people I met in and around Kargil since my first visit there in 2004. I am deeply thankful to the late Syed Abbas and his family, who treated me like one of their own in addition to providing me with extremely valuable data. In the beginning phase, I worked countless (and long) mornings with Syed Abbas himself, mainly on vocabulary, but he also told wonderful stories that I soon began analyzing with one of his sons, Syed Mehdi, who was brilliant at this task. Syed Ali, Syed Hyeder Shah, and Syed Hussein, as well as their mother Hajira, Archo Sakin, and Archo Nargis were always there to help solve problems we might encounter during our work. I also thank the other children of the same extended family, Syed Sajjad, Syed Irfan, Syed Imran, Archo Jabin, and Archo Fatima Nesa. Thanks to them I was able to learn some Purik baby talk.
In the second phase of my research, I started regularly working with Kacho Shabir Jawed from Yabgo, Goma Kargil. I am extremely thankful for the numerous hours he spent with me, doing an immense amount of work and having fun at the same time. I also apologize to his family for keeping him in the bazaar and away from them, especially his daughter Nasrin and son Zahir Khan.
I owe my thanks to the people of Kargil in general. They are the most hospitable people I have known, and I hope that they will appreciate this book, even though I suspect that it has become a little technical. I would like to mention the names of a few people to whom I am especially grateful: Imtiyaz Ali, Rahat, and Ibrahim (and the rest of their family) from the Dil Aram, as well as Hussein and my other acquaintances from there; Hassan the butcher; Bazgo Hassan and his family; Syed Sajjad, Mutaqi, Anwar, Ali from Kanor, Ajaz; the Munshi brothers; Khadim the Pang; and all the people from Goma Kargil, who greeted me and offered me tea whenever they saw me walk up to the Syeds’ house.
Many thanks also to the people that welcomed me and kindly agreed to work with me on my trips to the villages around Kargil, namely Wazir Mhd. Ali in Aro Pharka Shiliktse; Mhd. Hassan, son of Abdul Rahman, in Tumel; Mhd. Kazim in Jonjon (Darket); Fatima Bano in Ldoq (Darket); Mhd. Ali in Aro Lotsum; Mhd. Kazim, Son of Haji Hussein, in Batalik; Syed Mubarek in Sangko; Nissar Ahmad in Bhimbat; Gholam Mhd. in Mazhapor (Goshan, Dras); Tsewang Dolma and Kundze Dolma from Bodkharbu and Diskit Dolma from Wakha; and the people from Apati, who helped me brush the moss from the inscriptions on the rock next to their village.