The kāf-e tabʿīz in Burushaski: A documentary comparison of Allama Nasir Hunzai's grammatical tables

Allama Nasir Hunzai’s works present the suffix cited as -ik in descriptive grammars under the label tabʿīz, called kāf-e tabʿīz in Burushaski Jawahir Paray. This documentary comparison examines three grammatical tables and twelve dictionary records alongside Berger’s and Yoshioka’s descriptions. All 34 rows supply a form in the third column, including rows whose singular and plural are written alike. In 17 of the 24 rows with differently written singular and plural, the third-column form begins with the plural exactly as written; this written relation does not identify a morphological base. Eleven dictionary headwords carry the category label; seven receive direct glosses rendered here as ‘some’, ‘a few’ or ‘certain’. These findings document an author’s grammatical presentation, rather than speakers’ acceptance or a new semantic analysis. A comparison with forty identified tokens in Berger’s Hunza texts does not decide between indefinite-plural and subset readings, or rule out a contextual-quantification possibility considered here. The contribution is a documentary account of the category’s labels, paradigm arrangement and non-uniformities, with limits on the semantic inferences these support. Preprint. Concise version by Alyas Nasiri.