Bunun

Which dialects survive

Five dialects remain: Isbukun, Takbunuaz, Takivatan, Takibaka and Takituduh. A sixth, Takipulan, died out in the 1970s. Li in 1988 grouped them into Northern, Central and Isbukun, or Southern, branches. Isbukun is the prestige dialect and also the most divergent, spread through Nantou, Taitung and Kaohsiung, while the conservative forms are in the north: Takibaka and Takituduh, both spoken in Nantou. Takivatan reaches central Hualien.

Isbukun drops glottal stops that other dialects keep between vowels, so 'bitter' is mapais there and mapaʔis elsewhere, and it has no /e/.

How auxiliaries do the work of adverbs

Bunun has an unusually large class of auxiliary verbs. They carry negation (ni, 'be not', and uka, 'have not'), permission (maqtu, 'can'), relative time (ngausang, 'beforehand'), comparison and even questions, via, 'why?'. Most ideas that English puts in an adverbial phrase go into an auxiliary. Time and place are the exceptions.

Some of the more than 200 derivational affixes behave oddly. These lexical, or anticipatory, prefixes turn up on the verb they derive and are foreshadowed on the auxiliary in front of it, a pattern found only in Bunun and a few other Formosan languages.

Why one suffix covers three roles

Bunun clauses are organised by focus. A verb in agent focus is often unmarked; a verb in locative focus takes -an. Undergoer focus takes -un, and it covers the patient, the instrument and the beneficiary alike, where many focus languages mark each separately. The argument in focus comes right after the verb, and in Isbukun it takes the marker a.