This is very interesting. I haven't read much about this language, but from your description the "consecutive" reminds me of an aspect/tense I built into a conlang (constructed language)I created for a race of spirits. I think I'll do a little research on Burushaski and see exactly what the consecutive does.

I've been working on bringing up Burushaski crackpottery to the Basque level. But I can always use help (hint, hint)!

The lit.ref. numbers do look to be in the order given, so perhaps it's just the two editions of Ruhlen that are being contrasted, with some confusion about dates.

The author [Lorimer] deliberately makes no attempt to distinguish between the results of the inherent inaccuracy of normal speech and those of grammatical processes and just recorded what he heard.

Evidently it was actually Mrs. Lorimer who did the grunt field work.

What leapt at me was the description of Partawi Shah (Dr. Hunzai) as "the 1st poet of Burushaski language." From what I can tell, the claim is that he was the first person to write poetry in Burushaski. Fortunately, Burushaski does not seem to be a language devoid of poetry, because some more scrounging turned up this page of flute music from Hunza Valley where a person who goes by the handle 'shugulo' says:

An extraordinary effort to promote the traditional music of North. Need to expand the site by adding the reconstructed old songs with their background. Mr. Shahid Akhtar Qalandari is doing such an effort to collect and reconstruct the songs,which were sung,written or translated by miscellaneous various personnel's. An example is of a famous song written by Raja Mehboob Ali Khan of Nagar (former ruler of State of Yasin).The stanzas of this song have become extinct. One needs to recollect from any source and the best sources may be to contact the decendents of Raja Mehboob Ali Khan. The poetry in his song has laid the foundations of burushasky poetry in Burushaski Litrature. A song written by Mahabat Khan (younger brother of Grandfather of Shahid Akhtar Qalandari) has another very good example of Burushaski poetry. There is a need to have a survey to collect such songs written by unknown people and are becoming extinct. This is the duty of youth to collect such songs from elders otherwise we will loose a golden treasure of burusho literature.

As I am at work I can't check out the music, but it promises to be very interesting.

A page on the Overseas Pakistanis Foundation site has this to say on the subject of Burushaski literature:

The written literature in the language is scanty and scattered. A few poems and stories have been written in Burushaski by some obscure authors from Hunza, using a modified Perso-Arabic script.

Finally, here's an interesting tidbit google turned up in the Chinese wikipedia entry on Burushaski:

Tibetan sources also record a Bru-sá language of the Gilgit valley, which appears to have been Burushaski. The Bru-sá are credited with bringing the Bön religion to Tibet and Central Asia, and their script is supposed to have been the ancestor of the Tibetan alphabet. However, no Bru-sá manuscripts are known.

I had never heard of the Bön religion before. Suddenly I feel like a character in a story by Jorge Luis Borges.

Why is the Chinese wikipedia entry in English??

The Chinese version is plainly a clone of the English version, or rather an earlier state of it.

I too always said Burusháski, which is yet more evidence that the default stress in English is on the penultimate (the large number of inherited Germanic words conceal this).

By all means, more knowledge about Burùshaski and the other languages mentioned would be all to the good.

About larger classifications: Ruhlen is not reliable, as he tends to accept any new proposal (see a comment to that effect by Bill Poser some time ago). Bengtson is not reliable either. Although there seems to be mounting evidence for a Dene-Yenisei relationship, Dene-Caucasian is another matter. Finally, lately the meaning of the word "etymology" seems to have changed from "items on the accepted family tree of a particular word" (as in Eng head, Old English heafod, [related to] German Haupt, Latin caput) to "group of words presumed to be related", often on the basis of superficial resemblances - not the same thing at all. This second meaning is the one in the quote in LH's message.

An example of Ruhlen's unreliability:
Look up Zuni (should have a tilde on the n) and you might read that it has sometimes been linked to the "Penutian superstock" of Western North America, although the latter group (proposed by Edward Sapir) is not generally accepted, because of the diversity of the 15-odd language families (not just single languages) included in it. Ruhlen has written somewhere that "Zuni is obviously Penutian" (on what basis, he does not say), and that only old diehards stuck in the mud (or words to that effect) are unwilling to accept the connection. Actually, the connection is based on a single article published in 1965 in the International Journal of American Linguistics (IJAL, a journal dedicated to Native languages) by the well-known American linguist (now deceased) Stanley Newman, but there was for a long time a persistent rumor among Americanists that it might have been a hoax. It turns out that this was indeed the case, and the evidence (based on interviews with several linguists who were in on it, some of whom I know personally) was published in 2002, unfortunately in an article about Southwestern native agriculture that few persons interested in language are likely to read. I know about it because I know the author personally, the very respected linguist and anthropologist Jane Hill, who showed me a copy of her article.

The reason behind the hoax was that many linguists thought that the editor of the IJAL at that time, Carl Voegelin, was very lax about the standard of the articles he accepted, and the Zuni paper was meant as a test of whether or not he would swallow the bait. He did, and the article, which contains only rather unsystematic resemblances of vocabulary, was published. Apparently Newman was embarrassed about it, but did not want to embarrass Voegelin in turn by revealing the true state of affairs.

As for any language being "obviously Penutian" as Ruhlen says, I myself have been doing research in this group for a number of years, and the overall resemblances between the 15 or so language families included by Sapir (as opposed to the languages within the families) are far from obvious (and, in case you think that Newman could have been right anyway, Zuni definitely does NOT fit the group). More recently, Greenberg included an even larger number of languages and families, including Zuni, under the umbrella term "Penutian", a part of his so-called "Amerind", largely on the basis of yet other proposals which have never been accepted. (Greenberg's method, upheld by Ruhlen: accept the proposal, then look for words which might fit it - rather than the "old-fashioned" method: look for resemblances in structure as well as vocabulary, determine their systematicity, and propose groupings accordingly).

Wow, what a fascinating story about the IJAL hoax!

I can honestly (and carefully) say that I have never pronounced "Burushaski" incorrectly. Not even once.

("The bad news is that Burushaski has perhaps as many paradigms as Latin, but the good news is that they are much more regular"

Well. The chaotic noun plurals remind me of German -- you can guess the right one in maybe 40 % of the cases.

The consecutive is cool, though...

Ruhlen is not reliable [...] Bengtson is not reliable either.

Now, I agree that Ruhlen's method -- a phenetic method that counts similarities instead of shared innovations -- is fair enough for generating hypotheses, but bad at testing them. Also, if you write books about all languages in the world, mistakes are bound to creep in. But Bengtson? Please explain.

On German Haupt, please note that its meaning "head" is nowadays entirely poetic and is completely unknown in at least my dialect. Most of the time it's not a word, but a prefix that means "main".

I can honestly (and carefully) say that I have never pronounced "Burushaski" incorrectly. Not even once.

So you have never pronounced it?

I stressed it on the 3rd syllable before I found the German Wikipedia article on it. Maybe the default stress in non-compounds in German is on the penultimate, too... I'm not sure if I ever said the word aloud, though. :o)

BTW, the paragraph from the Chinese Wikipedia article is still in the English one.

I had a tiny epiphany when I realized that "hauptman" meant "captain" and that "hetman" was a derivative.

Well, the OED says "Believed to be derived from Ger. hauptmann," but as beliefs go, that's a reasonably reasonable one.

Curses! What's the HTML entity for a quick, smoke bomb-assisted getaway?

Re "hetman": not all -man are IE men. Wiki: "Dragoman designates the official title of a person who would function as an interpreter, translator and official guide between Turkish, Arabic, and Persian-speaking countries and polities of the Middle East and European embassies, consulates, vice-consulates and trading posts." That word has roots extending to Akkadian "targumannu".

I wouldn't be surprised if I found that "hetman" is a loan from a Turkish word which looks like a calque on an Arabic word.

"Turkomen" is also pure Turkish, but "men" is a kind of collective suffix.

I thought for awhile that "hetman" might be of Turkish derivation, from the Tatars to the Cossacks, but at this point it doesn't seem so.

According to the dictionaries, 'talisman' is also unrelated to 'man'.

Interesting -- the OED says (or said, a century ago) only that talisman "appears to be a corrupt or mistaken form of some Arabic, Persian, or Turkish spoken word, imperfectly caught by early travellers," but Merriam-Webster confidently traces it back to "Arabic tilsam, from Middle Greek telesma, from Greek, consecration, from telein to initiate into the mysteries, complete, from telos end."

Hmm, Hat, the online OED (I happened to have the window open) has two entries for "talisman", and the one in the relevant sense (talisman²) says:

= 17th c. F., Sp., Pg. talisman, It. talismano, ultimately representing Arab. ṭilsam, in same sense, ad. Gr. τέλεσμα [see TELESM]. The final -an is not accounted for.

An Arabic pl. ṭilsamān, alleged by Diez s.v., and thence in various recent dictionaries, is an error: no such form exists in Arabic, Persian, or Turkish. The only Arabic form at all similar would be a relative adj. *ṭilsimānī (one) dealing with talismans, if this were in use. The identity of talisman with τέλεσμα was first pointed out by Salmasius, Hist. Augusta 1620.

The bit with "appears to be a corrupt or mistaken form" &c. is in talisman¹, "A name formerly applied to a Turk learned in divinity and law, a Mullah; sometimes to a lower priest of Islam, a religious minister, a muezzin."

I wouldn't be surprised if I found that "hetman" is a loan from a Turkish word which looks like a calque on an Arabic word.

Ataman looks pretty Turkic, doesn't it?

Tibetan sources also record a Bru-sá language of the Gilgit valley, which appears to have been Burushaski. The Bru-sá are credited with bringing the Bön religion to Tibet and Central Asia, and their script is supposed to have been the ancestor of the Tibetan alphabet. However, no Bru-sá manuscripts are known.

Coincidentally I have spent the last three weeks researching the Bru-sha and related Zhang Zhung scripts found in Bön texts. I'll be blogging on them in a couple of days, but if you want a sneak preview of what the putative Bru-sha script looks like its letters are shown here.

The script is quite similar to Lantsa, and it is highly unlikely that it is anywhere near as ancient as is claimed or that it derives from Bru-sha (whether or not the identification with Burushaski is accepted). The claim that it is ancestral to the Tibetan script (specifically the cursive dbu-med style favoured by Bönpos) is, in my opinion, totally without foundation.

Great -- please leave a link to your post when it appears!