kalaṣa alâ (nišei alâ) Lexicon

Presented here are approximately 1,900 words and grammatical formatives of the nišei alâ dialect of kalaṣa alâ, spoken in the community of Nišeigrâm in Nuristân's Wâygal Valley. Beginning in 1971 I recorded lexical and grammatical data from my friend Muhammad Alam Melabâr of Nišeigrâm, who was then a graduate student at Indiana University. In 1974 I spent two months in the Waygal and Parun valleys with Alam, where I recorded additional material. Alam was an innocent victim of the communists in 1979, when he was tortured to death by his communist jailers for having studied in America. Further refinements to my data came later from my friend Ahmad Yusuf Nuristâni, also of Nišeigrâm, while he was studying in America.

Entries in the lexicon may be found using the index to the right. The lexicon is indexed semantically by categories and alphabetically by phonemes.

• Entries within a semantic category are grouped by major grammatical category: nouns first, followed by adjectives, verbs, and adverbs.
• Entries under each phoneme are alphabetized according to the order given at the top of each phoneme's page. The alphabetic order differs from language to language, but it follows the Sanskritic practice of vowels before consonants, both ordered according to position of articulation and subsequently by degree of vocal-tract stricture.

A lexical entry contains the following parts:

1. The phonemic form, followed by any contextually conditioned alternant or dialectal variant.
2. Any inflectional or derivational suffixes or irregular inflectional forms.
3. A part of speech designator.
4. The English gloss, followed by any optional comments.
5. The morphological analysis of the form, in brackets.
6. The etymology of the form, if known, in boldface brackets. This includes the language from which the form is derived, followed by the etymon and English gloss. Etyma from Old-Indo-Aryan that appear in R. L. Turner's Comparative Dictionary of the Indo-Aryan Languages are indicated using the entry number in that work, prefixed by "T." A parenthesized comment on the etymology may follow, within which a "+" following a Turner number indicates that the current form was not included in Turner's entry and should be added; a "-" indicates that the current form was incorrectly included in the specified entry.
7. Optional examples of the entry.