Himalayan Linguistics

The crosslinguistic concept of evidentiality, discriminating between direct and indirect knowledge, does not account for the Tibetic system, where the domain of direct is split up between external direct knowledge, based on immediate sense perception, and internal direct knowledge, based on acquaintance, control/ volition, responsibility, and/ or authority or engagement.   With the so-called ‘factual’ auxiliary red, several Tibetic languages also differentiate assertions, which are said to be neutral with respect to evidentiality. Ladakhi does not seem to have a corresponding counterpart. However, many instances of red can be directly translated by the compound auxiliary inok of the Central Ladakhi dialects and its siblings ɦinak, ɦindak, ɦinɖak, and intsuk elsewhere. The opposite, however, is not true. inok & Cie. do not present events neutrally, but express a speaker’s attitude towards the content and the addressee and, logivally, express the expected attitude of the addressee in questions. This attitude may vary considerably according to the context and socio-pragmatic contstraints. The Ladakhi auxiliaries inok & Cie. may thus shed light on the perhaps not so neutral character of the auxiliary red and, more generally, on how ‘evidential’ the ‘evidential’ systems in Tibetic languages and those influenced by them actually are.