This study summarizes preliminary research into the distribution of morphosyntactic patterns in the languages of South Asia from three different families, above all in eastern-central South Asia, in a first attempt to unravel the linguistic prehistory of this part of the subcontinent. To achieve this goal a small, preliminary morphosyntactic database has been compiled on 29 languages from throughout South Asia based on data from published resources, original field work, as well as questionnaires sent out to researchers working on a number of languages from the region. This data base, although still quite limited, will serve as the starting point for a much larger, finer-grained analysis of languages from throughout the subcontinent which will ultimately contribute substantially to our knowledge of the linguistic prehistory of this region.
This study deals with what we refer to here as the “narrative marker” =a in Sadri, the traditional Indo-Aryan lingua franca of western and central Jharkhand in eastern-central India. We argue that this marker in Sadri is the result of the reanalysis of an inherited focus marker which originally attached to the present tense in Sadri and that this reanalysis was influenced by speakers of Kherwarian languages using Sadri as a lingua franca, as the distribution of this marker in Sadri closely resembles that of the homophonous finite marker in Kherwarian. Finally, we show how this feature contributes to further define a micro-linguistic area centered on western-central Jharkhand.
Every function of n inputs can be efficiently computed by a complete network of n processors in such a way that: If no faults occur, no set of size t n /2 of players gets any additional information (other than the function value), Even if Byzantine faults are allowed, no set of size t n /3 can either disrupt the computation or get additional information. Furthermore, the above bounds on t are tight!