High in the mountains, in the north of Pakistan live a small people of Burish. There are a lot of hypotheses about the origin of these people and their language, but none are absolutely reliable, but there are many legends and myths about them.
Very few of them remained, about 90,000 people. These people are called differently - Burishi, Burushaski, Verishki, Khunza. But we can say that they are still called Burishi. Burushaski is their language, and Verishki is a dialect of the Burushaski language. Well, the Hunza is a river in the valley of which the Burishi live.
This people has many mysteries and the first secret is their language.
A language without relatives
It is no secret that all languages of the world have related dialects and belong to language families and language groups with a common origin. Exceptions are extremely rare, and one of such exceptions is the Burisha - Burushaski language. It is by itself and has no kinship with any of the languages of the earth.
Of course, this fact surprised linguists and historians, and many hypotheses have appeared that are still trying to find languages related to Burushaski. However, only two of them deserve mention.
The first asserts that Burushaski belongs to the so-called Sino-Caucasian (Dene-Caucasian) language family. However, the very existence of such a group of languages is in great doubt. In fact, all languages and language groups were collected in it, which, like Burushaski, are considered unique. And although there are a sufficient number of scientists working in this direction, the existence of this language family did not find support among the majority of researchers - the evidence base is too few and weak.
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More recently, another hypothesis has appeared - Burushaski belongs to the Indo-European language family and is related to the ancient Phrygian language and, therefore, Burishi comes from the Balkans and Asia Minor. However, this hypothesis was also severely criticized due to the weakness and fragmentation of the argumentation. So at the moment Burushaski is still considered a unique language with no relatives.
And this language has one very interesting feature - it is very sensitive to noise. In this language, the verb changes depending on how loudly the action was performed. Take, for example, the action to open a window. There are three different verbs for such actions - when it opens very quietly, when it is quiet, but not too much, and when it is loud. Apparently the Burishes have a very good ear.
However, this does not say anything about their origin, and it is also shrouded in mystery.
Origin
Here we can confine ourselves to two words - it is unknown. However, the Burishi themselves consider themselves to be the descendants of the warriors of Alexander the Great, who settled in these places after his campaign in India. This legend of theirs, by the way, can to some extent serve as an argument in favor of the Indo-European origin of the language. The Phrygians were indeed in the Macedonian army. And of course their appearance works in favor of this hypothesis. They are very different from the surrounding peoples.
A girl from the Hunza people (Burishi).
However, geneticists do not confirm the version of the origin of Burishi from the Balkans. So, today it is generally accepted that they are the descendants of the ancient population of the region, those people who lived here before the arrival of the Indo-Europeans and Sino-Tibetans.
But how many legends and rumors go about them. They live for 120-150 years and practically do not age - at 40-50 they look like at 20. That during the season, which the Burishi themselves call "hungry spring", they do not eat anything at all and only drink a drink made from fruit juice once a day and spring water and so on for 3 months. And stuff like that.
In general, these Burishi are a strange people. Amazing, mysterious, interesting and beautiful.
