In the world today, few nations are as homogeneous as Korea. There are no ethnic or linguistic minorities anywhere in its indigenous population. But the kinship-like bonds of this nation, together with its ties to the land itself, have fostered a monolithic view of the past. There is a tendency among Koreans to think of every artifact taken from Korea's soil as the handiwork of their forebears, every ancient tribe as ancestors, all prehistoric languages as forms of early Korean. However, in the remote past the Korean peninsula was a multicultural place.

Just when Korea became so homogeneous is not altogether clear, but certainly, there was a time when many diverse groups of people lived in that part of the world. Such was clearly the case around the beginning of the Christian era. In 108 BC, when Han Chinese forces first established commanderies on the peninsula, the region was already filled with local polities. In their interaction with these local groups, a process which had already been going on for centuries, the Chinese transcribed a scattering of names as best they could in phonograms. Some of the group names are thus preserved in Chinese historical annals; and from these records we know a little about where they lived and how they related to each other. But little institutional memory of the languages remains. For the most part, the vague records left about the peoples on the Korean peninsula provide room largely only for guesswork.

What is referred to here as “Early Modern Korean” extended from the beginning of the seventeenth century down to the end of the nineteenth century. It is the stage of the language represented in the texts written after the end of the Middle Korean period but before writing practices were updated and rationalized to reflect contemporary speech around the turn of the twentieth century. Early Modern Korean was, in that sense, a transition stage between Middle Korean and Contemporary Korean.

The Early Modern period began after the Japanese invasion of Korea in 1592. That invasion, followed by the seven, horrific years of the Imjin Wars, followed in turn by more years of widespread famine and disease, exacted a terrible price on Korean society. No books were published during that time, and when publication did resume around fifteen years later, Korean writing had changed. Gone were the diacritic dots used to mark tones; the triangle symbol used to write z had disappeared; consonant clusters and other kinds of spellings were confused and inconsistent; grammatical patterns and styles were noticeably altered. The differences in the textual records were so great, in fact, it was long believed that the wars with the Japanese had caused people to change the way they talked. Even today one sometimes hears it said that Hideyoshi's invasions caused Koreans to forget how to pronounce z's or to distinguish tones.

The story of Contemporary Korean begins with Korea's fitful emergence on the world stage in the late nineteenth century. The opening of Korean ports to outside powers brought sweeping political and social change to the country, and the pace and pressure only intensified over the next half-century. For the most part, the change was traumatic. The history of the Japanese colonial period, the partition of the country into north and south, and the culminating, internecine Korean War, was grim.

But the history of the language that played out against this backdrop was not altogether a story of misfortune. The reform of the language, particularly in how it was written, was very much at the center of what in Korea is called the “enlightenment period.” The stage for that movement was set in the early nineteenth century, when there developed out of the Sirhak (Practical Learning) tradition a body of scholarship, known as “enlightenment thought,” that argued for the opening of Korea to Western culture and technology. Then, when Korean ports were forcibly opened to foreign commerce with the Kanghwa Treaty of 1875, many of those Korean intellectuals looked toward constructing policies of reform and modernization. Thus began the “enlightenment period.”

At the top of the reformers' agenda was language. The creation of a modern state required a modern standard language for the proper functioning of society and government.

Introduction

In the course of a number of trips to North East India, I have come to realize that people there often use the words “language” and “dialect” to mean something quite different from the meanings that I usually give them. In some cases, their usage and mine are close enough to let us understand one another, but occasionally we run into trouble. In fact, “language” and “dialect,” are used in three different ways in North East India, each one emphasizing different aspects of communication. I will describe these varying usages in the hope that we can learn to understand each other better.

The linguist's meaning

First is the linguist's definition, and as a linguist this is the definition that I find most useful. Linguists are usually clear that by a “language” they mean the collection of spoken dialects that are mutually intelligible. For example, my native speech is a dialect of North American English, but I can understand people who speak British English and people who speak Indian English, so all of these ways of speaking count as “dialects” of a single language. It is the collection of all these dialects that we call “English.” On the other hand my speech is not mutually intelligible with Assamese, Angami, French, or Japanese, so these count as “languages” that are different from the English “language”. When I use my native speech, I am using a language that is different from Assamese, but I am, at the same time, using a dialect when compared, for example, to the English of London.

Linguistic diversity in India

It is a fact that India is one of the most linguistically diverse countries in the world, with seven language families; namely: Indo-Aryan (of Indo-European), Dravidian, Austroasiatic, Tibeto-Burman (of Sino-Tibetan), Tai (of Tai-Kadai), Andamanese and Great Andamanese which is newly added by Abbi (2006). The North East can be described as a mini-India because there are so many different communities having various cultures and speaking various mother tongues. For example, from the Dravidian language family, particularly Tamil but also Malayalam from Kerala are spoken by inhabitants in Moreh in Manipur, a small Indo-Myanmar border trade town 109 km from Imphal. They were driven out from Mandalay in 1960 by the Burmese Army. The North East is a garden of various languages and dialects with more than one hundred various mother tongues, especially Tibeto-Burman (TB) languages – most of which are neither fully documented nor scientifically described.

Manipur has officially recognised 33 tribal languages. Besides these, Manipuri (also called Meitei) itself has six dialects, namely, Sekmai, Khurkhul, Andro, Phayeng, Koutruk and Kwatha. All these tribal languages are not yet fully and scientifically described; of these some are endangered, namely, Tarao, Monshang, Moyon, Koireng, etc. Documentation of these languages is, of course, felt to be very necessary; loss of a language goes with the loss of beliefs, culture, ecology and medicinal herbal knowledge. In Manipur there was a language called Chakpa, spoken in Andro and Phayeng; now it was extinct. Documentation was not properly done.

Introduction

In all of the various linguistic varieties that are grouped under the heading Tangsa, verb complexes are marked by portmanteau morphemes that convey information about person, and tense/aspect or polarity. Consider (1), an example from Cholim Tangsa. Here the reciprocal verb răbom ‘say’ is marked by the 2nd person plural past marker, king. As we will see below in §2 (Table 4), -ing is the marker of 2nd person plural and k- is present on all 1st and 2nd person past forms.

The function of these markers is similar to the ‘sentence final words’ in Jinghpaw and Nocte as discussed by DeLancey (this volume), though much simpler than the system described for Jinghpaw (Jinghpo) in China by Dai (1992), briefly reprised in Dai and Diehl (2003).

We will term these ‘agreement markers’ because they carry person agreement with at least one of the arguments of the verb. In the Cholim and Lochhang varieties (§2 and §3), this agreement is only with the actor, whereas in Moklum, as reported by Das Gupta (1980), and briefly discussed in §5, there is hierarchical marking, in other words 1st and 2nd person undergoers are marked together with the actor in at least some situations. This difference of structure between Cholim and Lochhang on one hand and Moklum on the other has implications for the subgrouping of Tangsa varieties. Although much more data needs to be collected, particularly on Moklum, it would appear that Moklum should be treated as belonging to a different subgroup within Tangsa.

Introduction

Along with number, gender and case, nouns in Assamese and all other Indo-European languages have another important grammatical category, the discussion of which was not found in traditional grammars of olden days of east or west. Nouns, especially class nouns, need to be determined by some devices when they are used in sentences to realize any argument – subject, object or complement. The noun man in English or manuh in Assamese, for example, can refer to all the human beings in one use and in another use the reference of the same noun can be restricted to only one person. The reference of the noun man in former use is called generic and in later the reference is said to be of specific. The specific reference of a class noun can be again definite or indefinite.

One of the reasons behind the absence of discussion on the determinative elements of nouns in traditional grammar may be the absence of a definite article in the older Germanic languages in the west (Hawkins 1978: 13) and any such element in Old and Middle Indo-Aryan Languages in the east (Kakati 1972: 278) to show contrast between definiteness and indefiniteness of NPs. In modern linguistics, however, this feature has been studied by scholars from many different backgrounds and perspectives. Traditional grammarians (Christopherson 1939; Jespersen 1949), philologists (Heinrichs 1954; Hodler 1954), structuralists (Yotsukura 1970), transformational syntacticians (Smith 1964; Higham 1972), and philosophers and logicians (Russell 1905; Strawson 1950) have all contributed to the currently available data and descriptive insights.

Introduction

Marma is a dialect of Arakanese, a Southwestern variety of Burmese. It is spoken mainly in the Chittagong Hill Tracts (henceforth CHT), Bangladesh, where the population of Marma speaking people is 154,216 (1991 Census). In India, Marma is commonly known as Mogh and the corresponding population is 30,559 (2001 Census). There are hardly any linguistic reports on Marma/Mogh, except for Konow (1903), Bernot (1958; 1966), Huziwara (2003) and Maggard et al. (2007).

Marma has 7 vowels /a, e, i, ɔ, o, u, ə, 27 syllable-initial consonants /p, ph [ph], b, t, th [th], d, c[tc], ch[tch], j[dz], k, kh [kh], g, m, hm, n, hn, ŋ (which also occurs as a syllable final), hŋ, l, hl, r, hr, y, w, θ, ∫, h/ and one syllable-final consonant /?/ with four distinctive tones: the high tone is marked with an acute accent; the rising tone, with a hacek; the stop tone, with a word-final glottal stop; and the low tone is not marked.

The general grammatical information of Marma is as follows. Lexemes are classified into nouns, verbs and particles. Adjectives occur as a subclass of verbs; adverbs, as a subclass of nouns. The most frequent word order in a sentence is SOV, although arguments may occur before or after the predicate, depending on context. Marma has agglutinative morphology, predominantly using suffixes. Temporal/procedural setting and/or modification is accomplished via combinations of auxiliary verbs and predicate markers. Clause chaining occurs with the aid of various kinds of subordinating/converb-forming markers.

Introduction

The Hajong group is one of the scheduled tribes of North East India. They live mainly in Assam and Meghalaya in India and in the Mymensingh District of Bangladesh. Hajong is classified in the Ethnologue as Indo-European > Indo-Iranian > Indo-Aryan > Eastern zone > Bengali- Assamese (Gordon 2005). Although Hajong is classified as Indo-Aryan (IA), several Hajong case markers are not cognate with those of the large neighbouring IA languages, Bangla and Asamiya. This raises the question of the origin of these case markers. Some authors have speculated that the Hajong language has a Tibeto-Burman (TB) sub-stratum. The Hajong people are ethnically and culturally closer to the surrounding Tibeto-Burman people groups such as Garo and Koch than to the Bengali population. The cultural and linguistic similarities could be due either to a common origin or to a mutual influence between the groups who have been living in proximity for generations.

In this paper, I will describe the system of case marking in Hajong – that is, the morphemes which specify the syntactic function of the noun phrase. I will describe the syntactic functions associated with each case form and I will compare the Hajong case forms to their equivalents in four geographically proximate languages. From the IA family, Hajong will be compared to Standard Colloquial Bangla (Dasgupta 2003) and Standard Colloquial Asamiya (Goswami and Tamuli 2003) (both classified as Indo-European > Indo-Iranian > Indo-Aryan > Eastern zone > Bengali-Assamese).