Introduction

The Boro-Garo (BG) sub-branch of the Tibeto-Burman (TB) language family consists of thirteen languages found in North East India, as well as across the border in Nepal and Bangladesh; these languages include Boro, Deuri, Dimasa, Tiwa, Riang, Kokborok, Kachari, Garo, Megam, A'tong, Koch, Rabha and Ruga. Though much work remains to be done on all the modern languages in the family, this paper attempts an initial reconstruction of the Proto-Boro-Garo (PBG) noun phrase (NP), as well as some NP categories.

Reconstruction of some grammatical NP elements

The sound change patterns from PBG to the modern languages have been adopted from Joseph and Burling (2006), and are used as the basis for the reconstruction. Of the thirteen languages representing the Boro-Garo family, only Boro, Garo, Deuri, Rabha, Dimasa and Kokborok will be examined given the availability of language data. In the instances where data from other BG languages were available, they have been used to aid in the reconstruction. Phonetic transcriptions, specifically those of vowels and tones, have been regularized among the languages following Joseph and Burling's (2006) phonological reconstruction. High tones are marked with ′, while low tones are unmarked. A “∼’ over a vowel indicates nasalization.

The PBG pronouns: Personal PNs and demonstratives

The modern Boro-Garo languages are said to have a relatively shallow time depth, meaning their split from the proto-language occurred more recently in comparison to other Tibeto-Burman languages (Burling 2006).

Manipur is a small state in North East India. Many different communities inhabit the state. The total population of the state is approximately 2,400,000 (Directorate of Census Operations, Manipur 2001). There are thirty-three different tribal communities which are recognized by the state government. They are Aimol, Anal, Angami, Chiru, Chothe, Gangte, Hmar, Kabui, Kacha Naga, Kharam, Koirao, Koireng, Kom, Lamkang, Mao, Maram, Maring, Monsang, Moyon, Paite, Paomai, Purum, Ralte, Sema, Simte, Sahte, Tangkhul, Tarao, Thadou, Vaiphei, Zou, any Kuki and any Mizo (Lushai). They speak different languages, all of which belong to the Tibeto-Burman family. Among them nine different languages are recognized as Modern Indian Languages. They are Thadou, Paite, Tangkhul, Hmar, Rongmei (Kabui), Mao, Zhou, Kom and Vaiphei. There are also Meitei Muslims, called Pangals, in the state.

In addition to these groups are the Meiteis, who comprise the largest community in terms of population. The people of Manipur are collectively known as Manipuri, and this term is also used for the state official language of Manipur, which is one of the Modern Indian Languages. This language, which is in fact the first language of the Meitei people, is also called Meiteirol/Meiteilon. Manipuri/Meiteilon is the lingua franca of the state. The language has been regarded as one of the most important regional languages of the nation and has been listed in the Eighth Schedule of the constitution of India. People speaking the language also live in the neighbouring states of Assam and Tripura and in some parts of Bangladesh and Burma, now Myanmar.

Introduction

Mising is listed in the Indian constitutional order of Scheduled Tribes, 1950, as Miri. When and how the name Miri came to represent the Misings remains a matter of conjecture. In fact, “never a tribe known as Miri existed before”, claims Dr N. C. Pegu. In the words of Prasad (1991: 4), the word Miri is derived from ami ‘man’ + iri ‘virtue’ = miri ‘virtuous man’. Today, the Mising speakers consider the name Miri to be derogatory and in fact refer to themselves as Mising. Hence, they are now known by this name for all purposes. Sun, in his (1993) study of Tani languages, states that the term Abor-Miri-Dafla, composed of names of the three major tribal groups speaking these languages, must be discarded, since the outdated exonyms it is based on are now resented by native speakers. These terms are no longer accepted or widely used in North East India, having been replaced by the names Adi, Mising, and Nyishi, respectively.

The Mising people are believed to have once been hill dwellers, and to have lived in the hilly tracts of modern-day Arunachal Pradesh. The precise date and circumstances of entry of the Misings to the Brahmaputra Valley is not known. There are many controversies regarding the time of their settlement In Assam as well as in the adjoining plains of Arunachal Pradesh. N. C. Pegu and Dimbeswar Doley have estimated the Mising migration to have taken place around the time of the Ahom invasion in the early 13 century AD (Doley 2008: 48), although this has not yet been independently confirmed.

Introduction

The genetic relationships among the Tibeto-Burman languages of eastern India and western Burma have always been problematic. While several linguists, including myself, have made stabs at sorting the problem out at higher levels, we can expect that serious progress will start with establishing lower-level groupings, on the order of Burling's (1983) hypothesis of a special relationship among Bodo-Garo, the Konyak Naga languages, and Jinghpaw. This paper discusses data which offer significant support to Burling's “Sal” hypothesis – I will present here what I think is strong comparative evidence for a quite close relationship between Jinghpaw and Nocte, which nails down one side of the triangular Sal grouping.

The Jinghpaw Tense-Aspect-Agreement Complex

Jinghpaw has a very peculiar verbal system, as yet far from thoroughly understood. Along with a large set of grammaticalized verbs (Matisoff 1974; DeLancey, Diehl, et al. 1978), there is a system of morphologically complex final elements, of one or two syllables, which Dai and Diehl (2003) label “Sentence Final Words”, or SFW's. Dai and Diehl's SFW category actually consists of two distinct categories of SFW, which I will label prefinal and final. We will see that the prefinal SFW construction corresponds directly to an almost identical SFW construction in Nocte.

A sentence in Jinghpaw typically ends with some kind of mood particle. In a declarative sentence the default is the final particle ai, which otherwise functions as a nominalizer.

Introduction

Copular constructions have since long drawn the attention of scholars engaged in explorative studies of a particular language or across languages because of the intriguing features that set copular constructions apart from other types of constructions in language(s). The term “copula” (COP), as a constituent of a copular construction, has been used in typological studies to refer to any morpheme (affix, particle or verb) that links or “couples” a subject with a copula complement in a “family” of constructions, collectively often referred to as “predicate nominal constructions” (Payne 1997: 111–14). In contrast to the dimension of verb complementation distinguished in terms of the number of objects present, a copular construction, characterized by a copula, contains an obligatory copula complement (CC)/predicative complement (PC), predicated of the copula subject (CS) (Dixon 2004; Huddleston & Pullum 2002). Cross-linguistically, “the most basic copular construction” is used to encode the meanings of classification (inclusion/group membership) or identification (specification/equation of two participants “normally encoded as noun phrases,” others being “less basic” (Curnow 2000: 2). Typological studies show that besides that of inclusion and equation, copular sentences are used to express other assertions like that of location, attribution, possession or existence of a referent (Payne 1997; Declerck 1988; Pustet 2003). The distinctively different categories of overt copulas that have been attested across languages are mostly verbal, pronominal and particle (Stassen 1997: 85, cited in Pustet 2003: 45; Payne 1997: 118–119).

Introduction

This paper presents a description of the derivational morphology and the process of compounding in Pnar, an Austro-Asiatic language of the Mon- Khmer branch spoken in the Jaintia hills of Meghalaya. Derivational processes in Pnar are prefixing in nature and result with the formation of new words along with a change in lexical category. The notable derivational prefixes are noŋ-, i- and jiŋ-.

An attempt has been made in §2 of this paper to provide a brief linguistic description of Pnar. §3 discusses the nature of the derivational prefixes used in this language to derive new words. The next section of this paper is devoted to the causatives in Pnar which are morphologically realized. In §5, I discuss the poly-functional nature of the prefix wa- in Pnar as it is assigned the role of adjectivalizer, complementizer and conjunction although this prefix as a derivational morpheme is attached exclusively with adjectives. The next section analyses reduplication in Pnar as a derivational process. This language exhibits the instances of complete word reduplication which can be interpreted under the purview of derivational morphology. The process of compounding plays a vital role in the word formation process in Pnar which is discussed in detail with adequate examples in §7 of this paper.

As far as the methodology of this paper is concerned, it is based on primary data collected from three consultants. All the consultants are from Jowai, the region in Jaintia hills where Pnar is mainly spoken.

Introduction

Purum is a language belonging to the Kuki-Chin group of the Tibeto- Burman family (Grierson 2005 [1904]). Benedict includes the language under Kuki-Naga (Kukish) (Benedict 1972). The word Pu rum means ‘hide from tiger’ (Shakespear 1912: 150). Purum is recognized as one of the 33 languages spoken in Manipur by the State Government of Manipur, and the language is considered to be highly endangered. According to the Census of India (2001), the number of Purum speakers is 503. The teaching of the language has not yet been introduced even at the primary level of school education. There are two Purum villages, situated in the Senapati district of Manipur. The names of these villages are Purum Khullen and Purum Likli; the former is about 18 kms and the latter 27 kms north of Imphal (the capital of Manipur). Most Purum speakers are able to speak Manipuri due to the fact that they are in contact with Manipuri speakers through education, administration, business transactions, and so on.

There has been confusion as to whether two groups, the Purum and the Chote, are the same, as we can see from the title of the proceedings of a symposium held in 1985, “Proceedings of the Symposium on Purum (Chote) Revisited”. In those proceedings, Hiyang et al. point out that the name Chote, which has later come to be spelled Chothe, seems to be confused with Purum because the Chothe people settled in some places called Purum (Hiyang et al. 1985: 25–26).

Introduction

This paper is a comparative approach to functions of nominalization in Karbi (formerly called Mikir/Arleng), a Tibeto-Burman (TB) language from Assam in central North East India (NEI). Nominalization and its various functions is a topic of considerable current interest in TB studies, and one with both typological and historical implications. There may be several nominalization constructions with deep roots in TB, including nominalization with the kV- prefix, as found in Karbi, and nominalization with the post-verbal particle -pa, which is widely attested in the family. There is still disagreement as to where Karbi fits into the family. It is often classified as particularly close to Meithei (DeLancey 1987: 800), but other scholars prefer to place it in a branch by itself (Burling 2003: 187). Both approaches acknowledge resemblances between Karbi and the different groups of “Naga” and Kuki languages, even though those are spoken in far eastern NEI. The status of these resemblances for the genetic classification has yet to be determined. While this paper is primarily descriptive rather than comparative, I have included data from two other TB languages of NEI: Angami Naga (Tenyidie), where we see the same velar prefix as in Karbi, and Meithei (Manipuri), putatively closely related to Karbi, but using the -pa nominalization construction instead of the velar prefix.

The outline of this paper is as follows: §2 is devoted to derivational nominalization, including the derivation of nouns that denote activities, states, or events, and the derivation of agent nouns.

Verbs

Morphological categories

The overall range of inflected categories and forms is not very different between OJ (cf. 3.1.3) and EMJ; the EMJ inventory of forms is shown in Table 8.1.

The greatest change was the loss of the nominal form, e.g. kakaku, akuraku, which was prominent in OJ (see 3.1.3.3). It went out of general use, but was archaically retained in kanbun-kundoku and to some extent in poetry; it also survived in some set expressions, cf. 9.1.7. The OJ uses of the nominal form came to be taken over (a) by nominalizations by nouns such as koto ‘thing’ which increased in use both in abstract nominalizations (‘the fact that …’) and in complement clauses, and (b) by the adnominal form which expanded its use in headless nominalizations; see further 12.6.1 about changes in the use of the adnominal form.

The prohibitive retained only the one pattern shown in Table 8.1, and of the several related optative verb forms, only that in -(a)namu survived in EMJ, with the general sense ‘I wish’. A new optative form in -(a)baya came into use, e.g. kikabaya ‘I wish to hear’, originating in the combination of conditional -(a)ba and the particle ya. The segmental distinction between exclamatory and imperative, e.g. OJ kake versus kakye, was lost, in the course of the merger of OJ Ce and Cye (7.3.2.1). For vowel base verbs, the imperative now generally ended in -yo (which had been optional with some verb classes in OJ, cf. 3.4.5).

The etymological study of the lexicon of OJ, the question of its provenance, and the sorting of inherited from borrowed wordstock are part of the issue of the genetic affiliation of Japanese: OJ words which are similar to, or take part in sets of sound correspondences with, words from another language may be cognate with these words; they may be borrowings from the other language; they may themselves be the source of borrowings into the other language; or the similarities may simply be due to chance. We are more fortunate for the later historical stages of Japanese, but for the OJ language as it presents itself to us, we simply very often do not know and many attempts to identify old loanwords within OJ are highly speculative.

It is beyond doubt that OJ includes old loanwords from the languages around Japan – especially words relating to agriculture, seafaring, warfare, spiritual and religious life, government, and administration – but that we will not be able to identify many of them as loanwords on other than extra-linguistic grounds. It is for example a strong hypothesis that OJ iraka ‘roof, roof tile’ is a loanword, but we do not know from where. In other cases we believe that a word must be borrowed and can come up with several likely sources but cannot choose between them. It is, for example, very likely that the Japanese word for ‘horse’, OJ uma, is borrowed and there are indeed words in surrounding languages which mean ‘horse’ and which are similar to uma, e.g. EMC ✻maɨ’, MK mol, Mongolian morin.

Introduction

In Section 2.5. I noted that while representing little more than 2 percent of Indonesia's population, those of Chinese ancestry have been stereotyped as “deviant non-indigenous foreign others” and positioned as scapegoats in times of political and economic turmoil. During such times of turmoil they have been socially identified by masses – despite being largely physically undifferentiable from other Indonesians – and subject to acts of violence against property and person. Drawing on written inter-group communications, group manifestos, speeches, newspapers and interviews, historians have noted that this mass violence often evolved from a combination of local problematic interactions, widely held prejudices, and the actions of groups who benefited from instability (e.g. Coppel, 1983; Purdey, 2006). While eminently useful, such accounts provide narratives that give an appearance of a hypodermic model where representations of signs are received as sent. We know very little about whether, to what extent, and how such signs are “recontextualized” (Bauman & Briggs, 1990) in actual face-to-face interaction.

The next two chapters start to fill this gap by looking at face-to-face interactions that occurred in one urban middle-income space in a period preceded by two occurrences of mass anti-Chinese violence and followed shortly thereafter by the economic meltdown of 1997–1998 (e.g. Purdey, 2006). This meltdown was accompanied by monthly outbreaks of such violence culminating in the well-known lethal mass violence that occurred in Jakarta in mid-May 1998.