North East India: 1954

I first came to North East India in 1954, but as I write, it is 2008, 54 years later. 54 years in the other direction would take us back to 1900. In my imagination that early period seems much longer than the mere 54 years that have rushed by while I've been watching. Can North East India possibly have changed as much in the last 54 years as I imagine it to have changed in the previous 54?

In 1954, it was already possible to fly into Guwahati from Calcutta, and probably from Delhi. Buses already stopped for a rest at Nongpho on the way to Shillong, so that first-time visitors from other parts of India had the chance to be astonished to see Khasi women, rather than men, presiding at the shops and stalls that lined the road. Shillong was the capital of Assam, then. Assam was a larger state then than now, but Shillong was a smaller place. I don't even remember taxis in Shillong, certainly not the long lines that we find today. Arunachal was still NEFA, and I believe Gauhati University was the only one in the North East.

My family and I lived in the Garo Hills for most of the two years we spent in India. Even Shillong was too far away for a visit except on the way in, and again on the way out, when we had to deal with paper work.

Introduction

The languages of the East Bodish branch of Tibeto-Burman remain amongst some of the least documented within the family. Languages of Arunachal Pradesh, in particular those of the western portion of the state, likewise remain almost utterly undescribed. These facts are compounded by the difficulty in travelling to the regions in which East Bodish languages are spoken (Bhutan, Arunachal Pradesh, Tibet) and the near impossibility of gaining government permission for the research. This article endeavours to contribute to these descriptive deficiencies by outlining some phonological and morphological aspects of Dakpa (Tawang Monpa, a.k.a Northern Monpa), spoken in Tawang district, Arunachal Pradesh, India, based on data we collected while there in 2007. As it seems unlikely any further work will be done on Dakpa in the near future, in this article we aim to bring into light what little data and analyses we have.

This article provides a preliminary phonemic inventory and discusses some grammatical morphology in Dakpa of Tawang. Whenever possible, Dakpa data will be presented in the light of other East Bodish languages (Bumthang, van Driem, 1995a), (Kurtöp, Dzala, Chali, our field notes) and/or in comparison to the Dakpa data recently presented in van Driem (2007). We will conclude by highlighting some aspects of Dakpa that appear unusual in the context of East Bodish. It must be stressed that the analyses in this paper are preliminary. More thorough analyses will have to wait for further research.

Introduction

Chothe is one of the indigenous tribal languages which are spoken in Manipur and is included in the list of the thirty-three recognised languages in Manipur. It belongs to the Old Kuki sub-group of Kuki-Chin within the Tibeto-Burman Language sub family. The language is spoken by the people of the Chothe tribe in their domestic and village life. They inhabit the hills around the valley of Manipur. The language has become endangered, as their population is very limited at 2571, according to the census report 2001. This language does not have its own script.

The normal word order of the Chothe language is subject-object-verb (SOV). This word order is the same for all types of basic sentences, that is declarative, interrogative and imperative. The suffix -e, with variants ∼ye∼ke∼ne∼te∼we∼pe∼le etc. is suffixed to verbal roots or stems to form declarative sentences, as in (la). The question markers –mo and –me are used for the formation of the interrogative sentences, discussed in Section 3.1.4. here. The marker –o, with variants ∼wo∼ko∼ho∼lo is used in imperative sentences.

This article discusses the negative construction; the types of negative markers and how the negative marker -no is used in different kinds of sentences i.e. simple sentences, command sentences, interrogative sentences, etc. as well as how the negative marker -l∂w is used at a morphological level. Lexicalised negators, double negation, negative strengthening and negative polarity are also presented in this paper.

Summary

The vast majority of the three hundred or so modern Tibeto-Burman languages have decimal numeral systems, like most contemporary languages, and more specifically like their large influential neighbours, the Sinitic and Indo-Aryan languages. Like most languages again, their favourite way of constructing higher numbers is by multiplication and addition.

On inquiry, some of them reveal less common bases – 20, 12, 5 and even 4 – as the building blocks of their number systems. These may be used in parallel with a decimal system, may be mixed into it, or may be the unique system of the language. Some are only traces and some are full-fledged systems, like Dzongkha, which can compute all numbers up to 160,000 (204) including all intermediate numbers in its vigesimal system. Only the Maya language of Central America has been described with a comparable complexity.

Principles of number-building other than addition and multiplication, like fractions inside a number, or overcounting, which have become rare in other parts of the world, are also attested, although not always recognised by descriptors.

A complete typology of number systems has much to learn from Tibeto- Burman languages. More field-research is urgently needed to collect these fast-disappearing systems, which foreign educators and local speakers alike unfortunately regard as a hindrance to socio-economic development.

On the Endangerment of Number Systems

Many Tibeto-Burman languages are, as we know, endangered. Some are more imminently threatened with extinction, due to the very small number of their speakers, or to socio-economic conditions which discourage their speakers from continuing to use them.

Introduction

Khasi and Karbi, each belonging to a distinct major language family, have a full and independent system of numerals. Khasi (Mon-Khmer) exhibits SVO syntax accompanied by prefixal morphology that differs vastly from the Tibeto-Burman pattern seen in Karbi with SOV syntax and a good repertoire of suffixes and prefixes. However, several Khasi lexical items turn up in Karbi. In particular, Karbi i-nut ‘one (person)’ can be seen as derived from Khasi *shi-ngut ∼ *chi-ngut ‘one-cl(humnan)’.

Both languages have a classifier system of their own. Khasi, more specifically, Pnar spoken in Jaintia Hills of Meghalaya, and Karbi have shared in the past and continue to share today the same geographic space to a considerable extent. In spite of the different linguistic trees they have grown on, geographic overlapping has given rise to a shared linguistic area, even if very small. Could part of the synchronic behaviour of the numeral ‘one’ in Khasi and Karbi point to an area of their shared linguistic space?

Transcription

For this study, apart from the small amount of Boro, Garo, Tiwa and Rabha data used in Table 8.3, data have been drawn mainly from Standard Karbi (the Karbi Anglong variety) and Standard Khasi (Ktien Sohra). Some data is also from Pnar (as spoken in Raliang), Nongtung (a variety of Pnar), Khyrwang (a variety of Pnar), Tkong Chong-mu-Chen (a variety of War Pnar or War Jaintia) and War Mawlong (a variety of War Sohra).

Introduction

One of the major dialects of Assamese is Barpetia dialect (BD, hereafter), spoken in Barpeta district, situated on the north bank of the river Brahmaputra in Western Assam (locally known as Lower Assam). Barpeta is almost eighty kilometres away from the capital city of Assam, Guwahati (Dispur in Figure 6.2) in Kamrup district.

Until July 1983, Barpeta was a Sub-Division under greater Kamrup district. Historically, Assam was known as Kamrup as well as Pragjyotikhpur and Kamrupia/Kamrupi language is mentioned as having existed at the time of the visit of Hiuen Tsang in 643 A.D. (Kakati, 1941).

Medhi (1988) opines – ‘the origin and growth of Assamese language is not as simple and clear as we generally suppose…But its source is not to be found in the Sanskrit or Vedic literature…Its origin is to be found in the popular dialects of Assam.’ Hence, we find that there are many words used in BD which are pre-Vedic without relationship to any roots in Sanskrit.

Many of these words are not found in Standard Assamese (SA, hereafter) and in Standard Colloquial Assamese (SCA, hereafter) for example [telos] ‘towel’ which is always [gamosa] in SA. Before the seventeenth century, Kamrupi was the literary language of Assam. Today, the notion of Kamrupi language includes the spoken dialects of Kamrup, Nalbari and Barpeta districts with some inter-variations among them. However, major phonological traits like vowel deletion, dominant word initial stress, diphthongisations etc.

Introduction

Dimasa is a Tibeto-Burman language of the Bodo-Garo family, spoken by approximately 88,543 people in Assam and Nagaland. Not much is known about the phonology of Dimasa in general, and still less is known of the tonal phonology and phonetics of the language. In this article, we will investigate the tones of the Dimasa language. With the help of instrumental acoustic analysis, we examine the number and types of tones in Dimasa, and the acoustic characteristics that can distinguish among them. We will then examine how tones operate in non-derived disyllables as well as in non-derived monosyllables, and look at the effect of different types of consonants on the pitch of the following vowel. We conclude that Dimasa has three tones – rising/high, level/mid, falling/low, and that both monosyllables and disyllables are lexically marked with only a single tone. We also determine that the effect of consonants on the following vowel extends into 20 per cent of the vowel.

Background

Within the Tibeto-Burman family, the Bodo-Garo group of languages has received considerable interest from the linguistic community, with particular attention paid to the tonal systems; viz. Burling (1959), Joseph and Burling (2001), Halvorsrud (1959), Bhattacharya (1977), Weidert (1987), Baro (2001), Basumatary (2005), Joseph and Burling (2006) etc. However, there are lots of conflicting views regarding tones in these languages. In the literature on Bodo, while Weidert (1987) claims that Bodo has no tones, Bhattacharya (1977) claims that Bodo has four tones.

Introduction

It has been recognised for many decades that Boro, spoken in the plains of northwestern Assam, is a tone language, but there has been a conspicuous lack of agreement about just how many tones need to be recognised. Halvorsrud (1959) and Burling (1959) gave the language only two tones. Burton-Page (1955) described it as having three tones, while Bhattacharya (1977) gave it no less than four. In a recent monograph (2006), in which we compared the phonological systems of Boro, Garo, Tiwa, and Rabha, we implicitly confirmed the difficulty of the Boro tone system. We felt that we had a good understanding of the tones of Tiwa and Rabha, and of the cognate glottal stops of Garo, but the tones of Boro proved to be more difficult. The tones of one syllable Boro words seemed clear, but the tones of longer words proved to be very difficult, and, we were forced, in our monograph, to omit tone marks from Boro polysyllables. Something was special and different about Boro tones that prevented us from arriving at a satisfactory analysis.

In the winter of 2006, we had the opportunity to return to Boro and we can report considerable progress. In this article, we describe the tones of polysyllabic Boro words as we now understand them. Our new understanding also throws some light on why different observers have come to such different conclusions about the number of tones in the language.

Ahom is a language of the Southwestern Tai group, brought to India by a group of people from Mau Lung, or Müng Mau (məŋ5 māu5 loŋ6 ‘country-Mau-large’ in Tai Phake), now on the China/Burma border to the north of Shan State, Myanmar. Ahom was spoken as the language of court and ritual in the Ahom kingdom and as a mother tongue by some portion of the multilingual population ruled by that kingdom, a population that is known to have included several Tibeto-Burman speaking groups that were in Assam before the arrival of the Ahoms.

The Ahom kingdom lasted from 1228, when the Tai prince Sukapha set up his kingdom in the Upper Brahmaputra valley, until 1824 when it was overthrown by the Burmese and then supplanted by British rule. From the earliest days of their settlement in Assam, the Ahoms intermarried with local people, both Tibeto-Burman and Indie speaking. This, combined with the fact that from at least the early sixteenth century, the Ahom court began to abandon its ancient Tai religious practice for Hinduism, led to a gradual decline in the use of Ahom as a spoken Tai language. It seems that by 1800, the language was little, if at all, used as a mother tongue.

Today, Tai language is not spoken as a mother tongue by the Tai Ahom people, but the language remains both in ritual and in the many manuscripts that survive.

Introduction

Kom and Aimol belong to the Kuki-Chin-Naga family within the Tibeto-Burman family of languages (Ethnologue, Burling, 2003). The classification of Kom and Aimol within the Kuki branch of Tibeto-Burman language reaches back to Grierson (1904), who has already observed that these two languages are closely related to the central Chin languages like Hmar, Pake, Mizo, Lushai, Chiru etc.

In the Ethnologue (www.ethnologue.org), they are treated as part of the Northern group within Kuki-Chin. Burling (2003) also lists both Aimol and Kom as some of the varieties of Kuki-Chin spoken in Northeast India.

These two languages are spoken both in the hills and the plains of Manipur. Kom has been introduced in the schools of Manipur as a medium of instruction from Class I up to Class IX. Neither Kom nor Aimol have their own script. They use the Roman alphabet to write books and journals etc.

Kom and Aimol are recognised tribes of Manipur. They are settled mostly in the Churachandpur, Bishnupur and Chandel districts of Manipur. The population of Kom is 16,463 and Aimol is 2,643 (Indian Census, 2001). Kom and Aimol speakers can communicate with each other in their respective mother tongues. As for children, they use Manipuri or Meiteiron as the lingua franca for communication among themselves.

Numerals

A numeral is a word or phrase used to name a number. Numerals in Kom and Aimol can be studied in the following classification.