Mark W. Post

Adjectives in Thai : implications for a functionalist typology of word classes.

Abstract Tai languages are often described as “lacking” a major lexical class “adjectives”; accordingly, they and other area languages are frequently cited as evidence against adjectival universality. This article brings the putative lack under examination, arguing that a more complete distributional analysis reveals a pattern: overlap is highest among semantically peripheral adjectives and verbs and in constructions prototypically associated to both classes crosslinguistically, and lowest among semantically core adjectives and verbs and in constructions prototypically associated to only one or the other class. Rather than “lacking” adjectives, data from Thai thus in fact support functional-typological characterizations of adjectival universality such as those of Givón (1984), Croft (2001), and Dixon (2004). Finally, while data from Thai would fail to falsify an adaptation of Enfields (2004) Lao lexical class-taxonomy (in which adjectives are treated as a verbal subclass) on its own terms, this article argues that in absence of both universally-applicable criteria for the evaluation of categorial taxonomies crosslinguistically and evidence for the cognitive reality of categorial taxonomies so stipulated, even this more limited sense of a “lack” of adjectives in Thai is less radical a challenge to adjectival universality than has sometimes been supposed.

Re-thinking Sino-Tibetan phylogeny from the perspective of North East Indian languages

Sino-Tibetan has more speakers than any other language phylum, and covers a major proportion of the land area of East Asia. Despite some two centuries of study and publication, the subclassification of Sino-Tibetan remains highly controversial, as does its external affiliation (van Driem 2008a; Blench 2008a,b; Handel 2008). Originating as “Indo-Chinese” in the middle of the nineteenth century, it originally carried racial connotations (van Driem 2002). The first recognition of the phylum probably dates to Julius von Klaproth (1823) who recognised three parallel branches: Chinese, Burmese and Tibetan. Von Klaproth explicitly excluded Austroasiatic and Daic, unlike many later classifications, which sequentially included all the regional phyla. Although such views still sometimes surface (primarily in Chinese publications), they have been fairly conclusively rejected by most scholars. Considering the importance of Sino-Tibetan and its history of scholarship, there is a striking lack of consensus as to its internal classification. Historically speaking, there have been two opposing camps: those who consider Sinitic (i.e. the several varieties of Chinese) as representing a primary branch of the family (Wolfenden 1927; Benedict 1972, 1976; Bodman 1980; Weidert 1987; Bradley 1997b, 2002; Matisoff 2003, 2008; Thurgood and LaPolla 2003; Handel 2008) and those who situate it within the remaining languages, consequently applying the name Tibeto-Burman to the whole phylum (Shafer 1955, 1966/67; van Driem 2002). In recent years, successful reconstructions of low-level groups have begun to appear (e.g. Sun 1993; Mortensen 2003; VanBik 2007; Wood 2008; Button 2009), raising hope that higher-level reconstructions may eventually be able to be placed on a stronger footing or at least, that their validity will be able to be more rigorously tested. Nonetheless, many putatively Sino-Tibetan languages remain very sparsely documented, with accessible comparative lexical material of any significant scale being largely confined to Chinese and (to a lesser extent) Indian sources. The largest-scale comparative database of Sino-Tibetan languages compiled to date, the Sino-Tibetan Etymological Dictionary and Thesaurus (STEDT) project, was finally made generally available in “beta” form in October 2010, with some additional functionality added in 2012 (though still in “beta”). Consequently, historical linguists can now see the evidence for Proto-Tibeto-Burman forms given in Matisoff (2003), which did not explicitly present the data on which most reconstructions are based.1 Some potential problems with the linguistic data employed in Matisoff (2003) have been pointed out in various reviews (e.g. Sagart 2006; response by Matisoff 2007; further reply Sagart 2008; Hill 2009). One point that we will underscore here, however, is that there are also problematic disconnects with the archaeological evidence (Blench 2008b). For example, while ‘iron’ is reconstructed at the Proto-Tibeto-

Classifiers in Mising

[Extract] Mising is an underdescribed language from the Eastern Tani branch of the Tani subgroup Tibeto-Burman (Figure 1). It is currently spoken by approximately 587,310 Mising tribes peoploe living primarily in eight distrivts of upper Assam, namely Tinsukia, Dibrugarh, Sibsagar, Jorhat, Golaghat, Dhemaji, Lakhimpur, and Sonitpur (Census of India 2001). There are at least nine regional varieties of Mising: Pagro, Delu, Ojam, Saajan, Moojin, Dambug, Samuguria, Tamargoja and Bonkual, of which the last three groups have largely adopted Assamese (an Indo-Aryan language) in preference to Mising for the majority of language situations.

Language Contact and the Genetic Position of Milang (Eastern Himalaya)

This article discusses the relationship between Milang, a little-known language of the Eastern Himalayan region, and the Tani branch of Tibeto-Burman languages with which it has been provisionally aligned. Reviewing this alignment, we find little positive evidence in its favor. Bringing new linguistic and cultural field data to bear on the question, we conclude that Milang contains much linguistic material that cannot possibly be directly inherited from the ancestor of all Tani languages proper (i.e., “Proto-Tani”). We therefore suggest that material shared with Tani languages proper is either reconstructible to an earlier, pre-Proto-Tani stage, or has been subsequently acquired through contact with Eastern Tani languages. Material not shared with Tani languages proper may reflect an unknown substrate. While our resulting re-classification of Tani languages is thus in a sense quite minor, it has some important implications: first, that cultural and linguistic diversity in the Eastern Himalaya was probably much greater than has been assumed, and second, that sociolinguistic and cultural information are critical factors in the evaluation of linguistic subgrouping proposals and the reconstruction of pre-history.

The language, culture, environment and origins of Proto-Tani speakers: What is knowable, and what is not (yet)

This chapter represents a linguists effort at pre-historical reconstruction - an inherently interdisciplinary enterprise - in an area where there is not only no well-established interdisciplinary framework within which to couch ones research, but where there also exists no more than a pale fraction of the data that would normally be required in order to form solid, defensible hypotheses of any appreciable strength. Main interest in the chapter is in Tani, being a name for both a set of related languages and a set of related cultures found primarily in North East Indian State of Arunachal Pradesh, and to a lesser extent in Tibet and Assam. The chapter reviews a fairly diverse set of linguistic data which the author has argued can be brought to bear on questions of the culture, origins, and environment of Proto-Tani speakers, and/or their near ancestors. Keywords:Arunachal Pradesh; culture; Indian State; language; linguist; Tani; Tibet

The Tangam Language

Tangam is a critically endangered Trans-Himalayan language spoken by 150 hilltribespeople in the Far Eastern Himalaya. This work presents a cultural, historical and grammatical introduction to the Tangam language, a trilingual lexicon in Tangam, English and Minyong, and analysed texts.