A field report on Kongai language from Manipur, India

This paper presents a phonological sketch Maring, a Tibeto-Burman language spoken in southeastern part of Manipur in Northeast India. It begins by highlighting some of the previous works done in Maring. Then it goes on to describe the phonemic inventory of the consonants, vowels and tones, as well as the syllable structure and the phonotactics. The paper also highlights some prevalent morphophonological processes occurring in the language. In the absence of a standard writing system, many disyllabic words are becoming monosyllabic both in the spoken form as well as in written form. This sometimes leads to form consonant clusters. Thus, this paper attempts to describe the sound system of Maring and bring forth some of the prevalent sound changes happening in the language. This will be helpful to the community for developing orthography and grammars, and for those working on the phonology, sound change, historical linguistics etc of the lesser known and less described languages of Northeast India.

This study aims to explore the diversity of syllable types and develop a comprehensive classification framework. Analysis was conducted on the syllable structures of various languages to understand both common patterns and language-specific variations in syllable formation. Linguistic data from diverse languages were collected and analyzed to identify phonotactic patterns, morphological interactions, prosodic features, and phonetic realizations of syllables. Findings indicate a wide range of syllable structures, ranging from simple CV to complex structures with multiple consonants and vowels. There are also significant interactions between syllable structure and morphological processes, as well as prosodic features. The results of this study are integrated into a comprehensive classification framework that encompasses various phonological, morphological, and phonetic dimensions of syllables. Theoretical and practical implications of the research are discussed, along with recommendations for future research.

The eight Western Kho-Bwa varieties are spoken in western Arunachal Pradesh in Northeast India and form a small, coherent sub-group of the Tibeto-Burman (Trans-Himalayan / Sino-Tibetan) language family.This paper presents 96 sound correspondences, mainly between the two Western Kho-Bwa varieties Duhumbi and Khoitam, with additional evidence from other Western Kho-Bwa varieties and other Tibeto-Burman languages whenever deemed illustrative. On basis of these sound correspondences, I propose 282 Western Kho-Bwa proto-forms including a total of 92 onsets. The less common reconstructed Western Kho-Bwa onsets are the uvular onsets and the voiceless nasal and approximant onsets.A unique innovation of the Western Kho-Bwa languages, and indeed the Kho-Bwa languages in general, is the correspondence of initial *s- in other Tibeto-Burman languages to a vocal onset in Proto-Western Kho-Bwa and its descendent varieties. Another relatively unique innovation is the correspondence between Western Kho-Bwa obstruent onsets *b- and *g- ~ *kʰ- ~ *k- and other Tibeto-Burman nasal onsets *m- and *ŋ-, respectively.

In Shillong, the capital of the northeastern Indian state of Meghalaya, Indo‐Aryan languages from the plains meet the Tibeto‐Burman and Austro‐Asiatic minority languages of the hills, and the result is a degree of multilingualism that is high even by Indian standards. English is widely used by academic groups everywhere in India, but structured interviews with all 17 faculty members of two departments at North‐Eastern Hill University in Shillong reveal special reasons why some parents now choose to use English with their children rather than their own mother tongue. Caste imposes fewer barriers in this part of India than elsewhere, and marriages across ethnic groups are common, but con ?icting kinship practices can bring complications. If a woman from a matrilineal group marries a man from a patrilineal group, both families will, according to their traditions, consider the children to belong to their kinship group. Using English with their children, rather than choosing the language of just one set of grand‐parents, can be a way of avoiding potential con?ict. Thus, in addition to the use of English in higher education, increasing geographic mobility, and the general prestige of English, the con?icting demands of different kinship systems needs to be considered among the factors contributing to the spread of English at the cost of local languages in Northeast India.

Data from a total of 24 speakers reading 720 utterances from Catalan, English, and Spanish show that differences in rhythm metrics emerge even when syllable structure and vowel reduction are controlled for in the experimental materials, strongly suggesting that important differences in timing exist in these languages, and thus that the rhythmic percept is not solely dependent on these two phonological properties in a given language. Further analyses of the data indicate that the rhythmic class distinctions under consideration finely correlate with differences in the way languages instantiate two prosodic timing processes, namely durational marking of prosodic heads and prosodic edges. A prosody-based hypothesis is proposed regarding the importance of these durational patterns across languages for the perception of rhythmic contrasts.

The objective of this dissertation is to develop a new speech unit on acoustic modeling of the Thai language. The Thai syllables were studied in both acoustical and phonological properties. From the acoustical point of view, in the syllable structure, the final consonant is strongly influenced by the vowel duration. This relationship occurs only between the vowel and the final consonant. In contrase, the initial consonant is not affected by the duration of the vowel. Hence, the vowel and the final consonant are tightly tied while an inital consonant is loosely tied with the vowel in the syllable. From a phonological point of view, a syllable is composed of a pair of an onset and a rhyme unit. The onset consists of an initial consonant and its transition towards the following vowel. Along with the onset, the rhyme is composed of a vowel, a final consonant, and a tone. The onset-rhyme not only includes its contextual information, but also embeds the language modeling at the syllable level. Consequently, the decomposition of the syllable into an onset and rhyme is appropriate to the Thai language. The whole set of Thai syllables can be recognized by identifying onsets and rhymes. This research has objective to compare the efficiency of the units. Therefore a tone recognition system is not implemented in this research. To evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed acoustic model, various conventional speech units used in speech recognition systems have been investigated. Several experiments have been carried out to find the proper speech unit that can accurately create acoustic model and give a higher recognition rate. Results of recognition rates under different acoustic models are given and compared. The speech corpus used for training in this experiment was recorded from 9 male and 11 female speakers. This group of speakers also produced the speaker-dependent test set. In addition, the speaker-independent test set was produced from other 5 male and 5 female speakers. This speech corpus was designed to cover all onset-rhyme units in the Thai language. Experimental results show that the onset-rhyme model improves on the efficiency of other speech units. The onset-rhyme model improves on the accuracy of the baseline monophone model, the inter-syllable triphone model, and the context-dependent Initial-Final model by nearly 26.2%, 6.4%, and 4.2% for the speaker-dependent systems using only an acoustic model, and 29.7%, 6.0%, and 4.2% for the speaker-dependent systems using both acoustic and language model respectively. Using the language model, the onset accuracy is increased by around 16-21% for both SD and SI systems. In addition, the accuracy of the rhyme is substantially improved by nearly 45-47% for the SD and SI systems when the language model is applied. The results show that the onset-rhyme models attain a high recognition rate. Moreover, they also give more efficiency in terms of system complexity.

Languages belonging to different language families tend to share features of each other when they exist contiguously for a prolonged period of time. South Asian subcontinent is one of the examples in which different language families, due to geographical proximity, have been in intense contact for millennia resulting in language convergence. The present entry draws upon the linguistically diverse underrepresented area of Northeast India to carve out a language contact situation in a miniature form where varied groups of Tibeto-Burman languages exist in close proximity. Northeast India is an enclave of a huge Tibeto-Burman population along with a larger number of Indo-Aryan language speakers. These Tibeto-Burman languages, due to constant contact with the Indo-Aryan languages, have acquired certain Indo-Aryan patterns in their indigenous grammatical system. This entry observes the natural phenomenon of contact-induced changes in the Tibeto-Burman languages of Northeast India substantiating with instances of some clausal patterns such as relative clauses, case marking, anaphors, etc. in these languages.

Differential association of KIR gene loci to risk of malaria in ethnic groups of Assam, Northeast India

This paper presents a comprehensive analysis of reduplication in Khiamniungan, a Sino-Tibetan language spoken in Northeast India and parts of Myanmar. Reduplication in Khiamniungan is common across worrd classes. The study identifies and categorizes four primary reduplicative strategies: (1) echo formations, where partial reduplication creates semantically modified words; (2) compounding reduplication, in which morphologically independent stems combine to form new lexical items; (3) full reduplication, used for emphasis, pluralization, quantification, and manner marking; and (4) expressive reduplication, which encodes sensory and onomatopoeic meanings. The paper highlights the syntactic and semantic functions of reduplicated forms, illustrating their role in quantification, habitual aspect marking, imperative constructions, and intensification. While complete reduplication is pervasive across word classes, partial reduplication and echo formations are comparatively less common but still attested. Additionally, Khiamniungan exhibits a robust system of expressive reduplication that encodes sensory perception, aligning with patterns observed in other Tibeto-Burman languages. This study contributes to the broader understanding of reduplication in the Patkaian (Northern Naga) linguistic subgroup and sheds light on typological features relevant to Tibeto-Burman languages as a whole.

This article asks what is universal about phonological systems. Beginning with universals of segment inventories, a distinction is drawn between descriptive universals (where the effect of different theoretical frameworks is minimized) vs. analytic universals (which are specific-theory-dependent). Since there are few absolute universals such as "all languages have stops" and "all languages have at least two degrees of vowel height", theory-driven or "architectural" universals concerning distinctive features and syllable structure are also considered. Although several near-universals are also mentioned, the existence of conflicting "universal tendencies" and contradictory resolutions naturally leads into questions concerning the status of markedness and synchronic explanation in phonology. While diachrony is best at accounting for typologically unusual and language-specific phonological properties, the absolute universals discussed in this study are clearly grounded in synchrony.

An old-fashioned somatological analysis of the racial composition of the present-day populations of Northeast India suggested that this area was home to two major races of mankind, the Caucasoid and the Mongoloid, and modern population genetic studies now provide us with an even more fine-meshed and complex view of population prehistory. Close proximity of these populations in terms of settlements has led to exchange of genes between the two groups. This chapter provides a detailed account of the linguistic situation in Northeast India, which is relevant to our understanding of the prehistoric dispersals of linguistic groups. Various linguistic hypotheses and feasible archaeological links are discussed in this chapter. Probable routes of migration are also discussed on the basis of linguistic, ethnographical, historical, and folkloristic data.

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.

The alveolar lateral is phonetically and phonologically complex. Previous studies have shown that /l/ is one of the last segments to be acquired by typically developing Portuguese children. However, little is known about how Portuguese children with atypical development acquire /l/. In this paper, we investigate the acquisition of /l/ by Portuguese children with protracted phonological development (DLD; SSD). We explore the effect of syllable structure and segmental properties in the acquisition of /l/ and describe mismatches used for target /l/, thus contributing empirical evidence to the ongoing discussion on differential diagnoses for children with primary phonological disorders. Our results show that the lateral is more problematic in SSD than in DLD, with the manner of articulation being more problematic than its place. A syllable-segment interface effect was attested. Mismatches showed a preference for [w, ɾ, ø]. The results are discussed considering their implications for clinical practice and the role of target phonetic and phonological properties in the /l/ acquisition path.

Meghalaya, one of the Northeast Indian states, is inhabited by two major tribal clusters, Khasi and Garo. The disputed origin of the Lyngngam tribe of Meghalaya is a result of their geographic distribution, which is sandwiched between that of the above two major tribal clusters. Our earlier analysis of ethnohistoric, linguistic and demographic data suggested the neighbouring Khasi and Garo as the putative parental population(s) of Lyngngam. In this paper, we have investigated the Lyngngam, Garo and all the 7 subtribes of Khasi of Meghalaya using molecular genetic markers-autosomal, Y-chromosome and mtDNA-to explore the possible origin of the Lyngngam tribe. We obtained admixture estimates for Lyngngam versus the putative parental populations. While autosomal STRs and mtDNA results clearly suggest Khasi origin of the Lyngngam, Y-STR distances show greater proximity of Lyngngam to the Garo. Further, the comparative analysis of the Y-Chromosome and mtDNA haplogroup data on relevant Austro-Asiatic and Tibeto-Burman populations from South and Southeast Asia, published by us earlier, clearly exclude the possibility of Lyngngam origin from outside Meghalaya. The molecular genetic evidence in conjunction with the linguistic, demographic and ethno-historic information clearly suggests Khasi origin of the Lyngngam tribe.

The Sino-Tibetan family consists of two branches: Sinitic, and Tibeto-Burman. Classification schemes included Miao-Yao, Tai and Vietnamese in the Sino-Tibetan family on the basis of their remarkable typological resemblance to Chinese, but it is clear that the structural resemblances and shared vocabulary among these languages are areal features rather than shared inheritance from a common ancestor. Comparative Tibeto-Burman is a relatively unexplored field and there is not yet a complete and reliable schema for the genetic relationships among the various sub-branches of the family. The higher-order grouping of the Tibeto-Burman languages is problematic. Understanding of Proto-Tibeto-Burman phonology is still uncertain, although considerable progress has been made in the reconstruction of a few sub-branches, in particular Lolo-Burmese. The historical status of tone in Tibeto-Burman and Sino-Tibetan remains a topic of some controversy. Historical developments in the Sino-Tibetan sound systems are best described in terms of syllable structure.