A phonological and phonetic description of Sumi, a Tibeto-Burman language of Nagaland

So I should probably apologise / apologize for my lack of updates the past year or so. It's been pretty crazy since I started grad school - I'd have to spend many a blog post explaining all the wonderful things I've been able to do since I started in the linguistics PhD programme here at the University of Oregon.

In the meantime, in the 'American' spirit of self-promotion, I thought I should mention that I finally finished revising my University of Melbourne MA thesis A phonological and phonetic description of Sumi, a Tibeto-Burman language of Nagaland and got it published with Asia-Pacific Linguistics in Canberra.

It's an open access ebook (print on demand), and you can download it right here at the ANU digital collections page here.

I have too many people to thank for this, especially my family who've supported me all through this crazy journey, as well as the Sumi community / my Sumi family. I'm so thankful for all the amazing people I've met along the way, and all the help I've received in making this possible. Noshikimithi va na!

Dog-tailed Tigers in Assamese

I saw this comic on xkcd last week (link):

(Or a cabbage, for that matter. The goat makes sense. Goats are fine.)

Too true.

Anyway, I showed this to an Assamese friend of mine, who told me that the Assamese version contained a tiger, not a wolf. But then again, he added, a 'wolf' in Assamese is literally a 'dog-tailed tiger' (with a little sound change involved).

So here we have the word for 'wolf' in Assamese: কুকুৰনেচীয়া বাঘ kukurnesiyaa bagh - it also could be transliterated as kukurnechiyaa, but the transliterated 'ch' is pronounced like [s] in Assamese.



We can clearly see the words কুকুৰ kukur 'dog' and বঘ bagh 'tiger'. We can also kinda see the word for 'tail', which in Assamese is নেজ nez - it could also be transliterated as nej, but in Assamese, what is transliterated as 'j' can also be pronounced as [z].

At this point you may be wondering how or why কুকুৰনেচীয়া kukurnesiyaa and নেজ nez are related. I myself am not sure what the -iya does here and am assuming that it's some sort of attributive marker. However, most linguists will quickly see the connection between the [s] in kukurnesiyaa and the [z] nez - the difference between the two sounds is just a matter of whether your vocal folds are vibrating or not (the former being a 'voiceless' sound, and the latter a 'voiced' one with your vocal folds vibrating).

And there you have it, wolves are literally 'dog-tailed tigers' in Assamese.

One might wonder then if Assamese বঘ bagh then refers to any 'big scary animal that might eat you' with the prototypical example being 'a big orange cat with black stripes'. Of course, the danger for language learners like myself is to interpret these compounds too literally. I mean, most English speakers wouldn't perceive the food item 'hot dog' as a sizzling canine - the meat is never dog, and they're still hot dogs even when they get cold!

So with that in mind, how can it be fair for me to assume Assamese speakers perceive wolves as big striped cats with dog tails, amusing as it may be!

Animals at the Jew

Two days ago I was running around Kohima town looking for three things: white (banner) cloth, cellotape, and red sealing wax. Why? Remember the wood plate I tried to send last year? It ended up getting sent back to my friends' in Kohima because the post office failed to give me a customs declaration form to sign.

After what looked like a bumpy ride, the plate got chipped pretty badly so I bought a new one. This time, I wanted to package it better, so my friends in Kohima suggested I purchase these three things and do the packaging at home. And yes, it's still common practice in South Asia to use red sealing wax when you're making a parcel.

The cloth and cellotape were no problem, but I needed red sealing wax and none of the stationery shops I visited carried any. Eventually one guy (who was probably of Hindi-speaking background), told me to go to the 'Air to Jed' shop a little further down on NST road.

Air to Jed?

It took a few seconds, but somehow it clicked - I was looking for the 'A to Z' stationery shop.

There are two issues here. One, in standard varieties of English, the letter 'A' is pronounced as a diphthong like [eɪ]. This guy was saying producing with a monophthong [ɛ], which I heard as 'air'.

The second issue was that he substituted the 'z' sound [z] for the 'j' sound [ʤ]. This is actually quite common in widely spoken Indic languages, including Hindi, Nepali and Assamese. In these languages, the 'z' and 'j' sounds are what we call in free variation, meaning that if you swap one sound for the other, it doesn't change the meaning of a word, nor does it make the word nonsensical. For example, the word for 'table' in Hindi can be pronounced as both mez and mej. In the Bollywood film Salaam Namaste (which is set in Melbourne), one of the characters constantly pronounces 'exactly' as 'egg-Jack-Lee'.

Similarly, to this man giving me directions, 'Zed' and 'Jed' are effectively the same word.

Of course, to native English speakers, this can have even more humorous effects. A few weeks ago in Assam, I had to sit through a whole conversation with a friend who was telling me about the how he used to live next to the 'Guwahati Jew' and a soccer ball once accidentally went into the 'Jew'.

Thank goodness my time in Nepal had already taught me that in many parts of South Asia, a 'Jew' is where animals are kept.