This NSF-funded project had as its major goals the discovery of patterns of language change and relatedness. Of the 50 or so languages that form the South-Central Trans-Himalayan group in South and Southeast Asia, till lately, little has been discoverable of the languages in Manipur state where about a dozen languages from the group are spoken.  Have these languages diverged radically from the rest of the family, what parts of the grammar are the same, which words are the same and which changed in meaning or were borrowed from other languages (of which there are 30 in adjoining districts)?  Knowing answers to these questions would provide insight into how humans adapt linguistically to their environment (as in borrowing words or sounds).  To get at this information, this project used a method of word collection and grammar description which is based on naturalistic data.  Students became language technologists by learning to record in a sound proof booths, about data management, acoustic analysis, grammatical analysis, field methods, computational or tools-based skills in annotation, interacting with scholars in Indian institutions, interacting with speakers of other languages with sensitivity and concern, and conducting their own research.  “Service to others through science” was a prevalent theme in our interactions with each other and with the Lamkang community.  In terms of capacity building for the Lamkang, we were fortunate to support a speaker in her bid to learn more about her own language- she received a scholarship from UNT after working with us as s visiting scholar for two semesters. 

The project demonstrates the importance to language science in looking not only at well-known languages but also at the smaller lesser-known languages from lesser-known areas where, as in the case of Lamkang, unique grammatical and historical features reveal details about human language and cognition.  For example, in the course of the grammatical description of Lamkang, we discovered that the grammatical system encodes where every action originates:  one cannot say “come towards me,” rather one must say, “come toward me going uphill, (or downhill or on a level plane)”.  What is rather striking about Lamkang is that that spatial categories are used to encode prestige and power, so going south or downward from a place of relative powerlessness to a place of power will still be coded as going upward.  From a structural point-of-view, Lamkang exhibits a mismatch between prosodic chunking and morphological structure.   Prosodic chunking, e.g., the ways that phrases form intuitive chunks of information delimited by pauses,  a special intonational contour; or other sound-based phrasing, often lines up with morphological edges.  Pauses often coincide with the end of a clause and clauses have predictable initial and final pitch contours.  In the case of Lamkang, we find that there is a mismatch between the prosodic chunking and morphological boundaries in that a verb-word defined morphologically may consist of three prosodic chunks.  These chunks have implications for the writing system –creating inconsistency between speakers who write words with white spaces between the words based on morphological boundaries and those who rely on prosodic “feel” for the edges of word constituents.

Along with a team of students and experts in South-Central Trans-Himalayan, the PI (1) created basic grammatical description, of Lamkang, especially of major systems such as verb conjugation, spatial terms, verb stem alternation, local and core case marking, adverbials and clause chaining, affective markers, major sentence types/speech acts, and of the sound system including tone and sesquisyllabic structures. (2) Used this knowledge to create a practical orthography (understanding the concept of ‘wordhood’ for the Lamkang was central to this task.) (3) Used the practical orthography to create interlinear glossing which can be used for scientific and pedagogical purposes.  This was done in FLEx which is also the locus of the lexical database which contains in total word count, 64, 284 words and about 4,800 unique lexemes.  The numbers of lexemes are low because of polysemy (same form and different but related meaning as in the English word heated which can describe a liquid or an argument (!)  (4) Create a collection in the UNT digital library to archive and provide access to the series collections (Sumshot Khular Collection, Daniel Tholung Collection, Shobhana Chelliah collection, Rex Khular Collection).  (4) Disseminate and discuss findings with the speaker community and academic community.  Learn more about our activities and products here:  Lamkang Language Resource (@Weebly.com) and at The UNT Digital Library Lamkang Language Resource (https://digital.library.unt.edu/explore/collections/SAALT/).

Last Modified: 12/29/2018
Modified by: Shobhana L Chelliah