Comparative Tangkhul∗ David Mortensen University of California, Berkeley
[email protected] December 17, 2003 Abstract This paper presents a preliminary lexical/phonological reconstruction of Proto-Tangkhul (PTk) and presents a tentative but general overview of the sound changes that relate this meso- language to Proto-Tibeto-Burman (PTB)—as reconstructed by Matisoff (2003)—and to three daughter languages (Standard Tangkhul, Kachai, and Huishu). The phonological correspon- dences and reconstructions are presented according to prosodic constituents (prefixes, onsets, rhymes, and tones). These subsections include discussions of several theoretically interesting sound changes and morphological developments. 1 Introduction The name Tangkhul (also Luhuppa or Luppa, espcially in older literature) refers to an ethnic group of Manipur State, India, and contiguous parts of Nagaland (another state of India) and Burma (see Figure 1). The Tangkhuls are quite diversified linguistically, and the speech varieties of most Tangkhul villages are not mutually intelligible with those of neighboring villages (though the sim- ilarities are large enough to facilitate the rapid learning of one another’s languages). However, it is clear that the Tangkhul languages are closely related to one-another and form a distinct subgroup within the Tibeto-Burman family. It has long been noted that Tangkhul is a group of languages, rather than a single language (Brown 1837), however, almost all of the available descriptions of ∗This paper has profited immensely from