Review of the Tai Languages of Assam – a Grammar and Texts, by Stephen Morey, Canberra: Pacific Linguistics, 2005
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Linguistics of the Tibeto-Burman Area Volume 29.2 — October 2006 REVIEW OF THE TAI LANGUAGES OF ASSAM – A GRAMMAR AND TEXTS, BY STEPHEN MOREY, CANBERRA: PACIFIC LINGUISTICS, 2005 Mark Post La Trobe University Keywords: Review, Stephen Morey, Tai, Phake, Aiton, Khamyang, Khamti, Ahom. The volume under review is the first ever large-scale description of the Tai languages of North East India, and treats the Assam-based Phake, Aiton and Khamyang varieties, as well as (to a limited extent) the Arunachali Tai variety Khamti and the basically extinct language Ahom. It is not simply “a grammar and texts”, as the title proposes, but is rather a comprehensive documentation of a language or languages (I will return to this point), some features of which include an extensive literature review, a dialect survey, an explication of scripts and ceremonial-literary traditions, the current versions of three already very substantial dictionaries-in-progress (as well as a digitization of a previously unpublished dictionary by another author), a descriptive grammar, and a far larger body of fully analysed and annotated texts than is usually found in works of this kind, in addition to many helpful ancillary materials such as large colour photographs, detailed maps and consultant biographies. The sheer scale of Morey’s presentation is made possible through the inclusion of an ingeniously conceived and designed CD-ROM, which not only contains the full text of the bound presentation (replete with numerous links and clickable cross-references), but includes sound files for nearly every example, and every text, to which the author 141 142 Mark Post makes reference, as well as numerous materials (such as the dictionaries and text analyses) which are simply too extensive to include in a printed work of acceptable size and cost. Morey’s work thus not only easily takes its place at the forefront of North East Indian Tai studies, it paves the way, and provides much of the necessary data, for extensive future research in the area. The main text of the presentation is in eleven chapters. Chapter 1 orients the reader, and is followed by an overview of the North East Indian Tai cultures and their languages in Chapter 2, a literature review in Chapter 3, theoretical and methodological considerations in Chapters 4 and 5 and an extensive phonological description and discussion of traditional scripts in Chapters 6 and 7. Chapter 8 is the main body of the grammar, entitled simply “syntax”, and the final Chapters 9-11 involve discussions of literary traditions (9) and corpus design (10-11) respectively. I will first discuss the contents of these chapters in order, then return to a more general appraisal of the work. Chapter 1 opens with a provocative discussion concerning the relative values of linguistic analysis of endangered languages and their documentation, and leaves the reader with no doubt as to where Morey’s sympathies lie. Although one can agree or disagree with Morey’s principles, his central claim cannot be ignored, and this is that many of the logistical limitations on language documentation suffered by scholars over the last several hundred years simply no longer apply. As Morey has demonstrated, the development of computer-based technologies and low-cost dissemination media have made it possible even for researchers with ordinary technological abilities and modest means to produce and disseminate a relatively large-scale language database. Doing so accomplishes at least three very important goals: it provides the reader with the ability to check the analyst’s claims against raw data, it provides other researchers with the ability to conduct further research of their own on the same data, and it provides the community which the author is serving with Review of Morey (2005) 143 a very direct voice in the overall process of research into their language. Chapter 1 also includes a helpful, if brief, overview of the Tai language “family”, situating the North East Indian Tai languages in the Shan group of Southwestern Tai, largely on the basis of tone category correspondences, as is customary. On the basis of some apparent non-correspondences with Northern Shan (Edmondson and Solnit 1997), Morey finds that the position of his target languages within Shan should be re-evaluated, although he leaves this ultimate evaluation to a future researcher. In §1.2.3, we move to a very brief discussion of what is to me one of the trickier aspects of the work (also to an extent discussed in Chapter 2, as well as elsewhere), which is the author’s methodological decision to in most places combine two Tai “languages”, Aiton and Phake (in several places also including the highly endangered Khamyang, as well as in a few places apparently also including Khamti), together into a single integrated presentation. Although all of the languages Morey discusses (with the possible exception of the extinct language Ahom) appear to be largely mutually intelligible, hence are, on linguistic grounds, “dialects of the same language”, there are important phonological and grammatical features that distinguish them, such as the position of the comparator morpheme (§8.3.2.2.1), the syntax of negation (as well as the form of the negator) (§8.4.3.1), the segmental phonologies (§6.2-§6.3), and lexical, grammatical and phrasal prosodies (i.e. lexical tone, grammatical-functional tone, and intonation, §6.2.4, §6.3.4, and §8 (several places)), to name but a few. The author has his reasons for presenting these languages en masse, and goes to lengths in many places to be clear as to the extent to which the “Tai languages” discussed herein are identical or in what ways they differ (particularly in the phonology chapter §6, in which the detailed treatments presented there are kept quite distinct). But he does not, and indeed can not, do this everywhere, and some readers may as a result feel uncertain in several places as to the precise extent to which certain generalizations made necessarily hold 144 Mark Post across all of the groups, or whether every feature discussed has been equally fully-investigated for all varieties. Chapters 2 and 3 discuss the cultural and linguistic situation of the Tai languages of North East India and previous analyses of them, respectively. Chapter 3 is wide in scope, and helpfully discusses numerous works which are difficult – in some cases all but impossible – to locate, whether one is a locally or internationally- based scholar. Of the works discussed, the author makes frequent further reference to Needham (1894), Banchob (1977; 1987) and Kingcom (1992), sometimes extensively representing their analyses. Again, although the author has stated his reasons for doing so, I found myself surprised at points at the extent to which he relied on these sometimes uneven works in preference to far more reliable works treating Tai languages which are less closely related to North East Indian Tai languages, as well as non-Tai languages with similar grammatical typologies. Not entirely unrelated to this is the author’s decision (mostly discussed in Chapter 6) to use different orthographies for the different Tai varieties examined; in particular, although he adopted an IPA-based orthography for Aiton, with some modifications, for Phake he maintained the in some ways idiosyncratic orthography of Banchob (1987). Although the value of maintaining consistency with previous sources is certainly a matter of opinion, it is this reviewer’s opinion that a single, consistent practical orthography used throughout the presentation would have made cross-variety comparison far simpler for the reader, and the documentation more user-friendly overall. Chapter 4 discusses “theoretical considerations”, and includes a brief overview of a few of the better known works in Tai studies, mentioning their different approaches to some perennially vexing questions in Mainland South East Asian linguistics, including grammaticalization and the lexical versus functional status of serialized verbs, functions and variability of constituent order, and constituent structure and the possibility of “discontinuous” constituents (topics which are all revisited in Chapter 8). Here and Review of Morey (2005) 145 elsewhere, the author is to be commended for his recognition that Tai functors – while clearly functional in nature – are not so deeply grammaticalized that they are no longer also analysable in terms of their (lexical) source semantics. I found his decision to represent putatively functional serialized verbs in terms of their erstwhile lexical meaning in CAPS to be, in general, a comfortable and insightful solution to a difficult representational problem. However I do not feel the same about his decision to gloss several morpheme types (generally, what appear to be constituent-final stance particles) as “PRT” (“Particle”) – in other words, to leave them largely unanalysed – particularly as the author is explicitly aware of their functional importance in Tai languages. Chapter 5 outlines the methodology employed by the author in the collection, analysis and translation of his extensive text database. In it, he discusses the nature and relative values of different types of linguistic data at length, and focuses in particular on an opposition – perhaps overly reductive, but Morey is hardly alone here – between “elicited” and “text” data. It is clear both from statements made in this work and from its overall composition that Morey feels far more comfortable relying on “text” than on “elicited” data, and I can find no intrinsic fault in this. That said, one might add a further cautionary note that even “text” data can be gathered under excruciatingly unnatural circumstances (the very presence of a non- native speaker could be argued to condition data, to say nothing of when that non-native speaker acts as the sole or principal interlocutor). On the other hand, at least some types of “elicited” data (for example, sentences in the language under investigation which are constructed and volunteered by the analyst, and which are rejected by consultants as unacceptable) can illuminate an analysis both from the point of view of the analyst and from that of the grammar reader.