Luish languages

Last updated
Luish
Asakian
Geographic
distribution		 Burma and Bangladesh
Linguistic classification Sino-Tibetan
Subdivisions
Glottolog sakk1239

The Luish, Asakian, or Sak languages are a group of Sino-Tibetan languages belonging to the Sal branch. They are spoken in Burma and Bangladesh, and consist of the Sak, Kadu, and Ganan languages. In recent years, Luish languages have been influenced by Burmese and Chakma.

Contents

Although Luish languages are now widely scattered and spoken by relatively small populations, Luce (1985) suggests that the Luish languages were “once spread over the whole north of Burma, from Manipur perhaps to northern Yunnan.”

Matisoff (2013) [1] proposes the name Asakian, since Lui or Loi were used by the Meithei to refer to slaves. Although many speakers of Luish languages refer to themselves as Sak, Cak, or similar variations, speakers of Ganan and Mokhwang Kadu do not refer to themselves as Sak or Asak. [2]

Extinct languages

Matisoff (2013) [1] has demonstrated that the extinct Andro, Sengmai, and Chairel languages of Manipur are also Luish languages.

Andro, Sengmai, and Chairel are extinct and known only from a glossary recorded in 1859, their speakers having switched to Meitei. [3] [4] There are also various unattested varieties of Lui or Loi ('serf') mentioned in nineteenth-century accounts that appear to be Luish varieties. [5]

It is uncertain whether the extinct Pyu language of central Myanmar is a Luish language.

Benedict (1972) and Shafer (1974) had classified the extinct Taman language of northern Myanmar as part of the Luish branch, but it has since been shown by Keisuke Huziwara (2016) to be a non-Luish language, possibly a separate branch of Tibeto-Burman.

Classification

Matisoff (2013), [1] citing Huziwara (2012), [6] provides the following Stammbaum classification for the Asakian (Luish) branch.

Asakian

Huziwara (2020) merges Sengmai, Andro, and Chairel as varieties of Chakpa. [2]

Reconstruction

Proto-Luish has been reconstructed by Huziwara (2012), [6] with additional Proto-Luish lexical reconstructions by Matisoff (2013). [1] Like Proto-Austroasiatic and Jingpho, Proto-Luish has a sesquisyllabic syllable structure.

Proto-Luish reconstructions by Huziwara (2012), [6] can be found at Wiktionary's list of Proto-Luish reconstructions.

Related Research Articles

Sino-Tibetan languages Large language family of Asia

Sino-Tibetan, also known as Trans-Himalayan in a few sources, is a family of more than 400 languages, second only to Indo-European in number of native speakers. The vast majority of these are the 1.3 billion native speakers of Chinese languages. Other Sino-Tibetan languages with large numbers of speakers include Burmese and the Tibetic languages. Other languages of the family are spoken in the Himalayas, the Southeast Asian Massif, and the eastern edge of the Tibetan Plateau. Most of these have small speech communities in remote mountain areas, and as such are poorly documented.

Tani, is a branch of Sino-Tibetan languages spoken mostly in Arunachal Pradesh, India and neighboring regions.

Qiangic is a group of related languages within the Sino-Tibetan language family. They are spoken mainly in Southwest China, including Sichuan, Tibet and Yunnan. Most Qiangic languages are distributed in the prefectures of Ngawa, Garzê, Ya'an and Liangshan in Sichuan with some in Northern Yunnan as well.

Languages of Myanmar

There are approximately a hundred languages spoken in Myanmar. Burmese, spoken by two thirds of the population, is the official language.

The Kuki-Chin–Naga languages are a geographic clustering of languages of the Sino-Tibetan family in James Matisoff's classification used by Ethnologue, which groups it under the non-monophyletic "Tibeto-Burman". Their genealogical relationship both to each other and to the rest of Sino-Tibetan is unresolved, but Matisoff lumps them together as a convenience pending further research.

The Sal languages are a branch of Sino-Tibetan languages spoken in eastern India, parts of Bangladesh, and Burma.

The Jingpho-Luish, Jingpho-Asakian, Kachin–Luic, or Kachinic languages are a group of Sino-Tibetan languages belonging the Sal branch. They are spoken in eastern India and Burma, and consist of the Jingpho language and the Luish languages Sak, Kadu, Ganan, Andro, Sengmai, and Chairel. Ethnologue and Glottolog include the extinct or nearly extinct Taman language in the Jingpo branch, but Huziwara (2016) considers it to be unclassified within Tibeto-Burman.

The Tibeto-Kanauri languages, also called Bodic, Bodish–Himalayish, and Western Tibeto-Burman, are a proposed intermediate level of classification of the Sino-Tibetan languages, centered on the Tibetic languages and the Kinnauri dialect cluster. The conception of the relationship, or if it is even a valid group, varies between researchers.

The Nung or Nungish languages are a poorly described family of uncertain affiliation within the Sino-Tibetan languages spoken in Yunnan, China and Burma. They include:

Tibeto-Burman languages Group of the Sino-Tibetan language family

The Tibeto-Burman languages are the non-Sinitic members of the Sino-Tibetan language family, over 400 of which are spoken throughout the highlands of Southeast Asia as well as certain parts of East Asia and South Asia. Around 60 million people speak Tibeto-Burman languages, around half of whom speak Burmese, and 13% of whom speak Tibetic languages. The name derives from the most widely spoken of these languages, namely Burmese and the Tibetic languages . These languages also have extensive literary traditions, dating from the 12th and 7th centuries respectively. Most of the other languages are spoken by much smaller communities, and many of them have not been described in detail.

Proto-Tibeto-Burman is the reconstructed ancestor of the Tibeto-Burman languages, that is, the Sino-Tibetan languages except for Chinese. An initial reconstruction was produced by Paul K. Benedict and since refined by James Matisoff. Several other researchers argue that the Tibeto-Burman languages sans Chinese do not constitute a monophyletic group within Sino-Tibetan, and therefore that Proto-Tibeto-Burman was the same language as Proto-Sino-Tibetan.

Kadu or Kado is a Sino-Tibetan language of the Sal branch spoken in Sagaing Region, Myanmar. Dialects are Settaw, Mawkhwin, and Mawteik [extinct], with 30,000 speakers total.

Sak is a Sino-Tibetan language of the Sal branch spoken in Bangladesh and Myanmar.

Chakpa is an extinct Sino-Tibetan language that was spoken in the Imphal valley of Manipur, India. It belongs to the Luish branch. Chakpa speakers have since shifted to Meithei. Varieties include Sengmai and Andro.

The Burmo-Qiangic or Eastern Tibeto-Burman languages are a proposed family of Sino-Tibetan languages spoken in Southwest China and Myanmar. It consists of the Lolo-Burmese and Qiangic branches, including the extinct Tangut language.

Mruic or Mru–Hkongso is a small group of Sino-Tibetan languages consisting of two poorly attested languages, Mru and Anu-Hkongso. Their relationship within Sino-Tibetan is unclear.

Central Tibeto-Burman or Central Trans-Himalayan is a proposed branch of the Sino-Tibetan language family proposed by Scott DeLancey (2015) on the basis of shared morphological evidence.

Ganan is a Sino-Tibetan language of northwestern Myanmar. It belongs to the Luish branch, and is most closely related to the Kadu language of Myanmar.

Taman is an extinct Sino-Tibetan language that was spoken in Htamanthi village in Homalin Township, Sagaing Region, northern Myanmar. It was documented in a list of 75 words in Brown (1911). Keisuke Huziwara (2016) discovered an elderly rememberer of Taman in Htamanthi who could remember some Taman phrases as well as a short song, but was not fluent in the Taman language. However, no fluent speakers of Taman remained in the area.

The Sino-Tibetan Etymological Dictionary and Thesaurus was a linguistics research project hosted at the University of California at Berkeley. The project, which focused on Sino-Tibetan historical linguistics, started in 1987 and lasted until 2015.

References

  1. 1 2 3 4 Matisoff, James A. (2013). "Re-Examining the Genetic Position of Jingpho: Putting Flesh on the Bones of the Jingpho/Luish Relationship" (PDF). Linguistics of the Tibeto-Burman Area. 36 (2): 15–95.
  2. 1 2 Huziwara, Keisuke (2020). "On the Genetic Position of Chakpa Within Luish Languages". Himalayan Linguistics. 19 (2): 44–55. doi: 10.5070/H91150999 .
  3. ↑ Burling, Robbins (2003). "The Tibeto-Burman Languages of Northeast India". In Thurgood, Graham; LaPolla, Randy J. (eds.). Sino-Tibetan Languages. London: Routledge. pp. 169–191. ISBN   978-0-7007-1129-1.
  4. ↑ McCulloch, W. (1859). Account of the Valley of Munnipore and of the Hill Tribes: With a Comparative Vocabulary of the Munnipore and Other Languages. Calcutta: Bengal Printing Company.
  5. ↑ Hammarström, Harald; Forkel, Robert; Haspelmath, Martin, eds. (2017). "Lui (bookkeeping)". Glottolog 3.0 . Jena, Germany: Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History.
  6. 1 2 3 Huziwara, Keisuke 藤原 敬介 (2012). "Rui sogo no saikou ni mukete" ルイ祖語の再構にむけて [Toward a Reconstruction of Proto-Luish]. Kyōtodaigaku gengogaku kenkyū京都大学言語学研究 (in Japanese). 31: 25–131. doi: 10.14989/182194 . hdl: 2433/182194 .

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