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Kho-Bwa languages
Language family of northeast India From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
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The Kho-Bwa languages, also known as Kamengic, are a small family of languages, or pair of families, spoken in Arunachal Pradesh, northeast India. The name Kho-Bwa was originally proposed by George van Driem (2001). It is based on the reconstructed words *kho ("water") and *bwa ("fire"). Blench (2011) suggests the name Kamengic, from the Kameng area of Arunachal Pradesh. Alternatively, Anderson (2014)[1] refers to Kho-Bwa as Northeast Kamengic.
Both Van Driem and Blench group the Sherdukpen (or Mey), Lishpa (or Khispi), Chug (Duhumbi) and Sartang languages together. These form a language cluster and are clearly related. The pair of Sulung (or Puroik) and Khowa (or Bugun) languages are included in the family by Van Driem (2001) but provisionally treated as a second family by Blench (2024).[2]
These languages have traditionally been placed in the Tibeto-Burman group by the Linguistic Survey of India, but the justification of this is open to question.[citation needed] The languages have certainly been strongly influenced by the neighboring Sino-Tibetan languages, but this does not necessarily imply genetic unity and may possibly be a purely areal effect.[3]
The entire language family has about 15,000 speakers (including Puroik) or about 10,000 speakers (excluding Puroik), according to estimates made during the 2000s.
Word lists and sociolinguistic surveys of Kho-Bwa languages have also been conducted by Abraham, et al. (2018).
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Classification
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The internal structure of the Kho-Bwa group of languages is as follows.[2] The similarities between Puroik–Bugun and Sherdukpen/Mey are sporadic and may be due to contact. Lieberherr (2015) considers Puroik to be a Tibeto-Burman language, which would imply that at least Bugun is as well.
- Blench & Post (2024)[2]
- Mey (Mö) [dialect cluster]
- Sherdukpen [2 languages]
- Shergaon
- Rupa (Mö)
- Sartang (But Monpa) [2 languages]
- Rahung
- Jergaon
- Chug–Lish [1 language]
- Sherdukpen [2 languages]
Lieberherr & Bodt (2017)
Lieberherr & Bodt (2017)[4] consider Puroik to be a Kho-Bwa language, and classify the Kho-Bwa languages as follows.
Tresoldi et al. (2022)
Based on computational phylogenetic analyses from Tresoldi et al. (2022), the phylogenetic tree of Kho-Bwa is roughly as follows:[5]
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Vocabulary
The following table of Kho-Bwa basic vocabulary items is from Blench (2015).[6]
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See also
- Kho-Bwa comparative vocabulary lists (Wiktionary)
Further reading
- Ismail Lieberherr and Timotheus Adrianus Bodt. (2017) Sub-grouping Kho-Bwa based on shared core vocabulary. Himalayan Linguistics 16(2). 26–63. Paper (CLDF Dataset on Zenodo doi:10.5281/zenodo.2553234)
- Binny Abraham, Kara Sako, Elina Kinny, Isapdaile Zeliang (2018). Sociolinguistic Research among Selected Groups in Western Arunachal Pradesh: Highlighting Monpa. SIL Electronic Survey Reports 2018–009. (CLDF Dataset on Zenodo. doi:10.5281/zenodo.3537601)
- Bodt, T. and J.-M. List (2019). Testing the predictive strength of the comparative method: An ongoing experiment on unattested words in Western Kho-Bwa languages. Papers in Historical Phonology 4.1. 22–44. doi:10.2218/pihph.4.2019.3037 (CLDF Dataset on Zenodo doi:10.5281/zenodo.3537604)
- Bodt, Timotheus A.; List, Johann-Mattis (2021). "Reflex prediction: A case study of Western Kho-Bwa". Diachronica. doi:10.1075/dia.20009.bod.
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References
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