The phenomenon of Bodo-Garo

Bodo-Garo is a compact, low-level branch of Tibeto-Burman. That is to say, it includes a relatively small number of languages – perhaps a dozen, depending on how we define “language” – which are very similar to one another in their lexicon and grammatical structure. For a small, compact branch, it is spread over quite a large geographical area – and, before the expansion of Assamese and Bengali, certainly over an even larger one. Bodo-Garo languages are spread over a wider area than, say, Naga or Kiranti, each of which is considerably more linguistically diverse than Bodo-Garo. My purpose in this paper is to outline a proposal for the history of the Bodo-Garo branch of Tibeto-Burman which accounts for these facts, as a contribution to our understanding of Bodo-Garo as part of Tibeto-Burman and as a participant in the long-running story of intense language contact in the Brahmaputra Valley.

Briefly, I propose, following a suggestion of Burling (2007), that Proto-Bodo-Garo first emerged as a lingua franca used for communication across the various linguistic communities of the region, and that its striking simplicity and transparency reflect a period when it was widely spoken by communities for whom it was not a native language. In this paper I will first describe the relevant phenomena of Bodo-Garo and its Tibeto-Burman relatives. In §2 I will discuss how the facts of Bodo-Garo fit into various models of language change and differentiation. §3 will briefly review what can be said or imagined about the ethnolinguistic history of Assam and the Brahmaputra Valley. Finally, §4 will summarize my specific proposal for the origin of the Bodo-Garo branch.

When I first began research on Tibeto-Burman and Southeast Asian languages as a postgraduate student in 1975, North East India was a huge informational vacuum. Not that there was that much information to be had on Tibeto-Burman languages in general, but for the North East we had only the tantalizing snippets of the Linguistic Survey of India and a handful of colonial-era jottings. Of course, many years earlier the publication of the <I>LSI made North East India better documented linguistically than many other corners of the earth, and made early comparative work on Tibeto-Burman possible. But time moves on, and while the fragmentary and primitive documentation provided by the LSI and the efforts of enthusiastic but untrained missionaries and authors fueled the pioneering work of Konow and others, by the time I entered the field there was little more that could be done with the superficial documentation available. And this seemed likely to be the situation for the foreseeable future, since the region was generally inaccessible to outsiders at the time, and almost nothing was being done locally. For those of us outside India the valiant efforts of intrepid Indian linguists like K. Das Gupta and I. M. Simon gave us only tantalizing glimpses of the linguistic riches that someday might be available to the world of linguistics.

Introduction

The genetic relationships among the Tibeto-Burman languages of eastern India and western Burma have always been problematic. While several linguists, including myself, have made stabs at sorting the problem out at higher levels, we can expect that serious progress will start with establishing lower-level groupings, on the order of Burling's (1983) hypothesis of a special relationship among Bodo-Garo, the Konyak Naga languages, and Jinghpaw. This paper discusses data which offer significant support to Burling's “Sal” hypothesis – I will present here what I think is strong comparative evidence for a quite close relationship between Jinghpaw and Nocte, which nails down one side of the triangular Sal grouping.

The Jinghpaw Tense-Aspect-Agreement Complex

Jinghpaw has a very peculiar verbal system, as yet far from thoroughly understood. Along with a large set of grammaticalized verbs (Matisoff 1974; DeLancey, Diehl, et al. 1978), there is a system of morphologically complex final elements, of one or two syllables, which Dai and Diehl (2003) label “Sentence Final Words”, or SFW's. Dai and Diehl's SFW category actually consists of two distinct categories of SFW, which I will label prefinal and final. We will see that the prefinal SFW construction corresponds directly to an almost identical SFW construction in Nocte.

A sentence in Jinghpaw typically ends with some kind of mood particle. In a declarative sentence the default is the final particle ai, which otherwise functions as a nominalizer.