Mruic or Mru–Hkongso is a small group of
Sino-Tibetan languages
Sino-Tibetan, also cited 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 ...
consisting of two poorly attested languages,
Mru and
Anu-Hkongso. Their relationship within Sino-Tibetan is unclear.
Peterson & Wright (2009)
[Peterson, David A. and Jonathan Wright. 2009. ''Mru-Hkongso: a new Tibeto-Burman grouping''. Paper presented at The 42nd International Conference on Sino-Tibetan Languages and Linguistics (ICSTLL 42), Chiang Mai.] proposed the name ''Mru–Hkongso''.
Classification
Matisoff (2015)
[Matisoff, James A. 2015]
''The Sino-Tibetan Etymological Dictionary and Thesaurus''
Berkeley: University of California.
PDF
classifies Mru as part of the
Northeast India
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, ...
n
areal group, a
linkage that includes
Tani,
Deng (Digaro), "
Kuki-Chin–Naga",
Meithei,
Mikir, and
Sal
Sal, SAL, or S.A.L. may refer to:
Personal name
* Sal (name), a list of people and fictional characters with the given name or nickname
Places
* Sal, Cape Verde, an island and municipality
* Sal, Iran, a village in East Azerbaijan Province
* Ca ...
.
On the other hand,
Bradley (1997) classifies Mru as part of
Lolo-Burmese, based on Löffler's (1966) observations that Mru shares many phonological and lexical resemblances with Lolo-Burmese.
The ''Mru-Hkongso'' group was first proposed by Peterson & Wright (2009),
who do not consider it to be a subgroup of
Lolo-Burmese.
Peterson (2017:205)
[Peterson, David. 2017. "On Kuki-Chin subgrouping." In Picus Sizhi Ding and Jamin Pelkey, eds. ''Sociohistorical linguistics in Southeast Asia: New horizons for Tibeto-Burman studies in honor of David Bradley'', 189-209. Leiden: Brill.] notes that Mru and Hkongso do not have any features characteristic of
Kuki-Chin languages
The Kuki-Chin languages (also called Kuki-Chin-Mizo, Kukish or South-Central Tibeto-Burman languages) are a branch of 50 or so Sino-Tibetan languages spoken in northeastern India, western Myanmar and southeastern Bangladesh. Most speakers of ...
that have been identified by VanBik (2009), including lack of the
sound change
A sound change, in historical linguistics, is a change in the pronunciation of a language. A sound change can involve the replacement of one speech sound (or, more generally, one phonetic feature value) by a different one (called phonetic chan ...
Proto-Tibeto-Burman
Proto-Tibeto-Burman (commonly abbreviated PTB) 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 ...
*s > ''tʰ'', lack of Kuki-Chin-type verb stem alternation, and lack of the singular first person pronoun (1.) *''kaj'' which is present in most Kuki-Chin languages.
Peterson (2009)
[Peterson, David A. 2009]
"Where does Mru fit into Tibeto-Burman?"
Paper presented at ''The 42nd International Conference on Sino-Tibetan Languages and Linguistics'' (ICSTLL 42), November 2009, Payap University, Chiangmai, Thailand
Thailand ( ), historically known as Siam () and officially the Kingdom of Thailand, is a country in Southeast Asia, located at the centre of the Indochinese Peninsula, spanning , with a population of almost 70 million. The country is b ...
. considers Mru-Hkongso to be a separate Tibeto-Burman branch, and notes the following similarities between Mru-Hkongso and
Bodo–Garo languages.
*
Bodo–Garo *=''kho'' 'accusative';
Mru =''k(öj)'' 'accusative' (
Hkongso locative =''ko'')
*
Bodo–Garo *=''ba'' ‘also’; Mru-Hkongso =''pö'' ‘also’
*
Bodo–Garo *–''ram'' 'locative nominalizer';
Mru –''ram'' 'locative nominalizer'
*
Bodo–Garo *=''gVn'' 'future marker';
Mru –''köm'' ~ ''kön'' 'irrealis marker' (
Hkongso ''ham'')
*
Bodo–Garo *–''(k)ha'' 'past marker';
Mru –''khaj'' ~ -''hö'' 'past marker' (
Hkongso ''kö'' ?)
*
Bodo–Garo *–''dV'' 'imperative marker';
Mru –''diö'' 'imperative marker' (
Hkongso ''de'')
Peterson (2009)
considers the similarities with Bodo–Garo to be due to the possible early split of Mruic from a Tibeto-Burman branch that included Bodo–Garo (see also
Central Tibeto-Burman languages and
Sal languages
The Sal languages are a branch of Sino-Tibetan languages spoken in northeast India, parts of Bangladesh, and Burma.
Alternative names
'' Ethnologue'' calls the group "Jingpho–Konyak–Bodo", while Scott DeLancey (2015) refers to it as "Bodo- ...
).
Grammar
Both
Mru and
Hkongso display SVO (
subject-verb-object) order instead of the SOV word order typical of most Tibeto-Burman languages.
[Ebersole, Harold. 1996. ''The Mru Language: A preliminary grammatical sketch''. Ms.][Jonathan Michael Wright. 2009. ]
Hkongso Grammar Sketch
'. MA thesis, Graduate Institute of Applied Linguistics. Bai,
Sinitic, and
Karenic are the only other Sino-Tibetan language branches with primarily verb-medial (SVO) word order.
References
{{Sino-Tibetan languages
Sino-Tibetan languages