Jah Hut (Jah Het) is an

Austroasiatic The Austroasiatic languages ( ) are a large language family spoken throughout Mainland Southeast Asia, South Asia and East Asia. These languages are natively spoken by the majority of the population in Vietnam and Cambodia, and by minority popu ...

language spoken around the Krau river in

peninsular Malaysia Peninsular Malaysia, historically known as Malaya and also known as West Malaysia or the Malaysian Peninsula, is the western part of Malaysia that comprises the southern part of the Malay Peninsula on Mainland Southeast Asia and the list of isla ...

by the Jah Hut, one of the indigenous

Orang Asli The Orang Asli are a Homogeneity and heterogeneity, heterogeneous Indigenous peoples, indigenous population forming a national minority in Malaysia. They are the oldest inhabitants of Peninsular Malaysia. As of 2017, the Orang Asli accounted f ...

peoples.

Classification

Jah Hut belongs to the

Aslian The Aslian languages () are the southernmost branch of Austroasiatic languages spoken on the Malay Peninsula. They are the languages of many of the ''Orang Asli'', the aboriginal inhabitants of the peninsula. The total number of native speakers o ...

branch of the Austroasiatic language family. Previously thought to be a member of the Central Aslian sub-branch, Jah Hut is now considered an isolate. Dialects * Kerdau * Krau * Ketiar Krau * Kuala Tembeling * Pulau Guai * Cheres * Ulu Tembeling

Phonology

Jah Hut has 9 vowels and 19 consonants.

Morphology

Jah Hut does not contain

open Open or OPEN may refer to: Music * Open (band), Australian pop/rock band * The Open (band), English indie rock band * ''Open'' (Blues Image album), 1969 * ''Open'' (Gerd Dudek, Buschi Niebergall, and Edward Vesala album), 1979 * ''Open'' (Go ...

major syllables in word-final positions. Conversely, the language contains 15 consonants that can be used to close a syllable. Further, in the context in which a nasalized vowel or consonant occurs earlier in a given word, the final stop is broken down into a nasal and

glottal stop The glottal stop or glottal plosive is a type of consonantal sound used in many Speech communication, spoken languages, produced by obstructing airflow in the vocal tract or, more precisely, the glottis. The symbol in the International Phonetic ...

. Does not contain restrictions on non-homorganic stop clusters, meaning that many words begin with consonants that don’t phonetically match. (i.e. words that begin with ‘tk’ or ‘bk’). This pattern can be found in many other Aslian languages. * - palate * - Bamboo Rat * - gray Jah Hut causative prefixes

Jah Hut varies from other Mon-Khmer languages in that it contains little-to-no phonetic vowel length. It also uses

causative In linguistics, a causative (abbreviated ) is a valency-increasing operationPayne, Thomas E. (1997). Describing morphosyntax: A guide for field linguists'' Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. p. 173–186. that indicates that a subject either ...

prefixes that are composed by or . By using this, the speaker is able to indicate that a specific something or someone causes something or someone to be or do something else. Similarly, the prefix allows the user of the language to assign an act to a person. For example, , in Jah Hut, means "to plait palm leaves", while is translated as, "one who plaits". On the other hand, when an act does not involve a person directly, the agent of the act can be found in a prefixed or infixed , depending on the root of the given word. i.e. , or wrapping, compared to , meaning the act of wrapping.

Syntax

In Jah Hut, all complements but the direct object require a preposition and, like many Aslian languages, verb usage in Jah Hut is restricted generally to strings of no more than 2 verbs, with the first verb referencing some form of motion, with the second verb representing the major action. Another form of verb usage is a form which uses the first verb as the major action, with the second verb describing the manner in which the verb is enacted. Also, if a verb is attached to a personal prefix, this must always agree with the agent of the sentence, regardless of where these two components of the sentence are located.

References

External links

* http://projekt.ht.lu.se/rwaai RWAAI (Repository and Workspace for Austroasiatic Intangible Heritage) * http://hdl.handle.net/10050/00-0000-0000-0003-66F7-5@view Jah Hut in RWAAI Digital Archive {{Austro-Asiatic languages Languages of Malaysia Aslian languages Orang Asli