RabhaThe Rabha's inhabit the plains on both sides of the Brahmaputra river in Assam, in the North East of India. Their language is Rabha, a member of the Tibeto-Burman language family. This is the first ever comprehensive grammar of the Rongdani dialect of Rabha, as spoken in, a.o., the Rabha heartlands. Based on extensive field work by the author, this work is yet another significant step in the meticulous task of piecing together the jigsaw of Himalayan languages as undertaken by George van Driem and his team. Given the steady decline of the Rabha language in favour of Assamese, all those interested in the language and history of the Himalayas and Northern India will welcome this volume. With a Rabha dictionary/vocabulary, and a series of key Rabha texts shedding light on its people's customs. With financial support of the International Institute of Asian Studies (www.iias.nl). |
Contents
INTRODUCTION | 1 |
4 Methodology | 5 |
6 Rabha speakers and dialects | 7 |
7 Some scattered Róngdani speaking villages east of the river Jinari Bolbola | 9 |
8 Rabha in TibetoBurman taxonomy | 13 |
9 Literary activity | 16 |
CHAPTER ONE SOUND LEVEL ANALYSIS | 18 |
CHAPTER TWO PHONOLOGICAL PROCESSES AND MORPHEMICS | 115 |
CHAPTER FIVEADJECTIVES ADVERBS INDECLINABLES | 446 |
CHAPTER SIX SENTENCE LEVEL ANALYSIS | 479 |
CHAPTER SEVEN CORRELATIVE ANALYSIS OF BODO GARO AND RABHA | 489 |
CHAPTER EIGHT SAMPLE RABHA TEXTS | 664 |
RABHA VOCABULARY | 705 |
APPENDICES | 844 |
Appendix II A newly created Rabha numeral system | 846 |
Appendix III Some bisyllabic verb roots and their possible reduplicated forms | 847 |
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Common terms and phrases
adjectival adjectives adverbs affixes allomorph allophonic analysis antham Assamese attributive bamboo banana bár basket become betel nut Bhattacharya bird bobaia Bodo Bodo and Garo Bodo Garo Rabha Burling cán cána categoriser causative prefix cekena cika CL-one classifier cloth coda cokó compounds consonant cooked correlation dative derived diphthongs dogota echo endocentric finite verb fish free morpheme fruit Garo and Rabha genitive glottal stop gósa high tone indicating infixal initial clusters instances interrogative intr kaian kán khaa khára leaf lexemes locative marker másu meaning monosyllabic morpheme morphological nakor nán neken noun roots numerals paddy pattern peke person pheme phonemic plant plosives plural postpos postposition present tense pron pronouns ráa rákhua reduplicated rén-jo réna rice beer sábra semantic suff suffix syllable tási things three languages tree u-be variety verb formations verb roots verbal village vowel words