Khasi language

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This article has been extracted from LINGUISTIC SURVEY OF INDIA SIR GEORGE ABRAHAM GRIERSON, K.C.I.E., PH.D., D.LlTT., LL.D., ICS (Retd.). CALCUTTA: GOVERNMENT OF INDIA CENTRAL PUBLICATION BRANCH 1927

NOTE: While reading please keep in mind that all articles in this series have been scanned from a book. Therefore, paragraphs might have got rearranged or omitted and/ or footnotes might have got inserted into the main text of the article, interrupting the flow. Readers who spot these errors might like to correct (and/ or update) them in a Part II of this article. Secondly, kindly ignore all references to page numbers, because they refer to the physical, printed book.

Other references to this language in The Linguistic Survey Of India

NOTE: The following are not likely to be complete paragraphs. They are excerpts obtained through an Internet search.

Pater Schmidt has here proved not only that the Mon-Khmer languages form a link between the Munda languages of India proper and the languages of Indonesia, -- grouping the first two, with Khasi and some other minor forms of speech, under the

This is the number found in the list given in Appendix I, in which the figures for each are compared with those of the Census of 1921. But in this enumeration there is. a good dial of double counting, as each language and each dia1ect is there given a separate number. A better idea of the results will be gained from the consideration that the Census of 1921 records 190, and the Survey records 179 languages, as distinct from dialects. When counting dialects, it must be borne in mind that, in order to make the total for the dialects tally with the number of the speakers of the language of which they form the members, it has been necessary to count the standard form of the language as one of the dialects. There are also, inevitably, cases in which a language has been returned, but its dialects not mentioned. For instance, the Khasi language (No. 8 in the list) and its dialects are arranged as follows : -- Khasi, Standard, Lyng-ngam, Synteng, War, Unspecified . Here, if we count Kbasi in the list of languages, we must omit ` Standard' and ` Unspecified' in counting our list of dialects and languages, or we shall be recording the same form of speech twice, or perhaps three times, over. Hence, in the above example, we can count only three dialects as additional to the standard Khasi language. On this principle, the 1921 Census has recorded 49 dialects in addition to the general language-names. The Survey, on the other hand, has recorded no less than 544 dialect-names in addition to the standard and unspecified forms of the 179 languages. The various forms of speech noted are therefore 237 (188 + 49) in the Census, and 723 (179 + 544) in the Survey. Each of these 723 is described in the Survey, in most cases with more or less complete grammatical accounts. A summary of the dotails2 of these figures is as follows

In the year 1906 there appeared in Brunswick a little book by Pater W. Schmidt entitled ` Die Mon-Khmer-Volker, ein Bindeglied zwischen Volkern Zentralasiens und Austronesiens ' which at once attracted the attention of students of language and of ethnology. The author's researches into the languages known as Mon, Khmer, and Khasi had already established his reputation as a skilled and, at the same time, as a sober philologist, and in this work new and far-reaching views, based on solid and wide learning, were enunciated. These dews up to the present time have not been seriously challenged.

Going north we come to Khasi, a Mon-Khmer language spoken in the Khasi and Jaintia Hills of Assam. This was fully dealt with in the Survey. Its standard dialect has been often described, and moreover possesses a small literature with which it has been endowed by the local missionaries. Khasi is more or less isolated alike from its cousins of Burma and from those of India, and has struck out on somewhat independent lines apart from Mon, Nicobarese, and Munda, which are mutually more closely connected than any of them is with Khasi. With its three dialects of Lyng-ngam, Synteng, and War, in addition to the standard form of speech, Khasi forms an island of Mon-Khmer speech, left untouched in the midst of an ocean of Tibeto-Burman languages. Logan was the first to suggest, and Kuhn subsequently showed conc1usively, that it and the Mon languages belong to a common stock. The resemblances in the vocabularies of Khasi and of the dialects of the PalaungWa group settle the question. But the resemblance is not only one of vocabulary. The construction of the Mon and of the Khasi sentence is the same. The various component parts are put in the same order, and the order of thought of the speakers is thus shown to be the same. Like Mon and other members of the branch, and unlike the other Indo-Chinese languages by which it is surrounded, Khasl has no tones.1 On the other hand, it differs from the other Mon-Khmer languages in possessing the so-called articles, which are wanting in other members of the branch, and in having grammatical gender. Here we must leave the matter in the hands of the ethnologists. It will be interesting to see if any connexion of tribal customs can he traced, and. if the Mons or Palaungs still retain survivals of the matriarchal state of society which is so characteristic of the Khasis. The Palaungs, at any rate, trace their origin to a princess, and not to a prince.

In Volume II, page 7 of the Survey, I have stated that Khasi, there spelt ` Khassi ' possesses tones, but this was a mistake due to the fact that at the time we possessed no satisfactory definition of what a tone is. Many words in Khasi do end in a glottall check, and such a glottal check is called ` the abrupt tone' or ` the entering tone ' in other Indo-Chinese languages. But this glottal check is, properly, got a tone at all. The word ` tone' should be confined to indicating the pitch or the change of pitch of the voice, and has no reference to the abruptness or otherwise with which a word is uttered. All the Austro-Asiatic languages, including Khasi, employ this glottal check, but it is a distinguishing characteristic of all of them that none employs the true tones which indicate the meaning of a word by pitch or change of pitch.