Islamization in Malabar was influenced by various factors, the most predominant being trade and intermarriage in the early centuries. The patronage of rulers such as the Samuthiris in encouraging some of the Hindu castes to embrace Islam was also an important factor. In the late nineteenth and the early twentieth century, conversion among the lower Hindu castes by voluntary choice was often prompted by their poor economic conditions and the prospects of work on the coast. Also, by 1921, there was a mass conversion of the Cherumar population which has been attributed to the rigid landlord-peasant relationship and the Mappilla uprisings. The economic conditions and occupations of the Mappillas were quite disparate for, those of the coastal towns were generally rich, prosperous traders and merchants, often with trade links across the Arabian Sea, and those in the interior regions, particularly later converts from low castes, were agriculturists.

Closely linked to the mode of Islamization, their economic status and occupations, and their Arab identity was the social stratification of the Mappillas into various groups. For example, the thangals claimed a superior status on account of their sayyid ancestry in Hadhramaut, while the keyis, the koyas and the baramis as landed aristocrats and merchants were economically dominant. The pusalars and the ossans, as converts from the mukkuvans, were occupationally inferior and socially distant. Again, the coastal Mappillas considered the inland agriculturist population as economically inferior.

The predominant factor of Islamization on the coast was trade while in the interior religious preachers were dominant.

Introduction

The goal of this article is to document data of nominalizing velar prefixes found in Tibeto-Burman (TB) languages of different branches spoken in Northeast India (NEI).

These data include and expand data sets on a Proto-Tibeto-Burman (PTB) “adjectival velar prefix” presented by Wolfenden (1929), Shafer (1966), Benedict (1972), and Matisoff (2003). This long-known velar prefix has been shown to occur on adjectival and stative verbs in different branches of Tibeto-Burman, and therefore was reconstructed with this function for PTB.

The additional evidence presented here reveals other functions of the “adjectival prefix” in most of the languages. Based on a growing body of literature on nominalization in TB, we know that these other functions are typically associated with nominalization, as is derivation of adjectives.

Specifically, the literature on nominalization in TB documents derivational functions on the one hand, i.e. deriving action/event and agent/patient nouns from verbs, and the derivation of adnominal modifiers as well as the marking of (verbal) citation forms. On the other hand, we find clausal nominalization typically associated with subordinate clauses (relative, complement, and, less commonly, adverbial clauses) as well as with particular main clause constructions (focus and emphatic constructions, questions, aspect marking, etc.) which sometimes get reanalyzed as new default constructions (see Bickel 1999, DeLancey 1989; 1994; in press, Genetti et al 2008, Noonan 1997, inter alia).

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.

Introduction

The North East of India is home to four language families: Indo-Aryan, Tibeto-Burman, Austroasiatic and Tai. Barbora (2010), Konnerth (2011), Huziwara (2011) and Post (2011) have looked into the nominalization process in some Tibeto-Burman languages of the region, namely Mising and Karbi, spoken in Assam, Marma, spoken in Tripura and Bangladesh, and Galo, spoken in Arunachal Pradesh. Notable descriptions of nominalization in Tibeto-Burman languages of North East India are also found in grammars by Coupe (2007) and by van Breugel (2008). Accordingly, a study of nominalization in Assamese, an Indo-Aryan language of North East India, should provide information that would be of value to linguists with interest in the areal typology of the North East Indian region. The goal of this paper is to present such a study.

A brief overview of Assamese grammar

Assamese is a head-final language with a subject-object-verb word order. An agglutinative language, Assamese nominals are inflected for number, classifiers and case. The feminine gender marker -i suffixes to the classifier -zɔn. In finite clause constructions, a nominal argument in A function takes overt case marking. In S function, a nominal argument normally does not take an overt case marker. Pronominals, whether in S or in A function, do not take overt case marking. In the O position only, animate nominals optionally take an overt case marker. Arguments in peripheral positions take overt case markers. Finite verbs are inflected for tense, aspect and mood (TAM).

Introduction

This study is a descriptive account of the classifier system in Asamiya (Assamese), used as one of the most productive noun-encoding devices in the language. Asamiya shares many linguistic features with genetically related Indic languages, particularly with the Magadhan languages of Eastern India, but makes the most extensive and elaborate use of classifiers in terms of their scope and function. This phenomenon is generally ascribed to the influences and counter influences of the non-Aryan languages, particularly the neighbouring Tibeto-Burman languages spoken in and around Assam from the very early periods of its history (Kakati 2007: 278, 381–382; Goswami 1968; Emeneau 1956).

The study is concerned with various aspects of classifiers in Asamiya, as organised into different sections. §2 discusses the distribution of classifiers in the NP structure. §3 deals with the pragmatic, semantic and grammatical functions of classifiers. §4 attempts to subcategorize classifiers on the basis of their semantic considerations, followed by concluding remarks.

The classifiers in the examples are printed in bold and glossed as conglomerations of inherent semantic features without their grammatical or pragmatic information which are interspersed among the relevant texts, tables and/or free translations of examples. However, due to constraints of space, glossing in the Tables has been eschewed.

Introduction

The present chapter dicusses the grammar and meaning of classifiers in Assamese. In §2, we discuss classifier grammar, showing that the basic grammatical function of classifiers in Assamese is to unitize or individuate the noun to facilitate numerical quantification. They are thus numeral classifiers. In §3, we first identify the classifiers in Assamese, together with the semantic parameters they employ to categorize noun referents. The remainder of §3 then focuses on the meaning chains classifiers exhibit, showing how they extend their basic meaning in numerous ways so that they can categorize an open-ended class of noun referents which are apparently rather diverse and unrelated. The discussions in §2 and §3 are followed by our concluding remarks.

The grammatical functions of classifiers in Assamese

This section discusses the grammatical functions that classifiers in Assamese perform.

Classifiers and the object-mass distinction

A noun designates a kind of things, rather than an instance of the kind. Thus, for instance, the English word dog does not intrinsically refer to any particular dog; rather, it refers to a particular kind of animal. Now, in terms of ordinary human perception, kinds are of at least two types: a kind may refer either to a set of similar discrete objects, as with dog; or, it may refer to an unsegmented mass, as with water. In a language like English, the grammar is immediately sensitive to the distinction between these two types of kinds: the object-mass distinction.

We are very pleased to present the fourth volume of papers in the North East Indian Linguistics series. The papers in this volume were presented at the fourth NEILS conference, held at the North Eastern Hill University in Shillong, Meghalaya, from January 16–18, 2009, and organized by the Department of Linguistics, Gauhati University, in collaboration with scholars from the Research Centre for Linguistic Typology, La Trobe University (Melbourne AU). All the papers in this volume have been peer-reviewed and then revised in close consultation with the editors. Final approval for the papers in this volume comes from the editorial staff of Cambridge University Press India Pvt. Ltd. As in previous volumes our aim is to produce a volume reflective of both the linguistic diversity of the North East as well as the high quality of the current research.

The current volume is particularly representative of the diversity of the languages of the North East, the scholars working there, and the various research projects underway. Contributions range from renowned scholars of Tibeto-Burman linguistics to students from the North East making their first impact in the field of Linguistics. The articles in this volume cover four of the language families represented in North East India: Tai-Kadai, Indo-Aryan, Tibeto-Burman, and Austroasiatic and come from scholars based in the U.S., France, Germany, Japan, Norway, and Australia, but with the majority of contributions being from Indian scholars themselves.

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.