The essays in this volume collectively testify to the creative ferment of Comparative Studies today, as scholars around the world explore the possibilities – and confront the dangers – presented by a newly global world and its seductive new media. A recurrent fear felt by comparatists, and also by many specialists in individual languages, is that the growing hegemony of global English will swallow up other languages and literary cultures. As can be seen in the essay by Kanika Batra and elsewhere in this volume, the concern is that a linguistically and culturally ungrounded ‘World Literature’ based in English departments may eclipse – or may already have eclipsed – the fine-grained study of works in a variety of languages, the traditional philological strength of Comparative Literature. Yet the rise of English as a scholarly lingua franca does not in itself preclude close attention to other languages. English, indeed, is becoming an effective medium for the sharing of knowledge across many linguistic boundaries, enabling scholars around the world to communicate and to share their linguistically specialized knowledges. I have certainly found this to be the case in recent visits to Bucharest, Hanoi, Seoul, and Tehran, where in each case scholars from differing countries, often working in languages rarely if ever pursued by an older generation's comparatists, were able to share their findings together.

Even in the United States, both in English departments and all the more within programs of Comparative Literature, serious comparatist work continues to involve close attention to language and culture.

Introduction

Typically in Tai languages the head precedes the modifier. As Morey says, “The noun phrase in the Tai languages is a strongly head initial structure”. He adds, “if there is more than one modifier in an NP, the most unmarked order appears to be – Noun > Adjective > Possessor > Classifier > Relative Clause > Demonstrative. Though there are no examples in the corpus of texts showing all of the possible modifiers.” (Morey 2005: 259) This order of modification is attested in the Tai Ahom language, spoken during the Ahom kingdom that ruled in Assam in the period 1228-1824. This unmarked order is found in Ahom manuscripts; however, some variant orders are also found.

We begin the paper with a brief history of Ahom which is discussed in section 2. In section 3, I provide the source of manuscripts used for the study and, in section 4, I discuss briefly about modification process in general. Following it, in section 5, I present an outline of the linguistic features of Ahom, and move on to discuss modification at a language-particular level in section 6. Section 6.1 deals with different kinds of modifiers. With this we turn in section 7 to a survey of the unmarked order of constituents and subsequently look at modification order of expressives in section 7.1. The next two sub-sections, i.e. 7.1.1 and 7.1.2 explore the functions of expressives as modifiers and as intensifiers.

Although it may be possible to distinguish the various streams that comprise Social Geography, these fluid currents flow together to create a vast body of inter-and-intra-disciplinary study. This book attempts to capture the holistic essence of this field as well as highlight its rich thematic and areal diversity. Organized society and its institutions and characteristics over space go back to prehistoric times. It is no surprise then, that the field of social geography presents a full panoply of subjects of study.

Since its establishment as a recognized sub-field of geography in the twentieth century, Social Geography has continuously evolved to reflect the changing socioeconomic and political climate. Thus, the birth of radical geographies of feminism, the increased volume of alternate voices of transnationalism, postcolonialism and emerging geographies, the embracing of postmodernist methodologies and tools of interpretivism, the adoption of Geographic Information Systems (GIS) and remote sensing techniques to tackle social themes of study and so on. Such rapid changes necessitate the need for revisiting the state of the field every so often, while maintaining a connection with its traditional roots and themes.

Therein lies the significance of this book. The current work presents a number of contributions that provide an overview of the works that laid the foundation for Social Geography, or themselves address some of the traditional themes in Social Geography, such as art and culture, urbanism and crime, and social institutions of caste, class, and religion.

Introduction

The aim of this study is to provide a morphological and syntactic description of personal pronouns in Madhav Kandali's Ramayana (MKR). Prior to the main discussion on grammatical intricacies to be followed hereon, a brief background of the MKR is in order to authenticate the relevance of this study.

MKR has been attributed to the 14th century, (Sharma 1996; Neog 1985), a period of great significance in the history of the Assamese language, where the first phase of renaissance in religious, cultural and linguistic field was taking place. Around five court poets, including Madhav Kandali, produced Assamese texts during this period. Madhav Kandali translated the entire Sanskrit Ramayana composed by Valmiki into Assamese at the behest of the king Maha-Manikya of Tripura (Medhi 1936: 70). Though Kandali was an accomplished scholar of the Sanskrit language, he did not use the style of Sanskrit in his translation. He wrote it in an easy and simple, yet sublime style to cater to the needs of spiritual leaders to religious enlightenment of the mostly illiterate masses.

It is believed that over the 6th and 7th century, AD, the spoken form of the Assamese language began to develop and spread among the people. It got its written form during the 12th and 13th century, AD (Saikia Borah 1993). The specimen of this period is Carya, written by the Buddhist Siddhacharyas on palm leaves (Tāl pāt), hailing from the different parts of ancient Kamrupa.