Mruic or Mru–Hkongso is a small group of
Sino-Tibetan languages consisting of two languages,
Mru and
Anu-Hkongso. Their relationship within Sino-Tibetan is unclear.
Peterson & Wright (2009)[1] proposed the name Mru–Hkongso.
DeLancey (2021) also uses the name Mru–Hkongso.[2]
On the other hand,
Bradley (1997) classifies Mru as part of
Lolo-Burmese, based on Löffler's (1966) observations that Mru shares many phonological and lexical resemblances with Lolo-Burmese.[6][7]
The Mru-Hkongso group was first proposed by Peterson & Wright (2009),[1] who do not consider it to be a subgroup of
Lolo-Burmese.
Peterson (2017:205)[8] notes that Mru and Hkongso do not have any features characteristic of
Kuki-Chin languages that have been identified by VanBik (2009),[9] including lack of the
sound changeProto-Tibeto-Burman *s > tʰ, lack of Kuki-Chin-type verb stem alternation, and lack of the singular first person pronoun (1.SG) *kaj which is present in most Kuki-Chin languages.
Peterson (2009)[10] considers Mru-Hkongso to be a separate Tibeto-Burman branch, and notes the following similarities between Mru-Hkongso and
Bodo–Garo languages.
Peterson (2009)[10] considers the similarities with Bodo–Garo to be due to the possible early split of Mruic from a Tibeto-Burman branch that included Bodo–Garo (see also
Central Tibeto-Burman languages and
Sal languages).
Grammar
Both
Mru and
Hkongso display SVO (
subject-verb-object) order instead of the SOV word order typical of most Tibeto-Burman languages.[10][11][12]Bai,
Sinitic, and
Karenic are the only other Sino-Tibetan language branches with primarily verb-medial (SVO) word order.
References
^
abPeterson, David A. and Jonathan Wright. 2009. Mru-Hkongso: a new Tibeto-Burman grouping. Paper presented at The 42nd International Conference on Sino-Tibetan Languages and Linguistics (ICSTLL 42), Chiang Mai.
^DeLancey, Scott (2021). "Classifying Trans-Himalayan (Sino-Tibetan) languages". The Languages and Linguistics of Mainland Southeast Asia. De Gruyter. pp. 207–224.
doi:
10.1515/9783110558142-012.
ISBN978-3-11-055814-2.
^DeLancey, Scott (2015). "Morphological Evidence for a Central Branch of Trans-Himalayan (Sino-Tibetan)". Cahiers de Linguistique Asie Orientale. 44 (2): 122–149.
doi:
10.1163/19606028-00442p02.
^Löffler, Lorenz G. (1966). "The contribution of Mru to Sino-Tibetan linguistics". Zeitschrift der Deutschen Morgenländischen Gesellschaft. 116 (1): 118–159.
JSTOR43369896.
^Bradley, David (1997).
"Tibeto-Burman languages and classification"(PDF). Tibeto-Burman languages of the Himalayas, Papers in South East Asian linguistics. Canberra: Pacific Linguistics. pp. 1–71.
^Peterson, David. 2017. "On Kuki-Chin subgrouping." In Picus Sizhi Ding and Jamin Pelkey, eds. Sociohistorical linguistics in Southeast Asia: New horizons for Tibeto-Burman studies in honor of David Bradley, 189-209. Leiden: Brill.
^VanBik, Kenneth. 2009. Proto-Kuki-Chin: A Reconstructed Ancestor of the Kuki-Chin Languages. STEDT Monograph 8.
ISBN0-944613-47-0.
^Ebersole, Harold. 1996. The Mru Language: A preliminary grammatical sketch. Ms.
^Jonathan Michael Wright. 2009. Hkongso Grammar Sketch. MA thesis, Graduate Institute of Applied Linguistics.
Further reading
Language and Social Development Organization. (2019). A Chin dialect survey (Part 1 of 2) [Data set].
doi:
10.5281/zenodo.3344667 (The 2008-03 Anu-Hkongso Chin survey contains data on both Anu-Hkongso and the Anok, Dawpreng, and Sungma dialects of Mru.)