Rikker Dockum
Swarthmore College
There is no question that Tai Khamti (hereafter Khamti) would historically have had basic constituent order of Subject-Verb-Object (SVO), like nearly all Tai languages still have. But modern speakers also frequently use Subject-Object-Verb (SOV) order, typically attributed to centuries of contact with neighboring SOV languages. The issue of what constitutes the basic constituent order in Khamti has been a topic of debate among linguists for many decades and now involves data from three different centuries.
Based on Needham's (1894) grammar, Greenberg (1963) cited Khamti as an exception to his Universal 4, calling it an SOV language that was prepositional instead of postpositional. Khanittanan (1986) used data from her own fieldwork to argue that SVO was all but gone from Khamti and that it had fully transitioned to SOV. Diller (1992) showed that the syntactic generalizations laid out by Needham do not always hold and used data from other Tai languages of northeast India to argue for pragmatically driven constituent order, rather than SOV as basic. Morey (2006) introduced extensive additional data from northeast India, also arguing that Khamti’s verb-final ordering is pragmatically driven.
This study revisits the Khamti ordering debate with newly documented data from the Upper Chindwin River Valley in northwest Myanmar and provides sociolinguistic context to the data. The data come from a corpus of natural language texts, as well as 1,700 elicited sentences gathered between 2014 and 2017. Both SOV and SVO constituent orders are present throughout the data, as seen here:
(1)
| kaw4-kʰaa2 | kʰai6 kai6 | tʰuk6 saw4 | saaw2 |
| 1SG-POLITE | egg chicken | like | HON |
| S | O | V |
‘I like chicken eggs.’
(2)
| hə4-kʰaa2 | tʰuk6 saw4 | paa4 kyit6 | saaw2 |
| 1SG-POLITE | like | k.o. fish | HON |
| S | V | O |
‘I like (a kind of) fish.’
(3)
| kaw4-kʰaa2 | tʰuk6 saw4 | nɛ2 | tʰo6pʰɤk6 | saaw2 |
| 1SG-POLITE | like | TOP | k.o. bean | HON |
| S | V | O |
‘I like (a kind of) beans.’
(4)
| tʰo6 | nɛ2 | tʰuk6 saw4 | u6 | saaw2 |
| bean | TOP | like | PRES | HON |
| O | V |
‘I like beans.’
The Khamti case presents an interesting opportunity to study language contact influence on basic constituent order. Khamti has speaker communities in two countries, India and Myanmar, and in each country most Khamti speakers are also native or highly fluent speakers of a different SOV majority language: Assamese in northeast India and Burmese in Myanmar. While both basic orders are present in this new data, the notion of Khamti having basic SVO ordering is a part of the linguistic identity of some community members. At the same time, speakers openly credit Burmese influence for what they see as an ongoing change. This raises the question of the time scale of this kind of change to basic constituent order. If a change is indeed ongoing, it has been ongoing for well over a century and across geographically disparate dialects. The Khamti test case also presents an opportunity for further focused study to examine how different SOV majority languages might influence the Khamti dialects differently.
(Presented in the 2020 Chulalongkorn Asian Heritage Forum : Thai-Tai Language and Culture, 20 July 2020, The St.Regis Hotel, Bangkok, organized by Institute of Thai Studies, Chulalongkorn University, Department of Thai, Department of Linguistics, Southeast Asian Linguistics Research Unit, Faculty of Arts, Chulalongkorn University)