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Kho-Bwa languages

The Kho-Bwa languages, also known as Kamengic, are a small family of languages, or pair of families, spoken in Arunachal Pradesh, northeast India. The name Kho-Bwa was originally proposed by George van Driem (2001). It is based on the reconstructed words *kho ("water") and *bwa ("fire"). Blench (2011) suggests the name Kamengic, from the Kameng area of Arunachal Pradesh. Alternatively, Anderson (2014) refers to Kho-Bwa as Northeast Kamengic.

Both Van Driem and Blench group the Sherdukpen (or Mey), Lishpa (or Khispi), Chug (Duhumbi) and Sartang languages together. These form a language cluster and are clearly related. The pair of Sulung (or Puroik) and Khowa (or Bugun) languages are included in the family by Van Driem (2001) but provisionally treated as a second family by Blench (2024).

These languages have traditionally been placed in the Tibeto-Burman group by the Linguistic Survey of India. Jackson Sun, George van Driem, and multiple handbooks and language classification databases after them also label Kho-Bwa languages as Tibeto-Burman or otherwise Sino-Tibetan. Roger Blench, however, does not accept a Sino-Tibetan origin of these languages, claiming that similarities to such could instead be due to an areal effect.

The entire language family has about 15,000 speakers (including Puroik) or about 10,000 speakers (excluding Puroik), according to estimates made during the 2000s.

Word lists and sociolinguistic surveys of Kho-Bwa languages have also been conducted by Abraham, et al. (2018).

Classification

The internal structure of the Kho-Bwa group of languages is as follows. The similarities between Puroik–Bugun and Sherdukpen/Mey are sporadic and may be due to contact. Lieberherr (2015) considers Puroik to be a Tibeto-Burman language, which would imply that at least Bugun is as well.

Blench & Post (2024)

Lieberherr & Bodt (2017)

Lieberherr & Bodt (2017) consider Puroik to be a Kho-Bwa language, and classify the Kho-Bwa languages as follows.

Tresoldi et al. (2022)

Based on computational phylogenetic analyses from Tresoldi et al. (2022), the phylogenetic tree of Kho-Bwa is roughly as follows:

  • Kho-Bwa
  • Western
  • Duhumbi–Khispi (Chug–Lish): Duhumbi (Chug), Khispi (Lish)
  • Mey–Sartang: Shergaon, Rupa, Jerigaon, Khoina, Rahung, Khoitam
  • Bugun
  • A
  • Bulu, Rawa, Kojo Rojo
  • Sario Saria, Lasumpatte, Chayangtajo
  • B
  • Namphri, Kaspi
  • Wangho, Dikhyang
  • Singchaung, Bichom

Shared characteristics

Common characteristics between Western Kho-Bwa and Puroik are given by Lieberherr & Bodt (2017).

Prefixes

Kho-Bwa languages share the following prefixes:

  • *a- in front of adjectives
  • *kV- prefix before multiple parts of the head, such as the head itself, eyes, ears, and hair
  • Some element in front of the names of a specific subset of objects in the sky, namely the moon, sun, stars, clouds, rain and snow. The prefixes themselves however, although they resemble each other, are not identical; Puroik prefixes *ham- while Western Kho-Bwa prefixes *nam-.

Sound changes

Kho-Bwa languages share the following sound changes:

  • The fortition of Sino-Tibetan initial *m- to *b-.
  • Outright loss of initial *s-.

Examples

In the below tables, the other Sino-Tibetan cognates are taken from Lieberherr & Bodt (2017), but the proto-Western Kho-Bwa forms are taken from Bodt (2024) and the Proto-Puroik forms are from Lieberherr (2015).

Vocabulary

The following table of Kho-Bwa basic vocabulary items is from Blench (2015). Proto-Western Kho-Bwa (Proto-WKB) reconstructions are from Bodt (2024).

See also

  • (Wiktionary)

Further reading

  • Ismail Lieberherr and Timotheus Adrianus Bodt. (2017) Sub-grouping Kho-Bwa based on shared core vocabulary. Himalayan Linguistics 16(2). 26–63. Paper (CLDF Dataset on Zenodo )
  • Binny Abraham, Kara Sako, Elina Kinny, Isapdaile Zeliang (2018). Sociolinguistic Research among Selected Groups in Western Arunachal Pradesh: Highlighting Monpa. SIL Electronic Survey Reports 2018–009. (CLDF Dataset on Zenodo. )
  • Bodt, T. and J.-M. List (2019). Testing the predictive strength of the comparative method: An ongoing experiment on unattested words in Western Kho-Bwa languages. Papers in Historical Phonology 4.1. 22–44. (CLDF Dataset on Zenodo )

References