Tedim language
| Tedim | |
|---|---|
| Tedim Chin | |
| Zopau, Tedim pau, Zomi | |
| Native to | Myanmar, India |
| Region | Chin State and Sagaing Division of Myanmar Manipur State and Mizoram State of India |
| Ethnicity | Zomi people, Chin people |
Native speakers | (340,000 cited 1990)[1] |
| Latin Pau Cin Hau script | |
| Language codes | |
| ISO 639-3 | ctd |
| Glottolog | tedi1235 |
| ELP | Tiddim Chin |
The Tedim language is a Tibeto-Burman language spoken mostly in the southern Indo-Burmese border. It is the native language of the Tedim tribe of the Zomi people, and a form of standardized dialect merging from the Sukte and Kamhau dialects. It is a subject-object verb language, and negation follows the verb. It is mutually intelligible with the Paite language.
History
[edit ]Zomi was the primary language spoken by Pau Cin Hau, a religious leader who lived from 1859 to 1948. He also devised a logographic and later simplified alphabetic script for writing materials in Zomi.
Phonology
[edit ]The phonology of Zomi can be described as (C)V(V)(C)T order, where C represents a consonant, V represents a vowel, T represents a tone, and parentheses enclose optional constituents of a syllable.[2]
Consonants
[edit ]| Labial | Alveolar | Alveolo- palatal |
Velar | Glottal | ||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Plosive/ Affricate |
voiceless | p | t | tɕ | k | ʔ |
| aspirated | ph | th | tɕh | (kh ) | ||
| voiced | b | d | ɡ | |||
| Fricative | voiceless | f | s | x | h | |
| voiced | v | z | ||||
| Nasal | m | n | ŋ | |||
| Approximant | l | lˀ | ||||
- Approximants [j, w] can be heard as allophones of vowels /i̯, u̯/ within diphthongs.
- /x/ can also be heard as an aspirated velar stop [kh] in free variation.
Vowels
[edit ]| Front | Central | Back |
|---|---|---|
| Close | i iː | u uː |
| Mid | ɛ ɛː | ɔ ɔː |
| Open | a aː |
| Front | Central | Back |
|---|---|---|
| Close | iu̯ i̯a | ui̯ uːi̯ u̯a |
| Mid | ei̯ ɛːi̯ eu̯ ɛːu̯ | ou̯ oi̯ ɔːi̯ |
| Open | ai̯ aːi̯ au̯ aːu̯ |
- Sounds /ɛ, ɔ/ may have short allophones of more close [e, o].[3]
Tone
[edit ]![[icon]](/index.cgi/larger-text/https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Wiki_letter_w_cropped.svg){kind=link}
References
[edit ]
- ^ Tedim at Ethnologue (18th ed., 2015) (subscription required)
- ^ "Proposal to Encode the Pau Cin Hau Alphabet in ISO/IEC 10646" (PDF). unicode.org. Retrieved 15 September 2023.
- ^ Otsuka, Kosei (2014). Tiddim Chin. Toshihide Nakayama and Noboru Yoshioka and Kosei Otsuka (eds.), Grammatical Sketches from the Field: Tokyo: Research Institute for Languages and Cultures of Asia and Africa (ILCAA), Tokyo University of Foreign Studies. pp. 109–141.
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