Mizo language
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Mizoram known as the Lushai Hills District till 1954 is now a state in the Indian Union. The word ‘Mizo’ is a generic term applying to all Mizos living in Mizoram and its adjoining areas of Manipur, Tripura and the Chittagong Hill tracts and Chin Hills. Mizo literally means (Mi = people, zo = highlander) ‘Highlander’. The language is also known as Lushai (eg Ethnologue.com and ISO 639-3).
HistoryThe language of the Mizo comes under the Kuki-Chin branch of Tibeto-Burman. The numerous clans of the Mizo had respective dialects, amongst which the Mizo dialect, originally known as Duhlian or Lusei(by the mizo themselves), was most popular which subsequently had become the lingua franca of the State. Writing SystemInitially the Mizo had no script of its own. Christian missionaries started developing script for the language adopting the Roman alphabet with a phonetic form of spelling based on the well known Hunterian system of transliteration. The alphabets used are - a, â, á, à, aw, b, ch, chh, d, e, ê, é, è, f, g, ng, h, i, ì, í, k, l, m, n, o, p, r, s, t, u, û, v, z SoundsLater there were radical developments in the language where the symbol â used for the sound of long O was replaced by aŵ with a circumflex accent and the symbol A is used for the vowel sound of O was changed to AW without any accent. The following few words shall suggest that Mizo and the Burmese are of the same family. To illustrate the words that are same as Burmese are: Kun (to blend), Kam (bank of a river), Kha (bitter), Sam (hair), Mei (fire), That (to kill), Ni (Sun) etc. PhoneticsIn Mizo the large groups of words are obviously related to one another both in sound and in meaning, but not by any regular systematic pattern. For example: puar (slightly bulging), na (to swell up, be swollen), lang (to float), huan (garden), thiam (to know, like languages and knowledge), thau (fat), lian (big), buai (to be troubled of), pem (to move from one town or city to another), puan (a piece of cloth), puar (to bulge, as a goitre), hmelchhia (ugly), piang (born), ropui (great, mighty and powerful), bial (round/bulbous). ConsonantsMizo is a tone language, in which differences in pitch and pitch contour can change the meanings of words. Tone systems have developed independently in many of the daughter languages largely through simplifications in the set of possible syllable-final and syllable-initial consonants. Typically, a distinction between voiceless and voiced initial consonants is replaced by a distinction between high and low tone, while falling and rising tones develop from syllable-final (h) and glottal stop, which themselves often reflect earlier consonants. GrammarMizo contains many analyzable polysyllables, which are polysyllabic units such as the English word water, in which the individual syllables have meaning by themselves. In a true monosyllabic language polysyllables are mostly confined to compound words, such as lighthouse. The first syllables of compounds tend over time to be distressed, and may eventually reduce to prefixed consonants, but mizo languages is also rich from the people's saying, it just don't have nouns like the words virtual, survival (but this can be simplified to nungtheihna, in which 'nung' means "to live" 'theih' means "possible" 'na' in mizo always creates a noun so, in 'theih' if we add 'na' "theihna" it means Possibility ). Virtually all polysyllabic morphemes in Mizo can be shown to originate in this way. For example, the disyllabic form phengphehlep "butterfly", which occurs in one dialect of the Trung (or Dulung) language of Yunnan, is clearly a reduced form of the compound blak kwar, found in a closely related dialect. It is reported over 18 of the dialects share about 850 words with the same meaning. For example: Ban (arm), Ke (leg), Thla (wing, month), Lu (head), Kut(Hand)etc. DialectsFannai, Chhangte, Ngente, Ralte, Bawm, Lai(lakher), Mara, Tlau, Le. Related to Hmar, Pankhu, Zahao (Falam Chin). Mizo literatureMizo language has a thriving literature with a Mizo department in Mizoram University. StatisticsMizo (Dulien, Duhlian Twang, Kuki, Chin, Lusai, Lushai, Lusei, Lushei, Lukhai, Lusago, Sailo, Hualngo, Whelngo); 529,000 in India (1997). 1,041 in Bangladesh (1981 census). 12,500 in Myanmar (1983).Population total all countries: 542,541. See alsoReferences
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