Author(s):  
Hemanta Konch

North-East is a hub of many ethnic languages. This region constitutes with eight major districts; like-Assam, Arunachal Pradesh, Nagaland, Manipur, Mizoram, Tripura, Meghalaya and Sikkim. Tutsa is a minor tribe of Arunachal Pradesh. The Tutsa was migrated from the place ‘RangkhanSanchik’ of the South-East Asia through ‘Hakmen-Haksan’ way to Arunachal Pradesh. The Tutsa community is mainly inhabited in Tirap district and southern part of Changlang district and a few people are co-exists in Tinsukia district of Assam. The Tutsa language belongs to the Naga group of Sino-Tibetan language family. According to the Report of UNESCO, the Tutsa language is in endangered level and it included in the EGIDS Level 6B. The language has no written literature; songs, folk tales, stories are found in a colloquial form. They use Roman Script. Due to the influence of other languages it causes lack of sincerity for the use of their languages in a united form. Now-a-days the new generation is attracted for using English, Hindi and Assamese language. No study is found till now in a scientific way about the language. So, in this prospect the topic Nominal Inflection of the Tutsa Language has been selected for study. It will help to preserve the language and also help in making of dictionary, Grammar and language guide book.


Author(s):  
Ann Thyme ◽  
Farrell Ackerman ◽  
Jeffrey L. Elman
Keyword(s):  

2011 ◽  
Vol 6 (2) ◽  
pp. 197-244 ◽  
Author(s):  
Vered Vaknin-Nussbaum ◽  
Joseph Shimron

Research on several Indo-European languages attests to notable difficulties in inflecting irregular nouns and verbs. In these languages morphological and phonological factors are often intertwined in a way that obscures the source of the problem. Hebrew by contrast allows isolation of morphological and phonological factors in nominal inflection. Three experiments demonstrated that as in Indo-European languages, nominal inflection of Hebrew irregular nouns is slower than that of regular nouns and involves more errors. The occurrence of phonological alterations to the noun’s stem with the inflection is an additional source of irregularity, which also taxes the inflectional process in reaction time and error rate. The empirical results underline the power of the default automatic suffixation process as the main obstacle to irregular inflection. A theoretical contribution of this study is an interpretation of the irregularity effect based on a morphological analysis that views Hebrew as having a linear rather than a non-linear morphology. The stem–suffix match is suggested as the dominant factor affecting the inflectional process, responsible for the difficulties in irregular inflections. It is argued that in Hebrew, the differences between inflecting regular and irregular nouns can be easily and adequately explained as resulting from a mismatch between a stem and an affix.


2014 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-28
Author(s):  
Raffaela Baechler

Abstract One may hear that over time languages tend to simplify their grammar and notably their morphological system. This intuition, probably based on linguists’ knowledge of the rich inflectional systems of older Indo-European languages, has been challenged, particularly by sociolinguistic typologists (e.g. Trudgill 2011; Braunmuller 1984, 2003; Nichols 1992). They hypothesise that languages spoken by small and isolated communities with a dense network may complexify their grammar (Trudgill 2011: 146-147). The present article investigates the nominal inflection systems of 14 varieties of German in order to survey whether there is any such diachronic tendency towards simplification and whether instances of complexification can be observed, too. The varieties under analysis include present-day Standard German, Old High German and Middle High German (two older stages of German) and eleven present-day non-standard varieties which make part of the Alemannic dialect group. First, it will be shown that there is a diachronic tendency towards simplification if we consider the total complexity of nominal inflection. Second, however, we can identify instances of diachronic complexification too if we take a closer look at single categories. Interestingly, diachronic complexification appears only in the non-standard varieties, not so in the standard variety. This may support the hypothesis that isolated varieties are more complex than non-isolated ones.


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