Rongic: a vanished branch of Austroasiatic (original) (raw)
Austroasiatic is a phylum which has been fragmented by the subsequent southern expansion of Sino-Tibetan languages and there has been significant assimilation and borrowing between the two phyla. The paper argues that the Lepcha, or Rong language, today spoken in Sikkim, has a substrate deriving from an unknown branch of Austroasiatic, here christened ‘Rongic’. Forrest (1962) first noted some ‘Mon-Khmer’ cognates in Lepcha and his hypotheses are partly reprised in Bodman (1988). The paper compiles a comparative series of Lepcha with the remainder of Austroasiatic, showing that the cognates do not align the proposed substrate branch with any specific branch of Austroasiatic, and in particular not with Khasian or Munda, the nearest branches geographically. This argues that the now-vanished Rongic was part of the early dispersal of Austroasiatic. This paper brings together the evidence, making use both of recent descriptions of Lepcha (Plaisier 2007) and the comparative Austroasiatic and Sino-Tibetan materials on MKED and STEDT databases.
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