Sino-Tibetan language spoken in Burma and India
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
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
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
- 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
- Sounds /ɛ, ɔ/ may have short allophones of more close [e, o].[3]
Tone
References
Tedim language test of
Wikipedia at Wikimedia Incubator
- ^ Tedim Tedim Chin 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.
