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Wide
ranging variations in both pronunciation and morphological
constructions and high degree of flexibility in word-order
or synaptic constructions are two marked characteristics
of Hmar. They came to stay because of inevitable historical
and sociolinguistic reasons. As indicated in the ‘Introduction’
of this book, there was no solitary concentration of
Hmar speaking people nor was there any long term peace
and tranquility among the Hmars living in various pockets
scattered over three different states. In the earlier
days they were always on the move and in the later days,
they had to settle down in far flung hilly terains with
most unfavorable living conditions spread over three
states and to toil hard for their survival among various
hostile tribal groups. Because of natural geographical
barriers coupled with political polarisation there were
not much of interactions among the Hmars living in these
3 states; viz: Mizoram, Manipur and Assam. Because of
ethnic closeness and political dominance the Hmars in
Mizoram have been heavily influenced by the Lushai.
Consequently the Hmar speech in Mizoram has lost mcuh
of its indegenous characters or ingenuity. The Hmars
in Manipur and Assam, however, could maintain their
linguistic identity and protect their langauge from
corruption. Of these the Hmars in Assam could, however,
organise themselves and could make the Govt. of Assam
to introduce Hmar in Primary education. They have been
making significant efforts to standardize the langauge,
bring out text books and grammars
in Hmar. They have been orgainising orientation programmes
for teachers and holding seminars and workshops in order
to attain standardization of Hmar. They only have taken
initiative to revise and modify the Hmar version of
the Bible done in the early part of the twentieth century.
Therefore, it may be ncoveniently concluded that Hmar
is currently under the process of standardisation. Fortunately,
the efforts of standardization is characterised by openness.
Minor variations in pronunciations, grammatical forms
and syntactic structures are being widely accepted.
The varsion of Hmar described in this grammar represents
the Hmar of Assam-Manipur region which is under the
process of standardization. |
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From
what have gone before the most important salient features
of Hmar could be outlined as under. The contrast of
vowels in terms of length, presence of rising and falling
tones and initial occurrence of /*/ are its noticeable
phonological characteristics. The reduplicated use of
demonstrative pronouns both before and after the noun,
predicative occurrence of adjectives, reduplicated use
of subject pronoun1 both in the subject slot and in
the predicate slot, extensive use of post positions
to mark case relationships, marking of tense, aspect
etc. only by compounding of auxiliaries and inflection
of adjectives and adverbs for degree are its major amorphological
features. Negativization, simple interrogativization
and imperativization by further addition of auxiliaries
to the verb or sequence of verbs, passivization and
generation of echo questions only by modulation of sentence
intonation, precedence of subordinate clause or embedded
sentences, and cumulative addition of the constituent
clauses in the natural sequence of happening/incidence
to form compound sentences are the most prominent syntactic
peculiarities. |
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