Burma: Census of India 1901 Vol. I - Khamkoo

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8o
REPORT ON THE CENSUS OF BURMA.
Sir George Scott has classified with the Kachins, the Szis, the Lashis and the
Marus. These tribes, however, though outwardly they resemble the Kachins
proper, speak tongues which Dr. Grierson refuses to admit into the same category
as the Chingpaw language. It lslrTsome quarters believed that the Szis, the
Lashis and the Marus are not Kachins at all, or at best are hybrids. Whether
this is so or not is not a question that affects the present issue ;
the fact remains
that their forms of speech are, as I have already pointed out, more closely allied
to Burmese than to Kachin, and have been treated for the purposes of the
Linguistic Survey as belonging to the Burma group of languages. How their
languages acquired these Burmese characteristics is a problem for the research
of the future to solve. No attempt has yet been made to classify the tongues
of the Khangs, the Kaphawks, the Kaluns, the Khenungs and the Khunnongs,
scattered tribes whom the Kachins are said to look upon as distant connections.
Our information regarding these remote communities, who inhabit the extreme
north of the province, for the most part beyond- our administrative border, is
slender, but it seems possible that when their dialects come to be subjected to
the test of critical analysis, one or two of them at any rate will be assigned to the
Kachin group. Some of these tribes are, however, undoubtedly Mishmis.
Kachin is an isolating language with a structure closely resembling Burmese ;
so much so that, as Professor Forchhammer has asserted, " a Kachin sentence
can generally be transposed into a Burmese sentence, word for word, without disturbing
the collocation of words," but I have it on good authority that it can
hardly be said to be tonic at all. Mr. Symington in his Kachin Vocabulary
makes no mention of tones, and Mr. Needham, in his grammar of the language as
spoken in Assam, is careful to point out that there are only a few monosyllabic
words which are distinguishable from one another by variations of the vowel sound.
Over twenty years ago Captain Forbes showed by a comparison of vocabularies
that the Kachin language possessed affinities with the languages of the
Naga group. The similarity did not escape the eye of an even earlier observer.
Mr. Logan, in an article of the Journal of the Indian Archipelago, issued close upon
fifty years ago, when the knowledge of the tongues of the interior was in its
veriest infancy, commented on the fact that " Singpho " had some peculiar Naga
and Tibetan characters. The most recent philological enquiries show that the
connection pointed out by these scholars is real. The ethnic relations subsisting
between the groups is sketched in the chapter on caste, tribe and race. Dr.
Grierson has quite recently drawn attention to the fact that Meithei, the language
of Manipur, forms a connecting link between Kachin and the southern forms of
speech. Kachin was the language returned by 65,570 people at the census.
118. Dr. Grierson has recently prepared a most instructive note on the
Kuki-Chin languages,
The
from
Chin language group.
which I give the following
extracts :
''The territory within which these languages are spoken extends from the Naga Hills
In the north to Sandoway in the south. Their western frontier is, broadly speaking, the
hills extending from Sylhet in the north through Hill Tipperah, the Chittagong Hill Tracts
the Arakan Hill Tracts and the Arakan Yomas. Towards the east they do'not extend much
further than the Kubo and Myittha valleys. Most of the tribes seem to have passed the
Lushai or Chin Hills on their way to their present homes, where they have settled in relatively
recent times * * *
.
In the north the Kuki-Chin languages show an affinity
to the Naga group, while in the south they gradually become more like Burmese. The
whole group is more closely connected with Burmese than with Tibetan."
It is not unnatural that towards the south there should be a leaven of Burmese
in the tongues of the Chins. What is more significant is that, even where
they are far removed from Burmese influences, these languages still present a considerable
identity in structure with Burmese. The identity is apparently not so
striking as in the case of Kachin, but it is sufficiently close to prove an affinity,
and, though not so obvious a phenomenon as a similarity in vocabularies is to
the student really as suggestive. Practically all the following remarks made by
Dr. Grierson in connection with the Kuki-Chin tongues might equally have been
made in regard to Burmese :
"There is no grammatical gender, and only the natural gender of animate beings is
distinguished.