Luish languages

The Luish, Asakian, or Sak languages are a group of Sino-Tibetan languages belonging to the Sal branch. They are spoken in Burma and Bangladesh, and consist of the Sak, Kadu, and Ganan languages. In recent years, Luish languages have been influenced by Burmese and Chakma.

Luish
Asakian
Geographic distribution	Burma and Bangladesh
Linguistic classification	Sino-Tibetan Sal Jingpho–Luish Luish
Subdivisions	Sak Kadu Ganan Andro † Sengmai † Chairel †
Glottolog	sakk1239

Although Luish languages are now widely scattered and spoken by relatively small populations, Luce (1985) suggests that the Luish languages were “once spread over the whole north of Burma, from Manipur perhaps to northern Yunnan.”

Matisoff (2013)[1] proposes the name Asakian, since Lui or Loi were used by the Meithei to refer to slaves.

Extinct languages

Matisoff (2013)[1] has demonstrated that the extinct Andro, Sengmai, and Chairel languages of Manipur are also Luish languages.

Andro, Sengmai, and Chairel are extinct and known only from a glossary recorded in 1859, their speakers having switched to Meitei.[2][3] There are also various unattested varieties of Lui or Loi ('serf') mentioned in nineteenth-century accounts that appear to be Luish varieties.[4]

It is uncertain whether the extinct Pyu language of central Myanmar is a Luish language.

Benedict (1972) and Shafer (1974) had classified the extinct Taman language of northern Myanmar as part of the Luish branch, but it has since been shown by Keisuke Huziwara (2016) to be a non-Luish language, possibly a separate branch of Tibeto-Burman.

Classification

Matisoff (2013),[1] citing Huziwara (2012),[5] provides the following Stammbaum classification for the Asakian (Luish) branch.

Asakian

• Cak
  • Cak
  • Sak
• Chairel
• Loi
  • Sengmai
  • Andro
• Kadu
  • Ganan
  • Kadu

Reconstruction

Proto-Luish has been reconstructed by Huziwara (2012),[5] with additional Proto-Luish lexical reconstructions by Matisoff (2013).[1] Like Proto-Austroasiatic and Jingpho, Proto-Luish has a sesquisyllabic syllable structure.

Proto-Luish reconstructions by Huziwara (2012),[5] can be found at Wiktionary's list of Proto-Luish reconstructions.

References

1. Matisoff, James A. 2013. Re-examining the genetic position of Jingpho: putting flesh on the bones of the Jingpho/Luish relationship. Linguistics of the Tibeto-Burman Area 36(2). 1–106.
2. Burling, Robbins (2003). "The Tibeto-Burman languages of northeast India". In Thurgood, Graham; LaPolla, Randy J. (eds.). Sino-Tibetan Languages. London: Routledge. pp. 169–191. ISBN 978-0-7007-1129-1.
3. McCulloch, W. (1859). Account of the Valley of Munnipore and of the Hill tribes with a comparative vocabulary of the Munnipore and other languages. Calcutta: Bengal Printing Company.
4. Hammarström, Harald; Forkel, Robert; Haspelmath, Martin, eds. (2017). "Lui (bookkeeping)". Glottolog 3.0. Jena, Germany: Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History.
5. Huziwara, Keisuke 藤原, 敬介. 2012. Rui sogo no saikou ni mukete ルイ祖語の再構にむけて [Toward a reconstruction of Proto-Luish]. In Kyoto University Linguistic Research 京都大学言語学研究 (2012), 31: 25-131. doi:10.14989/182194

• Benedict, Paul K. (1972). Sino-Tibetan: a conspectus. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• Huziwara, Keisuke. 2016. タマン語の系統再考 / On the genetic position of Taman reconsidered. In Kyoto University Linguistic Research 35, p. 1-34. doi:10.14989/219018
• Luce, George H. (1985). Phases of Pre-Pagan Burma: languages and history, vol. I, II. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• Shafer, Robert (1974). Introduction to Sino-Tibetan. Wiesbaden: Otto Harrassowit

Bibliography

• George van Driem (2001). Languages of the Himalayas: An Ethnolinguistic Handbook of the Greater Himalayan Region. Brill.