Sound Change in Deori: A Descriptive Account

Arup Kumar Nath¹^,^†

¹Tezpur University

^†Corresponding Author : Arup Kumar Nath, Center for Assamese Studies, School of Humanities and Social Sciences, Tezpur University, Assam, India Phone: +919864196993; Email: arupjnu@gmail.com

Copyright ⓒ 2016, Sejong University Language Research Institue. This is an Open-Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/) which permits unrestricted non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Received: Aug 29, 2012; Revised: Aug 23, 2012; Accepted: Sep 03, 2012

Published Online: Jan 01, 2017

Abstract

This paper deals with the sound changes that have undergone in Deori language from the time of publication of Grierson’s Linguistic Survey of India, i.e., 1903 to the present time. (That is till the time of collecting data: January 2008 - January 2009.) During this span of hundred and five years, a considerable amount of phonetic and morphological changes have taken place. Deori has shown ample evidences of sound changes in the patterns of complete lexical shift, epenthesis, devoicing, de-aspiration, vowel shift, nasalization, elision, deletion, morpheme addition, degemination, borrowing, and so on. Most remarkably the loan and borrowing words are fast replacing the basic vocabularies of this language.

Keywords: lexicon; shift; sound change; Tibeto-Burman

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