Colloquial Chin as a Pronominalized Language

Abstract

It is over 100 years since Brian Houghton Hodgson was persuaded by what he described as ‘great peculiarities in the use of the pronouns’ in certain of the languages of the southern Himalayan region to ‘divide the Himalayan races primarily into two groups, distinguished by the respective use of simple or non-pronomenalised [sic], and of complex or pronomenalised languages’. This method of classification was taken over by Sten Konow in the third volume of the Linguistic Survey of India and has been widely accepted by linguists since that time. ‘Pronominalization’ has been taken to mean pronominal usage of a certain kind, particularly within the verbal complex, and has on the whole been regarded as a non-typical feature of Tibeto-Burman languages, probably to be accounted for by alien influences, and restricted, within the Tibeto-Burman family, to the languages grouped together by Konow under the name ‘Himalayan’.