| Abstrakt: |
Lamkang (ISO 639-3 code: lmk) is a Tibeto-Burman language spoken mainly in Manipur, India by a community of under 10,000 speakers. As a part of revitalization and documentation efforts, members of the Lamkang community have begun to document oral literature, personal histories, Bible translations and the like in written form using a Latin-based script. In this paper, we present findings from samples of writing collected over the course of the first author's 12 years of work with community writers. Reviewing this corpus of writing samples, we characterize variations in the orthography in linguistic terms. We then compare these variations to orthographic variations in related South Central languages. Our goal is to provide an analysis of orthographic variation focusing on phonological and morphological structure. In particular, we consider how the following are represented: vowel length, vowels in minor syllables, adjacent vowels in different syllables, and affricates. We also consider how writers group morphemes together in orthographic words and how these groupings may not correspond with morphological constituency. Existing literature on literacy shows that metalinguistic awareness can impact the processing of the written word, suggesting that this awareness, or lack thereof, could also impact orthographic choice. These linguistic factors, along with aesthetics and identity, may be used to explain and contribute to resolving orthographic variation in languages with similar structures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR] |
