Reacting to news report under the heading ‘Fund Fraudulently withdrawn in the name of documenting Monsang Langauge’ appeared on Imphal Times, Professor of Linguistics at the University of Oregon, U.S.A., Dr. Scott DeLancey said that the report content number of incorrect statements about the research project being taken up by him and his assistant. In an e-mail the professor said that the news story seems to be based on a serious misunderstanding of a press release from his university. The content of the letter is produced here.“A recent article in this newspaper makes a number of incorrect statements about a research project which I have recently begun. This story seems to be based on a serious misunderstanding of a press release from my university, which your readers should read for themselves. It describes a research grant which I and Dr. Linda Konnerth, my research assistant, received to write a grammar of the Monsang language in Chandel District. We are just beginning this work, with the assistance of the Monsang Art and Culture Association. (Just to set the record straight, my name is spelled DeLancey, I am from the U.S., and the language which we are working with is spelled Monsang). Although the news story states that I claim “to have done a documentation”, in fact the press release is all in the future tense. Our project is just beginning, and we have not done much of anything yet.“What we hope to do is to collect and transcribe a large body of oral texts in Monsang, and then write a complete reference grammar of the language. Writing a grammar of an unwritten language is a very large task. This has only been done for about half a dozen of the hundreds of languages of the Northeast. Within Manipur, only Meiteiron has been fully documented in this sense, although scholars at Manipur University and in the Centre have provided preliminary documentation of several other languages of the state.“So why would I want to learn about Monsang, and why would a U.S. research agency want to support this work? For one thing, every language is of interest to the field of linguistics, and every new language which we describe shows us something we haven’t seen before. The languages of the Northeast have many unusual or unique features which are of great interest to linguists. But a certain set of languages from Chandel District – Aimol, Anal, Monsang, Moyon, Tarao, and some others – are especially interesting to me for my own research. These languages, like almost all the languages of Manipur, belong to the Sino-Tibetan family. This means that they are distantly (your story says “closely”, but that is not correct) related to Tibetan, Burmese, many languages of the Himalayas and NE India, and to Chinese. These languages all descend from a common ancestor which was spoken at least 5 or 6,000 years ago, probably somewhere in southwest China. In the meantime the descendants of this original language have spread until the family stretches from Beijing in the east to Ladakh in the west, from Qinghai in the north to Mizoram and Chittagong in the south.“In my research I am trying to reconstruct the grammar of this original language, based on comparing the grammatical features of the languages as we find them today. Some languages of the family are much more useful than others for this purpose. Within the Sino-Tibetan family, some languages, including Tibetan, Burmese, and Meiteiron, have changed greatly over time, and lost much of the original grammar. Chinese is the language which has changed the most. These languages cannot contribute much to the question of what the ancestral language was like.“Other languages still preserve some of the ancient grammar down to the present day, and these are the languages we must rely on to reconstruct the past. Among these are the Kiranti languages of Nepal and the rGyalrong languages of Sichuan in China. A group of languages spoken in Chandel district, including Tarao, Aimol, Anal, Moyon and Monsang, are among this group. That is why these languages are particularly interesting from a historical linguistic point of view, and why we are particularly interested in studying them.
