The Apatani or Tanw is one of major tribes of Arunachal Pradesh in north-east India. The modified Roman Script (MRS) is used to write the Apatani language. The Apatani Alphabet or Tanw Kannanw was recommended by the Apatani Language... more
The Apatani or Tanw is one of major tribes of Arunachal Pradesh in north-east India. The modified Roman Script (MRS) is used to write the Apatani language. The Apatani Alphabet or Tanw Kannanw was recommended by the Apatani Language Development Committee (ALDC), technically approved by the Apatani Cultural and Literary Society (ACLS) and given administrative approval by the Tanw Supuñ Dukuñ (TSD).
Research Interests:
The Apatani Cultural and Literary Society (ACLS), Ziro organized a symposium to standardize the script to write in Apatani in 1997. This document is the recommendation of the ad-hoc committee to finalize the script.
Research Interests:
Despite being one of the most extensively researched of Eastern Himalayan languages, the basic morphological and phonological-prosodic properties of Apatani (Tibeto-Burman > Tani > Western) have not yet been adequately described. This... more
Despite being one of the most extensively researched of Eastern Himalayan languages, the basic morphological and phonological-prosodic properties of Apatani (Tibeto-Burman > Tani > Western) have not yet been adequately described. This article attempts such a description, focusing especially on interactions between segmental-syllabic phonology and tone in Apatani. We highlight three features in particular – vowel length, nasality and a glottal stop – which contribute to contrastively-weighted syllables in Apatani, which are consistently under-represented in previous descriptions of Apatani, and in absence of which tone in Apatani cannot be effectively analysed. We conclude that Apatani has two “underlying”, lexically-specified tone categories H and L, whose interaction with word structure and syllable weight produce a maximum of three “surface” pitch contours – level, falling and rising – on disyllabic phonological words. Two appendices provide a set of diagnostic procedures for the discovery and description of Apatani tone categories, as well as an Apatani lexicon of approximately one thousand entries.