----- Original Message -----
Sent: Wednesday, August 02, 2000 3:34
PM
Subject: [phoNet] Re: assam
pronunciation
Distance? Not so much of it. The Ahom speakers came from what is now
Myanmar (Burma), and some Tai languages are still used in those parts, though
most of them are spoken in Thailand, Laos and S China. Tai is a branch of
Tibeto-Burman, which in turn is regarded as a subfamily of
Sino-Tibetan.
If you look at a map of India, you will find that Assam is squeezed
between Bangladesh and Myanmar, with Tibet to the north. Ahom is not the
ancestor of modern Assamese, which is closely related to Bengali (both being
Indic and therefore Indo-European); but the ancestors of the majority of the
Assamese people are thought to have migrated from Myanmar (the Ahoms founded
the kingdom of Assam in the 13th century).
Piotr
Brian wrote:
I found it intriguing to learn that the original Assam language was
akin to Thai, considering the geography involved, although I believe there are
many related languages similarly separated by
distance.