‘Come’ vaiŋ and ‘go’ laŋ in Cak

Abstract

Cak is a Luish language belonging to the Tibeto-Burman language family and is spoken in the Chittagong Hill Tracts, Bangladesh. In this paper, I have tried to analyse the internal word structures of vaiŋ ‘come’ and laŋ ‘go’ in Cak.

  As a rule, in Cak, we must employ one of the directional auxiliary verbs in perfective sentences. However, there is no need to do so for the two motion verbs vaiŋ ‘come’ and laŋ ‘go’. Thus, it is better to reanalyse them as the combination of a verb and a directional auxiliary verb. The investigation clarified that, both synchronically and diachronically, vaiŋ is analysable as va ‘come/venitive’ + -aiŋ ‘venitive’ and laŋ, as la ‘take/go’ + -aŋ ‘non-specific’.

  The results also suggested that the three major Cak directives -a ‘andative’, -aiŋ ‘venitive’, and -aŋ ‘non-specific’ might be related to the Proto-Tibeto-Burman pronominal affixes *a ‘third person’, *n ‘second person’, and *ŋ ‘first person’, respectively. If this is the case, we can regard Cak as a language that is in the process of shifting from a pronominalized language to a non-pronominalized one.