抄録
J.F. Needham’s 1897 publication, A Collection of A Few Môshâng Naga Words, provides the first written account of Muishaung (Glottolog mosa1240), and one of the first ever accounts of any language within the Tangsa-Nocte group. While not completely free of typographic oddities, the text is an invaluable record of language change and an otherwise under-documented language within the Sino-Tibetan family. One of the four texts produced by Needham from the region in this period, the collection of Muishaung lexical and syntactical data provides unique insights into historical sound changes of a language that lacks a written tradition. His account is not without errors and contains several potential misinterpretations and typographical oddities. However, the text is crucial for its contribution to understanding the language in terms of historical developments and the role of elicitation methodology and linguistic practices employed at the time. Through Needham’s description, and his references to other languages about which he had published, such as Singpho and Tai Hkamti, we can understand the recent changes in tense-aspect-mood marking, lexical diffusion of certain sound changes, such as vowel fracture, which are unique to Muishaung within the Tangsa-Nocte group of languages. Other important features include shifts in explicit gender marking of some animal names through a degree of morphological leveling. This paper presents a detailed account of the text, including lexical items and grammatical structures of the original, with a comparison to the modern form of the language spoken in the Tərɨt Valley of Arunachal Pradesh, India, at the Burmese border, highlighting changes that have occurred over more than a century.
