Abstract
The aim of this paper is to describe briefly and tentatively the phonemic and grammatical structures of the Lahu Shi language, gathered, using the Burmese language, from a lady informant living in a Christian Lahu village at a Nikhom near Mae Chan, northern Thailand during the present writer's field trip in 1964.
Linguistically, Lahu Shi is clearly divergent from the other Lahu languages, Lahu Na, Lahu Ni, on the phonological, grammatical and lexical levels. As regards the segmental phonemes, the distinction between velar and postvelar stops reported by Matisoff in the Lahu Na of Chiang Mai province is not maintained in the Lahu Shi language in question.
This dialect shows a simple phonemic system, having 23 single consonants : / k kh g p ph b t th d ts tsh dz s f h z v ɣ ŋ m n ʔ l/, 8 vowels of two series : oral and laryngealized : / i e ε ɤ a u o ɔ/ (laryngealized) and/ih eh εh ɤh ah uh oh ɔh/(oral) and 5 tonemes : high level, mid level, low level, rising and falling. The gliding tonemes, rising and falling, are realized as a high rising or a high falling tone respectively in laryngealized vowels (characterized by laryngealization or glottalization), but as a low rising or a low falling tone in oral vowels.
Syllable structure is always CV or CVV with a toneme. No consonant cluster occurs at the initial position, while a syllable has no glottal stop ending.
A word may consist of one to four morphemes. Bi-morphemic words are most frequent.
Words of the action-state class can easily be distinguished from its accompaniment by a bound morpheme ve (VP). Words refer to objects are prefixed by a bound morpheme ʔah-or ʔɔh-(NP).
Tonal change occurs quite frequently : a sequence of two high tones results in that of low and high tones. The language seems to be following the similar process of changing from a syllabic-tone type to a quasi word-tone type as seen in the Akha language, although the latter has more clearly a feature of stress. (See T. Nishida, “A preliminary report on the Akha language, ” Studia Phonologica, IV 1965/66.)
