In search of language contact between Jarawa and Aka-Bea: The languages of South Andaman
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.5617/ao.4848Abstract
The paper brings forth a preliminary report on the comparative data available on the extinct language Aka-Bea (Man 1923) and the endangered language Jarawa spoken in the south and the central parts of the Andaman Islands. Speakers of Aka-Bea, a South Andaman language of the Great Andamanese family and the speakers of Jarawa, the language of a distinct language family (Abbi 2006, 2009, Blevins 2008) lived adjacent to each other, i.e. in the southern region of the Great Andaman Islands in the past. Both had been hunter-gatherers and never had any contact with each other (Portman 1899, 1990). The Jarawas have been known for living in isolation for thousands of years, coming in contact with the outside world only recently in 1998. It is, then surprising to discover traces of some language-contact in the past between the two communities. Not a large database, but a few examples of lexical similarities between Aka-Bea and Jarawa are investigated here. Words for comparison are selected from the Automated Similarity Judgment Programme-list ASJP (Holman et al. 2008, Brown et al. 2007, 2008, Wichmann 2010) as well as from the Loan Word Typology research (Haspelmath and Tadmor 2009). Although we have data only for 100 items, we further compared the lexical items against the Swadesh list (1955) (see appendix 5). The result achieved exposes for the first time, the possibility of language contact between Aka-Bea and Jarawa in the past. We pose a very relevant question here: can enmities and rivalries induce changes in languages which can be ascribed to contact of a very special kind? We conclude by claiming that prototypical least borrowable lexical items can also be borrowed in a very specific context despite the absence of interactive communication between the two communities.Downloads
Issue
Section
License
1. Authors who publish with this journal agree to the following terms:Authors retain copyright and grant the journal right of first publication with the work simultaneously licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution License that allows others to share the work with an acknowledgement of the work's authorship and initial publication in this journal.Authors are able to enter into separate, additional contractual arrangements for the non-exclusive distribution of the journal's published version of the work (e.g., post it to an institutional repository or publish it in a book), with an acknowledgement of its initial publication in this journal.Authors are permitted and encouraged to post their work online (e.g., in institutional repositories or on their website) prior to and during the submission process, as it can lead to productive exchanges, as well as earlier and greater citation of published work.
2. English
Copyright Notice
Contents published in editions of Acta Orientalia in volumes predating 2016 are protected by the Norwegian Copyright Act (http://www.wipo.int/wipolex/en/details.jsp?id=3232). Text and other material published in these journal volumes can only be shared and republished with written permission from article rights holders. Starting from 2017, the content published in Acta Orientalia is - unless otherwise is stated - licensed through Creative Commons License Attribution 4.0: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ . Through this licence content can be copied and distributed but also remixed, transformed and built upon for any purpose under the following conditions: Attribution — You must give appropriate credit to the creators of materials published in Acta Orientalia, provide a link to the license, and indicate if changes were made. You may do so in any reasonable manner, but not in any way that suggests the licensor endorses you or your use. No additional restrictions — You may not apply legal terms or technological measures that legally restrict others from doing anything the license permits.
Notice: No warranties are given. The license may not give you all of the permissions necessary for your intended use. For example, other rights such as publicity, privacy, or moral rights may limit how you use the material.
Authors who publish in Acta Orientalia accept the following conditions: Author(s) retains copyright to the article and give Acta Orientalia right to first publication while the article is licensed under the Creative Commons License Attribution 4.0: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/. This license allows sharing the article for non-commercial purposes, as long as the author and first publishing place Acta Orientalia are credited. The license does not allow others to publish adapted versions of the article without the author's permission. The author is free to publish and distribute the work/article after publication in Acta Orientalia, as long as the journal is referred to as the first place of publication. Submissions that are under consideration for publication or accepted for publication in Acta Orientalia cannot simultaneously be under consideration for publication in other journals, anthologies, monographs or the like. By submitting contributions, the author accepts that the contribution is published in both digital and printed editions of Acta Orientalia.
