A Brief History of Karbi Grammar
Posted by Administrator on July 5, 2009
BY : Dharamsing Teron
Rev. Dr. Nathan Brown’s ‘Grammatical notes of the Assamese Language’ first published in 1848 originally was not intended to ‘be regarded as a Grammar of the Assamese Language’ but ‘they were commenced with the intention of printing only a few sheets, for private use of the most common grammatical forms’. These ‘notes’ however did not remain ‘private’ and in fact provided the foundation of the grammar in Assamese that clinched two very crucial issues of the day—firstly, Assamese gained recognition as ‘much superior in beauty and softness’ and not ‘a merely corrupt form of Bengali,’ and secondly, the language emerged as a ‘system of imparting formal or institutional education’ in Assam. It was not to say that what Dr. Brown and the missionaries had devised more than a century ago was free from shortcomings. In his introductory remarks to Dr. Brown’s seminal work, Dr. Nagen Saikia during whose tenure as the General Secretary the third and the last edition was reprinted in 1982 by the ‘Assam Sahitya Sabha’, had these observation to make: the missionaries had ‘followed the model of the English grammar’ as they had ‘no other model before them’ and since Dr. Brown’s grammar was basically an effort to ‘make the learners acquaint themselves with the important characteristics’ of the language, he ‘very naturally left out sandhis and samasas, besides krit and taddhit suffixes from his discussion’. Dr. Brown also ‘did not discuss about syntax of the language.’ What the grammar achieved in its aim was to ‘teach the grammatical rules of Assamese as the target language’ and the emergence of Assamese linguistic nationalism in the later years.
Now, looking back a century and sixty year later since 1848, where does Karbi language stand vis-à-vis the Assamese language? In retrospection, one finds from historical data that Karbis were not very far off, they were in fact just behind their Assamese brothers. The missionaries had toiled not the less for the development of the Karbi language as well. Three decades after the publication of Dr. Brown’s grammar, another missionary, Rev. RE Neighbor compiled the ‘Vocabulary of English and Mikir, with illustrative sentences’, in 1878 that deserves to be called the ‘first’ karbi ‘dictionary’. As the title aptly describes, the book had nothing to do with the grammatical aspects of the language, what it did was putting down as many vocabularies as possible for the benefit of English readers. Another three decades later, Sardoka Perrin Kay’s ‘English-Mikir Dictionary’ came out in print in 1904. Four years later in 1908, Sir Charles Lyall and Edward Stack followed it up with ‘The Mikirs’, the first ethnographic details on the Karbis. This monograph also contained some important grammatical basics of the language based on Mr. Lyall’s ‘study…. in the linguistic materials collected’ by Mr. Neighbor’s vocabulary, Sardoka’s dictionary and phrase book, though Mr. Stack ‘himself had drawn no grammar’. Mr. Lyall ‘contributed’ the same material to the first ever ‘Linguistic Survey of India’ (1902) conducted by Sir George Abraham Greierson between 1898-1929. Mr. Lyall had acknowledged Sir Grieerson’s sketches of the Karbi grammar to be ‘the first published attempt to explain systematically the facts and mechanism of the language.’
The efforts of the Baptist and Catholic Missionaries and the colonial officers on Karbi language, whether or not they were driven by ‘the interest of their own’, but what mattered most was that a very bold and positive beginning was made. That collectively the subsequent generations of Karbis failed to capitalize on the early foundation provided by them still remains a matter of a serious concern. The missionaries ran a ‘newspaper’ in Karbi titled ‘Birta’ in 1903. They had a similar publication in Garo language by the name ‘Achikni Ripeng’ (Garos’ Friend) that started publication since 1881 and ‘served much the same purpose for the Garos that the Orunudoi had served for the Assamese’. But sadly