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Tedim language

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Tedim
Tedim Chin
Zopau, Tedim pau, Zomi
Native toMyanmar, India
RegionChin State and Sagaing Division of Myanmar
Manipur State and Mizoram State of India
EthnicityZomi people, Chin people
Native speakers
(340,000 cited 1990)[1]
Latin
Pau Cin Hau script
Language codes
ISO 639-3ctd
Glottologtedi1235
ELPTiddim Chin

The Tedim language is a Tibeto-Burman language spoken mostly in the southern Indo-Burmese border. It is the native language of the Tedim tribe of the Zomi people, and a form of standardized dialect merging from the Sukte and Kamhau dialects. It is a subject-object verb language, and negation follows the verb. It is mutually intelligible with the Paite language.

History

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Zomi was the primary language spoken by Pau Cin Hau, a religious leader who lived from 1859 to 1948. He also devised a logographic and later simplified alphabetic script for writing materials in Zomi.

Phonology

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The phonology of Zomi can be described as (C)V(V)(C)T order, where C represents a consonant, V represents a vowel, T represents a tone, and parentheses enclose optional constituents of a syllable.[2]

Consonants

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Labial Alveolar Alveolo-
palatal
Velar Glottal
Plosive/
Affricate
voiceless p t k ʔ
aspirated tɕʰ ()
voiced b d ɡ
Fricative voiceless f s x h
voiced v z
Nasal m n ŋ
Approximant l
  • Approximants [j, w] can be heard as allophones of vowels /i̯, u̯/ within diphthongs.
  • /x/ can also be heard as an aspirated velar stop [kʰ] in free variation.

Vowels

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Front Central Back
Close i u
Mid ɛ ɛː ɔ ɔː
Open a
Diphthongs
Front Central Back
Close iu̯ i̯a ui̯ uːi̯ u̯a
Mid ei̯ ɛːi̯ eu̯ ɛːu̯ ou̯ oi̯ ɔːi̯
Open ai̯ aːi̯ au̯ aːu̯
  • Sounds /ɛ, ɔ/ may have short allophones of more close [e, o].[3]

Tone

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References

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  1. ^ Tedim
    Tedim Chin
    at Ethnologue (18th ed., 2015) (subscription required)
  2. ^ "Proposal to Encode the Pau Cin Hau Alphabet in ISO/IEC 10646" (PDF). unicode.org. Retrieved 15 September 2023.
  3. ^ Otsuka, Kosei (2014). Tiddim Chin. Toshihide Nakayama and Noboru Yoshioka and Kosei Otsuka (eds.), Grammatical Sketches from the Field: Tokyo: Research Institute for Languages and Cultures of Asia and Africa (ILCAA), Tokyo University of Foreign Studies. pp. 109–141.