Abstract
Following a brief overview of the types of traditional Singpho songs recorded in Northeast India, this paper presents the Hkaq Yawng Ningkin, a Singpho saga of a young man and the adventures he undertakes to find his loved one. The complex poetic structure of the song is partly hidden behind a maze of linguistic forms: stock phrases, particles and vocables, vocatives and the like, all of which need to be shifted to one side to appreciate the poetic form. This is presented as a tribute to Kate Burridge’s considerable linguistic and artistic achievements.
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Notes
- 1.
In this paper I will use a modified form of the orthography developed for the Jinghpaw language by Ola Hanson (1906). I will retain his use of ă to mark the short vowel in the minor syllable of a sesquisyllabic word (short-long or iambic structure) such as săyawq [səjɔʔ²], in the word săyawq goi, name of one style of song. I will add a final -q to mark glottal stop which although not present in Hanson (1906) is used by some writers on Jinghpaw such as Steddom (2009). Aspirated stops are marked with preceding h, as hk, ht, hp. The low back vowel, [o] ~ [ɔ] is written as aw, except when followed by /i/. Contrastive vowel length (present in Numhpuk Singpho but not Jinghpaw) and tones are not marked in the orthography.
- 2.
In this chapter, the tones are marked following a system suggested by Mr. Manje La of Munggong village, Assam, discussed in Morey (2010: 92 and 2011b). The tones can be described as Tone 1—low, on open syllables; Tone 2—low, on checked syllables, Tone 3—high, on checked syllables, Tone 4 mid-level, on open syllables and Tone 5, high falling, on open syllables.
- 3.
Much of the research leading to this paper was commenced as a result of an Individual Postdoctoral Fellowship, Endangered Languages Documentation Program (School of Oriental and African Studies, London), A comprehensive documentation of the Turung and Singpho languages of Assam. (www.hrelp.org). This project employed Palash Kumar Nath as research assistant, and one of his important contributions was the recording of the Hkaq Yawng Ningkin. Because the recordings and the analysis were collaborative efforts, the plural pronoun ‘we’ is used in that sections of this chapter that refer to the group effort in data collection.
- 4.
The transcriptions can also be viewed and searched at The Tai and Tibeto-Burman languages of Assam website, www.sealang/assam. These transcriptions did not include the final -q for glottal stop.
- 5.
It has been suggested that this is the same name as Tipam, now used to name a Tai Phake village near Namrup in Assam.
- 6.
A search for ‘Jinghpaw traditional music’ produced several links, the first of which was this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v =MRbXMwoWTE4. This was performed played on an electronic keyboard and does not sound to me like a traditional song in the way that the ones recorded by our project in India do. Another example on YouTube is described as ‘Traditional Jingpho/Kachin/Singpho dance, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=In1kLizm9Qg. This dance appears to be very much influenced by Chinese musical styles.
- 7.
This invaluable appendix includes transcriptions of multiple ‘pre-Western Kachin Songs’. The Shayawq Goi is on page 211 and the Shoi Wa on page 214.
- 8.
Effort was made to try and set up an opportunity to get a male-female pair to sing. In January 2006, the late Kiyang Laq and Stephen Morey set out on foot to walk from his home village (Kumchai Kong) to the Bisa village in order to meet with Gădung Luq Bisa Gam and sing together. While this walk was only about 3 km, Kiyang Laq was already over 90 at the time. When the two old people met they felt unable to sing, because of the relationship between them.
- 9.
According to Lukam Tonglum (Liikyam Cholim) of the Tangsa Naga community, the term Naga refers to the child of a great snake and a spirit (nat in both Singpho and Cholim Tangsa). In Lukam’s history of his community gives their origin as children of a great snake /pʰəren²/ and a female spirit or /nɤt/ (/naʔ/
in Burmese). The children were then called /nɤtga²/ hence ‘Naga’. However, I thank an anonymous reviewer for pointing out that the etymology of the ethnic name ‘Naga’ and the mythological serpent ‘Naga’ are different and that in Burmese, for example, this difference is shown by the fact that the two words carry different tones. - 10.
In Burmese,
is given as ‘the future Buddha, Buddha to be, Bodhisattva’ (http://sealang.net/burmese/), accessed 20190923. The last syllable is an honorific suffix. I am grateful to the anonymous reviewer for pointing out that alawng ‘semi-divine being’ is also found in Jinghpaw in Myanmar (Hanson 1906: 12). This is further discussed in Kurabe (2016: 115). - 11.
Hanson (1906: 209) gives the meaning of Ji nat as ‘ancestral spirits, as objects of worship’. Ji is given as ‘an ancestral spirit’, and Hanson suggests the word is related to that for ‘grandfather’. We do not have a translation or explanation of the meaning of Săngawn wa.
- 12.
Our linguistic analysis in this paper uses the following abbreviations: ag ‘agentive’, dl ‘dual’, excl ‘exclamation’, lv ‘light verb’, poss ‘possessive’, prt ‘particle’, seq ‘sequential’, top ‘topic’, voc ‘vocative’.
- 13.
Developed by Paul Boersma and David Weenink, downloaded from http://www.fon.hum.uva.nl/praat/.
- 14.
I am grateful to the anonymous reviewer for pointing out that the cognate matsun means “word, command, testament” in Jinghpaw of Burma (Hanson 1906: 441).
- 15.
This refers to one of Kate Burridge’s many delightful books, where she makes the point that ‘as all gardeners know, what one gardener calls a “weed”, another may call a “flower”. The same goes for words and their usage in English—sometimes we just haven’t realized their virtues’ (Burridge 2005: i). I see these particles in the Hka Yawng Ningkin as somehow similar; they do obscure the underlying poetic structure, but they have other, important, values.
- 16.
A reviewer for this paper questioned why one instance of moi had been ‘removed’ in line 4 and the grammatical particle na retained. My feeling is that the phrase moi na măchun ‘the history of long ago’ is a content phrase and best retained as a unit.
- 17.
I am very grateful to a reviewer of this paper for pointing out that in two publications (neither of which are in English), Dai and Xu (1995) and Kurabe (2019), Jingpo/Jinghpaw poems and songs, in China and Myanmar respectively, show the following characteristics: (a) every two lines are paired, (b) each line in the paired line contains the same number of syllables (the number of syllables vary from paired lines to paired lines) and (c) the last syllable of each line rhymes (tones being ignored). The poetic structure seen in this paper is both somewhat more complicated and has not, to the knowledge either of the reviewer or the present author, been observed in China or Myanmar.
in Burmese). The children were then called /nɤtga²/ hence ‘Naga’. However, I thank an anonymous reviewer for pointing out that the etymology of the ethnic name ‘Naga’ and the mythological serpent ‘Naga’ are different and that in Burmese, for example, this difference is shown by the fact that the two words carry different tones.
is given as ‘the future Buddha, Buddha to be, Bodhisattva’ (References
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Acknowledgements
The research leading to this paper has been undertaken at La Trobe University, supported by the resources of the Centre for Research on Language Diversity. The original data collection and translation were made possible by a fellowship from the Endangered Languages Documentation Program for the project: A comprehensive documentation of the Turung and Singpho languages of Assam (2005–2007) (www.hrelp.org). Work on the Singpho language continued through a project funded by the DoBeS (Dokumentation Bedrohter Sprachen—Documentation of Endangered Languages) program within the Volkswagen Stiftung, entitled The Traditional Songs And Poetry Of Upper Assam—A Multifaceted Linguistic and Ethnographic Documentation of the Tangsa, Tai and Singpho Communities in Margherita, Northeast India (2007–2010). More recently, the Australian Research Council funded Discovery Project Tangsa Wihu song: insight into culture through language, music and ritual (2016–2020) has continued to support this work. I am particularly grateful to colleagues Palash Kumar Nath, Jürgen Schöpf and Meenaxi Barkataki-Ruscheweyh for our cooperative work in the field. Gaku Kajimaru’s insight into the Buyi Antiphonal song has been a crucial step in the analysis presented here. I am also very grateful to the many valuable suggestions from an anonymous reviewer, all of which significantly improved this paper. Our Singpho consultants who so generously provided expertise that allowed this work to occur include in particular Kiyang Gam (the singer of the Hka Yawng Ningkin), Gumgi Gumhtoi (who worked with me for many days to translate it), Manje La, the late Kiyang Laq, Gădung Luq Bisa Jan, N’hpang Gumgai, and late Bhupeswar Ningda, all of whom are singers and story tellers.
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Morey, S. (2020). The Singpho Water Flowing Song: Searching for the Poetics in a Rich Maze of Linguistic Forms. In: Allan, K. (eds) Dynamics of Language Changes. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-6430-7_17
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