Himalayan Linguistics

This paper presents morphophonemic alternations in Thadou, a Tibeto-Burman language of the Kuki-Chin subgroup spoken in Northeast India and Myanmar (Burma). Section 1 introduces the language in terms of its place within the Kuki-Chin subgroup and the phonological and morphosyntactic features. Section 2 presents the phonemic inventories of Thadou, the modifications of vowels and consonants, syllable structure, and length contrasts. The remainder of the paper is devoted to discussing the various morphophonemic changes in Thadou. Section 3.1 discusses morphophonemic changes due, namely progressive and regressive assimilation. Section 3.2 to 3.5 discusses morphophonemic changes that take place when two morphemes/syllables concatenate according to the morphosyntactic rules of the language. These include deletion glide insertion, vowel change, vowel reduction, cluster formation, and consonant deletion. Section 4 and 5 deal with the segmental changes that verb stems display and tonal changes between tones in juxtaposition. Finally, the paper concludes with a summary of the paper.