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Poula is an Angami-Pochuri language that is predominantly spoken by the Poumai Naga people in Senapati district in
Manipur Manipur () ( mni, Kangleipak) is a state in Northeast India, with the city of Imphal as its capital. It is bounded by the Indian states of Nagaland to the north, Mizoram to the south and Assam to the west. It also borders two regions of ...
and
Phek district Phek District (pron:/ˈfɛk/) is a district in the Indian state of Nagaland. At , the district is the seventh-most populous district in Nagaland and 596th most populous district in India with 163,418 inhabitants. The district is home to 8.26% ...
in
Nagaland Nagaland () is a landlocked state in the northeastern region of India. It is bordered by the Indian states of Arunachal Pradesh to the north, Assam to the west, Manipur to the south and the Sagaing Region of Myanmar to the east. Its capital cit ...
,
India India, officially the Republic of India (Hindi: ), is a country in South Asia. It is the List of countries and dependencies by area, seventh-largest country by area, the List of countries and dependencies by population, second-most populous ...
. The language of
Chingjaroi Chingjaroi, originally known Asinei or Asewnei alternatively called Zingchui/Zingjui by the tangkhul, Shomai by the Poumai and khatchomi by the Chakhesangs is a large village located in northern Ukhrul district, Manipur state, India and bordered ...
is also closely related to Poula.


Overview

A
descriptive grammar In the study of language, description or descriptive linguistics is the work of objectively analyzing and describing how language is actually used (or how it was used in the past) by a speech community. François & Ponsonnet (2013). All acad ...
o
Poula
is available now. However, there is a dearth of written literature in Poula language. Some written Poula appeared in form of the Bible and Christian hymns, translated by the Bible Society of India in 2009. Prior to that a Poumai Literary Society was formed in 2007 with the intention of producing reading materials in the language. In order to standardize the language, the Poumai Literary Society has attempted koineization, which was not successful as it was not possible to account for all the varieties of the language. This was partly due to the fact that the Poula language and its varieties had not yet been identified, described or analyzed. Standardisation of the orthography only took place after the enough was understood about the phonology of the language.


Phonology

The
phonology Phonology is the branch of linguistics that studies how languages or dialects systematically organize their sounds or, for sign languages, their constituent parts of signs. The term can also refer specifically to the sound or sign system of a ...
of Poula lacks
syllable coda A syllable is a unit of organization for a sequence of speech sounds typically made up of a syllable nucleus (most often a vowel) with optional initial and final margins (typically, consonants). Syllables are often considered the phonological " ...
s and also disallows
consonant clusters In linguistics, a consonant cluster, consonant sequence or consonant compound, is a group of consonants which have no intervening vowel. In English, for example, the groups and are consonant clusters in the word ''splits''. In the education ...
in
onset Onset may refer to: * Onset (audio), the beginning of a musical note or sound * Onset, Massachusetts, village in the United States **Onset Island (Massachusetts), a small island located at the western end of the Cape Cod Canal * Interonset interva ...
position. There are 25 consonant
phonemes In phonology and linguistics, a phoneme () is a unit of sound that can distinguish one word from another in a particular language. For example, in most dialects of English, with the notable exception of the West Midlands and the north-wes ...
in Poula.


Consonants


Vowels

There are six vowel
phonemes In phonology and linguistics, a phoneme () is a unit of sound that can distinguish one word from another in a particular language. For example, in most dialects of English, with the notable exception of the West Midlands and the north-wes ...
in Poula. In Poula, the phoneme /ə/ is written with the
grapheme In linguistics, a grapheme is the smallest functional unit of a writing system. The word ''grapheme'' is derived and the suffix ''-eme'' by analogy with ''phoneme'' and other names of emic units. The study of graphemes is called '' graphemi ...
' ü' (now, many use it as 'ii') in Bible and Hymns which was devised by Bible Society of India. In addition Poula lacks high back round vowel as a monophthong, but is present in nexus of diphthong; for example pou əu`father'.


Tones

Poula is a
tonal language Tone is the use of pitch in language to distinguish lexical or grammatical meaning – that is, to distinguish or to inflect words. All verbal languages use pitch to express emotional and other paralinguistic information and to convey emph ...
, however tone is not currently marked in the
orthography An orthography is a set of conventions for writing a language, including norms of spelling, hyphenation, capitalization, word breaks, emphasis, and punctuation. Most transnational languages in the modern period have a writing system, and ...
. There are four
tonemes Tone is the use of pitch in language to distinguish lexical or grammatical meaning – that is, to distinguish or to inflect words. All verbal languages use pitch to express emotional and other paralinguistic information and to convey emph ...
in Poula.


Grammar

Poula is an extremely innovative language–unlike Kuki-Chin languages–for having simple morphology.


Morphology

Nouns and verbs are the two content word classes. There are no ‘adjective’ and ‘adverbs’ words classes, however nominalized verbs may modify nouns and non-finite converbial verbs may modify verbs. There several functional words found. Expressives are a part of the grammar and lexicon of Poula. As parts of speech, expressives are verb modifiers which occur post-verbally. Unlike verbs and nouns, an expressive word in Poula cannot head a predicate or a noun phrase. Poula expressives are arranged into three groups (Acoustic symbolic words, Articulatory symbolic words and Systematic patterned words). As it occurs, the speaker raises the pitch only when expressing extremely quick action; if not, the pitch of the expressive words is produced using falling or low intonation.


Morphosyntax

Considering the overtly expressed noun phrases, the three components that can occur before the head phrase are possessive pronouns, genitive nouns and derived modifiers, and four components that may post head are derived modifiers, quantifiers, relative clauses and demonstratives. In sentences, noun phrases may occur in coordinations, in appositions, in asyndetic coordinations or in embedded within a noun phrase. The marking of subjects and objects in Poula is not purely syntactic. The arguments are grouped into two (core argument markers and pragmatic argument markers). The motivation for the marking and not marking a subject or an agent is pragmatic, determined by information and discourse structure, rather than syntactic. There are three pragmatic argument markers (the particular -ni, the contrastive maker -jò and the sympathetic -zw` ) that are noted to mark or replace the core argument markers, based on certain specific pragmatic conditions.


Syntax

Poula has several suffix nominalisers, but has no prefix nominaliser. Most nominalisers indicate an early stage of grammaticalisation. This is because, most nom- inalisers still retain their lexical meaning, and may occur before nominals too. Except the converb -ni, nominalisers are developed due to elision of the nominaliser -zy. Poula demonstrates finite relative clauses, as any tense, aspect or modality marker may be suffixed to the main verb of the relative clause, before the relative clause marker. However, a systematic tone alternation is observed in relative constructions and derivational nominalisation–due to the ellipsis of the nominaliser -zy. That is, verbs attached with any relative markers are conditioned to be either in high tone or in rising tone. Poula is a verb final language. However, the word order of subject, verb and object are not rigid in Poula. There can be two slots (components) in front of the head and three slots (components) following the head of a predicate. The causative morpheme "pai" and verb modifiers are the only two components that occur before the head predicate. Like in most other Trans-Himalayan languages, a verbal predicate needs at least one inflectional morpheme in a clause. Poula tense, aspect and modality markers cannot be strictly differentiated. After the head of a predicate, the components that can occur are verbal particles, negation markers, tense, aspect and modality markers and sentence final markers. Considering the valency of Poula verbs, verbs are grouped into three sub-types (univalent, bivalent and trivalent). However, categorising verbs based on transitivity or valency is challenging because of the prevalence of zero anaphora in Poula. Single verb as the head of predicates is infrequent in the corpus, as most heads of predicates (of both matrix and dependent clauses) are serial verb constructions. In addition, there is no clear distinction between copular clauses and nonverbal clauses The clauses inside Poula complex sentences have one matrix clause and one or more dependent clauses. In such constructions, typically, Poula verbs in dependent clauses are marked differently than the verbs in matrix clauses. Poula nonfinite dependent clauses mostly occur to the left of matrix clause. There are two types of dependent clauses in Poula (non-finite dependent clauses and finite dependent clauses). The morpheme -ni ‘CVB’ in poula is the converbal marker, which is one of the dependent clause markers. However, the converbal marker behaves like an adverbialiser in independent clauses, and behaves as converbal clause linker in a dependent clause. In Poula, serial verb constructions can occur both in matrix clauses and dependent clauses.


References

{{Kuki-Chin–Naga languages Angami–Pochuri languages Languages of Nagaland