The Impact of Phonological Change in Manipuri Morphology

Abstract

The main objective of the present paper was to study the impact of phonological change on Manipuri morphology. Manipuri is a highly agglutinating Tibeto-Burman language which is highly influenced by other languages such as Bengali, Sanskrit, Assamese, Hindi and English. The study discusses the various phonological changes in the language such as assimilation, epenthesis to name such a few along with the condition. For instance, epenthesis can be of two types—vowel epenthesis and consonant epenthesis. So the study will be based on what type of epentheses is available in the language along with the example. Manipuri has its own phonotactics rule which permits the sequence of phonemes combination. It is found out that phonological change is highly found in the loan words due to the nonavailability of sound system in the language. The paper is divided into four parts. The first part deals with the introduction which discusses Manipuri language, its classification, features and sound system. The second part discusses the availability of various loan words in the language which are derived from Assamese, Bengali, Sanskrit, Hindi and English. The third part aims to study the phonotactics rules in the language. The fourth section deals with the conclusion and references. This study will be useful in the study of word formation process and also in the process of morpheme identification—one of the major tasks of natural language processing.

Keywords: Agglutinating, Epenthesis, Loan words, Tibeto-Burman, Phonology, Assimilation, Vowel, Consonant, Manipuri, Onset, Coda