Aspects of North East Indian Languages

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Professor P.C. Bhattacharya's Aspects of North East Indian Languages is a welcome addition to the growing body of literature on the different issues of Indian Linguistics. Bhattacharya's interest and range of scholarship is wide. He is equally at home in Indo-Aryan as well as Sino-Tibetan. This collection of his twenty-four articles touching upon a wide range of subjects reflects this aspect of his scholarship. In this he is a follower of Suniti Kumar Chatterji. Unfortunately, in the days of super specialization encyclopedic scholarship is almost an endangered species. Bhattacharya may be the last of this kind. I hope this book will encourage some of our young scholars to follow this tradition. Personally, I have enjoyed reading the Non- Aryan Elements in the Assamese Language, Sino-Tibetan Elements in Indo-Aryan Place-names and River-names. The Boro Elements in Ancient Place-Names of Assam explores areas rich in potentiality but rarely explored. Place names and river names are not only of linguistic importance but are of historical interest.

Aspects of North East Indian Languages is a compilation of twenty four essays and research papers on language and linguistic features of North East India with special reference to Assam. Written on different occasions, most of these papers and essays have been previously published (1954-1998) in various journals and periodicals. The four papers relating to Numerical Definitives in the Boro Language of Assam (1955) deal with the traditional methods o transliteration of Assamese and Boro sounds. The specimens of Assamese and Boro colloquial dialects are also given to illustrate a number of comparative and contrastive features. The figures of the Census of India, 1951 was only available for the paper "The Languages of Assam" (1955).

As a research scholar of Sino-Tibetan Boro language and by virtue of being a member of the Linguistic Society of India, I had the opportunity to attend the advanced courses in Phonetics, Phonemics, Morphology, and Field Methods of the School of Linguistics during 1954-60. I owe a great deal to our great teachers of Linguistics, namely I.J.H. Taraporewala, S.K. Chatterji, S. Sen, S.M. Katre, J. Burton-Page, John Gumperz, P.B.Pandit, and many others. The encouragement of my colleagues G.C. Goswami, U.N. Goswami, A.R. Kelkar, Bhabendra Narzary and others contributed to the completion of A Descriptive Analysis of the Boro Language (1965), my research dissertation in Gauhati University.