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Pearic Pearic constitutes a small sub-group of endangered languages spoken in scattered locations in Cambodia and Thailand. Numbers of speakers are very low, no more than a few thousand in total, and some Pearic languages recorded in the 1800s are now extinct or moribund. They were once more widely spoken in Cambodia - a 13th century Chinese source describes individual Cambodians owning scores and even hundreds of slaves who were Tchouang (*ɟuaŋ), which is the Pearic etymon for "people". Unfortunately Pearic people have been actively marginalised, and at times exterminated by the Cambodians, who often have had a low regard for ethnic minorities. |
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At least 8 Prearic
languages are distinguished:
The term Samre is used by Cambodians to refer to Pearic people - it is an infixed from of sre "field" and just means "farmer". The term Pear is also a Cambodian designation, ultimately from Sanskrit varna, referring to caste, presumably the slave caste. Chong and its variants reflect Proto-Pearic *ɟuaŋ "people", which strikingly corresponds to the name of the Munda group Juang. |
Map of
Pearic Languages (from Headley 1977)  |
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Pearic was one of the first MK groups to be documented, and for some of them the best sources we have are the oldest. Phonologically the group is remarkable, showing a 4-way register system that combines both breathy and creaky phonation, similar to systems found among Vietic languages. As in other phonologically innovative MK groups, proto-MK voiced stops are devoiced, and the proto-implosive series is realised as plain. However, Pearic is also conservative in some respects, preserving final stops that were lost in Cambodian, Bahnaric, Katuic etc., and retains various lexical items that have cognates in MK languages much further north rather than in the Eastern MK area. Unfortunately the Pearic is very difficult to use as a witness for PMK reconstruction due to the extent of contact induced change and sheer lack of documentation. It is also significant that the older sources were not collected by trained linguists, and consequently are not phonetically reliable, and thus should only be used for lexical studies. Only since Huffman (1985) and L-Thongkum (1991) do we find the 4 registers properly described and distinguished. Fortunately fieldwork is now being done by experienced Thai researchers on the Pearic dialects spoken in Thailand and with emigrés from Cambodian regions, but a comprehensive program of field data collection and documentation remains an urgent priority. Headley (1978b) presented a preliminary Proto-Pearic reconstruction and internal genetic classification. He relied mostly upon the Baradat vocabulary of 1941 and a manuscript Chong vocabulary provided by Franklin Huffman. From the perspective of comparative phonology the reconstruction is rather incomplete - unfortunately sources were not yet available that reliably distinguished the 4 registers, and while Headley noted the phenomenon of "prefinal glottals" (as he called them) he decided to leave the question "to future linguists". In respect of the consonants, Headley reconstructed voicesless stops deriving from both *voiceless and *voiced stops, and additionally reconstructed a second *voiceless series of an unknown phonation type that he writes with capitals: *P, *T, *C, *K. Some of these reflect PMK aspirates, while some others reflect a special correspondence between voiced stops in Old-Mon and voiced stops in Khmer. The significance of this series is not clear to me, and I suspect that it is an artifact of Headley's analysis based upon too narow a dataset. Due to the preliminary nature of the reconstruction I will not go into further detail - rather the time is right for another attempt at the problem. Headley's data includes at least 410 sets of comparisons, so it provides an excellent starting point for new comparative studies undertaken with the benefit of broader data. |
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References and further reading
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