Tabu Ram Taid (born August 1. 1942. village Ghunasuti. North Lakh- impur. Assam) did a master's in English at the University of Delhi and obtained later a postgraduate diploma in Applied Linguistics from the University of Reading. He also did a training course in distance teaching at the University of London Institute of Education. He started as a lecturer in English at Cotton College, Guwahati, where he became a professor. Subscquently he moved to administrative posts in the department of education, government of Assam, doing different stints as Director, Anundoram Borooah Institute of Language, Art and Culture, Director of Higher Education, Chair- man, Board of Secondary Education, etc. before his retirement in the year 2000.
Apart from contributing articles on topics relating to education, culture and language to different dailies, periodicals and magazines in both Assamese and English, Shri Taid published papers on the Mising language in the journal Linguistics of the Tibeto-Burman Area, University of California, and Berkeley. His publications also include his first lexicographical work A Dictionary of the Mising Language (1995). Shri Taid is the founder president of Mising Agom Kebang (Mising Language Society, also referred to as Mising Sahitya Sabha, established 1972).
A hundred years ago, in 1910, the Assam Secretariat Press, Shillong, published a rudimentary lexicographical work, titled A DICTIONARY OF THE ABOR-MIRI LANGUAGE, compiled by a Christian missionary, and named J. Herbert Lorrain. "Abor' and 'Miri' in the title of the work are the present-day speeches of the Adis of Arunachal and the Misings of Assam respectively. No significant lexicographical work, either on the two forms of speech together, as the one Lorrain had compiled, or on the two speech forms separately, appears to have seen the light of day during the many decades that followed.
The centuries of inhabitance of the Misings in the plains of Assam saw them go through a process of acculturation- -a process that influenced even the vocabulary of their speech. This is something that the Adis had not experienced in their hilly abodes. Moreover, the Misings themselves got divided into a few so- cial subgroups, each speaking a dialect of its own and each dialect having, in varying degrees, some differences with another in terms of vocabulary, although the common lexical core of the speech continued to be quite cohesive in nature.
Considering these aspects of Mising speech, the present editor made at his own initiative a very humble effort to compile a dictionary of Mising in the early 1990s. which was published in 1995 by an organization, called the Mising Agom Poyimne Kebang (Mising Language Teachers’ Association)? The present work, under- taken as a part of the project on publication of dictionaries of the indigenous languages of Assam, launched by the Anundoram Borooah Institute of Language, Art and Culture (ABILAC), purports to be a little more ambitious than the one published in 1995.
I am sure more, and, in many ways, better, dictionaries of the Mising language than the present one will keep appearing in the future from time to time. There are scores of words, including variant forms, which the present compilers have probably missed, but will find their due place in future Mising dictionaries. New words will be born, borrowed or coined, and they too will keep getting incorporated into the vocabulary entries in such dictionaries.
**Contents and Sample Pages**
Send as free online greeting card
Email a Friend
Manage Wishlist