| Description |
Bisu wordlist, Lua' wordlist. Scanned notes provided by David Bradley. Part of Side 2 of tape 054 is the first 477 words of the vocabulary from my 1979 book Proto-Loloish in Rmeet (lbn) from Pangcok village, Wang Pa Pao District, Chiang Mai Province. The village is 10km south of Tako and 2 km north of Wiang Pa Pao, just east of the main road. This is a Mon-Khmer language mainly spoken in NW Laos, now no longer spoken in Pangcok. In Pangcok they called themselves Khamet, like the Lao exonym Lamet but with the Lao kha- 'slave' prefix, the Thai classified them as Lua' which is a Northern Thai term used to refer to a variety of MK languages spoken in N Thailand, and also to Bisu and Mpi though Bisu and Mpi are Tibeto-Burman languages. The corresponding term in standard
Thai is Lawa which is also applied to the Gong, speakers of another Tibeto-Burman language, as well as to the Bisu, the Mpi and the various MK groups, from the Palaungic, Angkuic or Lametic subgroups, including a couple now sleeping.
The Thai personal name of the Tako speaker, Daeng Myan-uthang, and the Thai names of the villages are in the scans. The village Tako is also sometimes locally known as Din Dam 'black earth'. The name Tako is in Northern Thai, the standard Thai would be /thako/, both
mean 'Ko landing place', Ko being an old Thai exonym for various groups speaking Tibeto-Burman languages like the Akha. The village Doi Chomphu 'pink mountain' is also sometimes locally called Huai Chomphu 'pink stream'. Note that these names are Thai, not Bisu. The presence of Bisu at Tako is attested to by Hallett, a passing 'explorer', in the 1880s; the ancestors of the Bisu now in Thailand were probably brought as war captives from north of Kengtung in what is now the Shan State of Burma by the Chiang Rai prince sometime in the 1850s. I am told that there are now no speakers left at Tako. Tako is the tambon (village cluster) headquarters; the other villages Doi Chomphu, Phadaeng and Pangcok are all just
muban (village), under another tambon nearby. |
