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This blog is inactive since last 8 odd years taking into consideration the development surrounding Apatani script. You read any post of this blog on your own risk.

E-book on Apatani Language

view or download free copy

 An ebook- ‘A Guide to Simplified Apatani’- is finally here. It’s a compilation of various posts of this blog with necessary adaptation to meet the immediate need of handy guide on Tanii agun. Comments and feedbacks of visitors of the blog have been looked into and changes have been made wherever necessary.

 

Naming of mithuns

Naming of mithuns in Apatani are based on the patterns of colours on their skin. Male and female with similar pattern of colours may have different names. Male names generally start with ‘ta’ as starting syllable and that of female with ‘ya’ as starting syllable. However, there are some patterns of colour for which the bearer have a name irrespective their gender. Following are the illustrations of some common names:

Letters and Spelling System in Apatani

English alphabet is being employed to write Apatani for two obvious reasons:

• It is known well to all literate Apatanis; and
• It is quite convenient, as well, to write Apatani with slight customization of phonological rules of English.

For the purpose of writing Apatani with English alphabets, following points have been considered and used in this blog:

• All the consonants, that is, b, c, d, f, g, h, j, k, l, m, n, p, q, r, s, t, v, w, x, y and z, sound as in English.
• Combinations of consonants such as ch, kh, ng and double consonants (nn, tt etc.) are used specifically as in check, Sikh, ring, sinner and attend respectively
• Vowels are a, e, i, o, u – as in English, plus two additional vowels e and ii which are unique to Apatani

• Each vowel in Apatani has a unique sound-

‘a’ as in America
‘e’ as in set

**‘e’ as in tader /tad...r/ (means intestinal worm in Apatani), taker (star)

‘i’ as in sit, India etc

‘o’ as in pot, old etc

‘u’ as in bush

‘ii’ as in siibin /s…bin/ (means goat in Apatani)

**[e may be replaced by e for convenience of writing and typing and its use in words are understood from context.]

• Apatani being a tone language, all the speech sounds mentioned above except e have variant forms depending on length, pitch and aspiration of the vowel. These variant forms are represented in words with certain combination of letters which are nearest to the sound represented in English words with similar combinations of letters.

• Representation of speech sounds on basis of length, pitch and aspiration:

Variants of vowel sound a:
a  /as in Papa, ask/ e.g, apu (flower), owpa (about to cut work with spade), ane (mother)
aa  /as in aag (fire), raat (night) in hindi/ e.g, aane (came), owpaa (remove by cutting with spade)
ah  /as in ah!/ e.g, miinah (too busy in doing something), owpah (chance of working with spade/ chance to find something while working with spade)

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