Felix
Ahlner
Body
part terms in Kammu
This paper presents a
descriptive and comparative overview of words for body part in the Mon-Khmer
language Kammu. In Greenberg’s four-tome Universals of Human Language (1978),
Andersen proposed a set of universals for the linguistic organization of human
body parts. One basic concept was that body part terms are ordered in
partonomies, e.g. that a finger is part of a hand, which is part of an arm etc.
In a special issue of Language Sciences, Majid et al (2006) present new
data from a number of languages from all over the world. The outcome shows that
partonomical relations are far from the only connections that exist between
body parts. Other important relations include ”location, connectedness, and
general association” (2006:199).
The
descriptive part of this paper shows that Kammu indeed contains different
systems for organizing the body, and the elicited lexical data present several
interesting and amusing details. The comparative part benefits from Majid et
al, whose special issue contained data both from Lao (Enfield 2006) and from
the Aslian language Jahai (Burenhult 2006). Are there
still any similarities between Kammu and Jahai, several millennia after the two
languages split? In what ways has the genetically unrelated language Lao
affected Kammu’s body part terms over the past centuries?
References
Andersen, Elaine S. (1978).
‘Lexical universals of body-part terminology’, in Greenberg 1978, pp. 335–368.
Burenhult, Niclas (2006).
‘Body part terms in Jahai’, in Majid et al. 2006 (eds.), pp. 162–180.
Majid, Asifa;