TURA, March 29: The Mothers’ Union, Tura, and the A’chik Literature Society (ALS) have picked holes in a book entitled Poraina Skiani A and objected to its use for teaching Garo language in select schools in Garo Hills.
The book has been authored by Bluwin Chisik Sangma and published by DJ Publications, Tura.
Arguing that the book will do more harm than good to the A’chik language and culture, the groups, in a statement, said, “The combination of phonemes in the words given in page number 16 does not agree with the phoneme combinations in Garo language. For example, the words KAB, KACH, KAD, KAJ, LACH, MAB, MACH,NAJ, RAJ, TACH, etc do not occur in the Garo language. There are no words that end with j, ch, as final syllables. We do have all those phonemes in the language, but not the above-mentioned combinations. They are totally alien to our language.”
Referring to page 15 of the book, they added, “On that page with the heading ‘Oikor Minggitamchi Gamˑatani’ (meaning pronouncing with three letters), and titled (Menggo) with the picture of a cat, is filled with contradictions because the word menggo involves the sound of 6 (six) letters: m, e,n, g, g, o. The text below has none of those letters, no sound or phoneme connected with menggo. The words or letter combinations such as HAN, HAP, CHAJ, BAD, CHACH, etc. have nothing to do with menggo”.
The groups also objected to the incorrect placement of raka (glottal stop) symbol in some words such as ‘e.ching’ (pages 5 and 7), ‘te.gatchu’ (page 11), ‘wa.a’ (page 12) and said informing that a raised dot (•) is the accepted symbol to represent raka in the Garo language. “It is totally unjust to impose the phoneme combinations of other languages on Garo language. On account of the reasons given above, we strongly object to the use of that book Poraina Skiani A as a language teaching textbook for Garo language,” the groups said.