Note 10 — VII. AFFINITIES.

The words in which Tibeto-Burman languages agree most widely with one another are perhaps those for water and village; for the former dī, tī, tui, dzü, zu, jī, chī, and other similar forms, all apparently identical with the Tibetan chhu and the Turki su, run through the whole family: for the latter khul, khu, ku (Turki kū, kūi) are similarly widespread. It is somewhat surprising to find in Mikir an exception to the general rule. Water is làng, and village is ròng. Searching through the tribal vocabularies, Tangkhul Naga (a Naga-Kuki form of speech) appears to have, in ta-rā, the corresponding word to làng (r = l, and ta a prefix). Nowhere else in the neighbourhood is there a trace of a similar word until we come to Burmese, where water is rē (now pronounced yē). Similarly, it appears to be only in Burmese that we have a word for village, rwā, corresponding to the Mikir ròng. These coincidences, like others already mentioned, seem to point to the south for the affinities of the Mikir race. At the same time it is to be observed that Mikir appears once to have had, like the Kuki-Chin languages generally, the word tī for water. This survives in the word for egg, vo-tī, which must mean “fowl’s water,” and corresponds in sense to the Boṛo dau-dui, Chutiya du-ji, Garo do-chi, Shö (Chin) a-tui. In Angāmi and Lushei “fowl” is omitted, and the word for “egg” is merely dzü, tui, = water.10