Lahu is a Tibeto-Burman language spoken by more than half a million people scattered over the hills of China's Yunnan Province, Burma's Shan State, Northern Thailand, NW Laos, and North Vietnam. Beginning in 1965-66, Principal Investigator Dr. James Matisoff has devoted much of his scholarly activity to the documentation of this language, including a 693-page Lahu grammar (1973/82), a 1500-page Lahu-English dictionary (1988), and a 472-page English-Lahu lexicon (2006).
Most of the PI's work on Lahu has been based on the voluminous corpus of texts he collected in Northern Thai villages in the 1960's, recorded on reel-to-reel tape-recorders and transcribed in longhand, then corrected during subsequent fieldtrips in the 1970's. These texts comprise a wide variety of genres and registers, including descriptions of daily activities, often enacted in the form of skits or playlets; conversations (e.g. on village life and its hardships); jokes and anecdotes; trickster tales; fables and other stories with a moral; traditional love poetry and songs; pre-Christian myths and prayers from the animist tradition; Christian sermons, hymns, and Bible readings. They reflect a cultural milieu nearly half a century old, before the profound changes in village life of recent decades. Many of the words and expressions in these texts are no longer in common use, and are sometimes unintelligible to current generations of speakers.
About 130 of these 170 texts have already been translated by the PI. In the spring of 2011, the Lahu transcriptions were entered into the computer by a visiting Lahu graduate student from Thailand. During the projected two-year grant period, the following steps will be undertaken: (1) completion and revision of the free translations; (2) interlinear glossing of every morpheme in each text; (3) copious annotation, both linguistic and cultural; (4) formatting the texts and translations for publication in the University of California Publications in Linguistics series. The printed volume will be accompanied by a time-aligned electronic archive of the original audiotapes from the 1960's and 1970's.
In order to ensure maximum usefulness to the Lahu people themselves, the texts will be presented in all three of the orthographies now in use: the Baptist missionary system used by the Lahu in Burma and Thailand; the pinyin-based orthography used by the Lahu in China; and the PI's phonemic orthography used in his grammar, dictionaries, and articles on Lahu. The end result will be a volume of several hundred pages, which will be of interest to scholars in a variety of humanistic and social scientific disciplines, and most importantly, to the Lahu people themselves.
