On the other hand, some lexical items, like the few given below for five different varieties of Tiwa (Tiwa speaking areas/villages - Marjông, Amsái, Magró, Amkhâ, and Rongkhói, also referred to as Marj, Ams, Magr, Amkh and Rong respectively further below), show enough variety to arouse one's curiosity.

For Example: The words for fish (ngá in Marj and Ams, and ná in others) are less divergent and may offer a way of dividing the dialects into some groups.

The priest and the regular conduct of rituals and ceremonies gave such groups of villages socio-cultural cohesion.

The earlier traditional system, which must have had stricter village coalitions, has suffered marginal disintegration in recent times.

A Tiwa group is known as Amkhâ, which had its center at Suphing (also in West Karbi Anglong), got dispersed and does not have a priest at present.

In the Ri-Bhoi District of Meghalaya, the villages of Amjông, Lumphúi, and Phat Magró have their functioning priests even now.

The Tiwa orthographic tradition (which is based on the Roman alphabet) is to a large extent straightforward; the letters represent the sounds they are generally associated with.

A similar situation arises when ti- 'two' is prefixed to a noun or a numeral classifier that has an initial p, t, c(h) or k, as in tin 'day' > titin [tidin] 'two days'.

There are a handful of exceptions where the unproductive nature of the suffix, as in thrúba thrúbi 'unnoticed; quietly' (which we recognize as related to thrúp thráp in a hidden manner'), has forced us to keep the new voiced medial.

There are other similar instances that involve consonants other than a plosive, like mile [mil-e] 'all, everything', chile [chil-e] 'as having a shiny film or sheen' and chole [chol-e] 'as whole grains'.

The above words would be syllabified as [ka-la-pan], [thin pa-til], [i-ta], [e-ka], [ri-ti], [du-ki] and [re-kót].

If the free variations pon ~ bon 'strike (where bon is more common), tobôl ~ dobôl ~ dabûl 'double' (where dobôl ~ dabûl is gaining ground) and methêng ~ medêng ~ mitîng 'meeting' (where methêng ~ medêng are getting more and more rare) are any indication, we can make a safe bet that voiced initial plosives (ie, b-, d-, j- g-) and voiceless medial plosives (ie, -p-, -t-, -ch-, -k-) will get more and more established in the language.

There are a few instances where the tonal shift occurs across the word-boundary, as in: kidâp 'book', but hísap kídap 'account', and shêna 'strip' but ngá shéna (~ ngáshena) 'fish cut into strips'.

Other examples are musí 'rat' and musî chelé 'a type of mousetrap'; khễya 'a medium-sized palm tree with sweet-scented flowers' and khum khễya 'the sweet-scented flowers of this palm tree'; sháguni 'porous sieving basket' and shak shâguni 'to purify'.

We did not extend this rule to include the falling tone on all first-syllables, in order to be able to have a visual clue to differentiate words like shuwa (< shu- 'peck' and -wa 'nominalizer suffix') 'the pecking' and shûwa 'rubbish, impurity'.

The Amsái dialect does have some examples, like sarí 'whetstone' (which in Marjông is sárai) and sári 'a little' as in kai sári 'a little each'; khagái 'baby boy' (which in Marjông is kháisa) and khágai- 'tie paddy bundle in the middle'; ná-na 'to enter', na-na 'to appear' and naná (< indaná) 'why'.

Four syllable roots tend to be split into two disyllabic words, with two tones, as in tariphûra [tarî-phûra] 'tree-less and open (land)', shuguphûra [shûgu-phûra] 'hypocritical (masc)' and hâbuskharya [hâbus-khârya] 'greedy'.

Examples are: hûri 'winged white ant', sâra 'care, concern', asî 'aunt', shôron 'echo form of lat 'shame', phâmdim 'rheumatism', mathî 'world', khûnda 'post', makhâ 'hill'.

Polysyllabic roots that have two or more syllables with these consonants (as in shâsi 'insect; germ') probably follow some pattern; but we have not studied them systematically.

As a further proof of this pattern in Tiwa, we have variations like khâru/karû (echo forms of kahâ 'wound'), khûndar/kundâr (echo forms of andâr 'dark') and chenê tenê/thêne 'somehow', In the same direction we have karôn 'reason' and khâron 'reason' (as in khâron kóna 'give news of somebody's death to the village priest') borrowed from Assamese কাৰণ (kāran) 'reason'.

Similarly, we have: lore [lor-e] 'suddenly (of spurts)' and lorê- 'give chase', lele [lel-e] 'as protruding' and lelê- 'incite; instigate'.

See Polysyllabic Minimal Pairs for mile [mîl-e] ~ mîlai ~ milâi 'everything', a word that, with its variants, straddles the area of the regular rule and that of the exceptions.

This principle is used in marking the tones of the syllables of larger words in this dictionary, and appears to capture the essence of the Tiwa tonal behaviour.

Some examples are given below: In (1) phiyasekhá the falling tone of phi− (unmarked here being a monosyllable) 'come' spreads across to the negative marker −ya and the emphatic se, but was stopped by the non-continuative khá.

Marjông and Amsái, only four kilometers apart by road from village centre to village centre [or, from cultural house (shámadi) to cultural house] and separated only by a broad swath of paddy-land, show a considerable amount of dialectal differences.

Tiwa appears to have made good use of the languages that it came into contact with in its past and is surrounded by at present, to enhance its store of words and linguistic devises.

Borrowings from the Indo-Aryan languages Assamese/Bengali and Hindi/Nepali and, to a lesser extent, from the Austro-Asiatic Khasi (or Pnar) and the Tibeto-Burman Karbi are discernible in the Tiwa lexicon.

In transcribing the Assamese words the following convention has been used: ক ( k ) খ ( kh ) গ ( g ) ঘ ( gh ) ঙ ( ng ) চ ( c ) ছ ( ch ) জ ( j ) ঝ ( jh ) ঞ ( nya ) ট ( ʈ ) ঠ ( ʈh ) ড ( ɖ ) ঢ ( ɖh ) ণ ( ɳ ) ত ( t ) থ ( th ) দ ( d ) ধ ( dh ) ন ( n ) প ( p ) ফ ( ph ) ব ( b ) ভ ( bh ) ম ( m ) য ( y ) ৰ ( r ) ল ( l ) ৱ ( w ) শ ( s̪ ) ষ ( sh ) স ( s ) হ ( h ) ক্ষ ( ks̪ ) ড় ( r̪ ) ঢ় ( r̪h ) য় ( y ) The vowel symbols used are: ɑ (অ), ā ( আ ), i ( ই ), ī ( ঈ ), ē ( এ ), u ( উ ), ū ( ঊ ) and o ( ও ).

Some of them may be genuine exceptions whose reasons will need to be probed in greater depth, others point to a shallower time-depth of the borrowing.

Some examples are Such second borrowing also gives rise to voiced stop initials as seen in the following free variations.