One of the clues to the reputed lost tribe identity I was searching for would have been language similarities, both in vocabulary and grammar. The day after my arrival, the Principal selected two students and a driver to accompany me into town to buy any necessities. We went to the main produce market, an underground sort of affair, and to one store, one street vendor, and one desk in the back of a snack shop to purchase a phone, sim card, and minutes, respectively.
In general, Mizos have only one very long name. The syllables mean things like 'heaven' or 'lord' or 'desire' and they are strung together. Many folks I met had a last name that started with Vanlal (meaning 'heaven' and 'Lord').....followed by several more syllables. Everyone also has a nickname derived from their longer names, which makes it all the more confusing, because sometimes the nicknames are not exactly a part of the longer name. Rather they are some of the syllables elided together. So even though Lalnunzira is called Zira and Vanlalruata is called Ruata, Lallumzwala is called Lawma. It took me a while to get the professors that I had regular contact with sorted out and, to my shame, I learned only the names of my students who had western first names. The ones with single, long Mizo names, I knew by face, personality, and number.
The young lady who accompanied me on my first shopping trip was a first year student who was also in my Hebrew class. Her name was Shalom. Hebrew names are not unusual in Mizoram. Everywhere you go you see stores named Jehovah Jireh this or Moriah that or Jerusalem the other thing. What was unusual in Shalom's case was that her father related that God told him to name her Shalom and they only in the past few weeks found out what it means. The Sunday school teacher had recently taught them this Hebrew word.
The young man who came on the initial expedition was named Hnema. I really thought he said Nehemiah, but later in the car, Shalom spelled it for me. Then she said it was a Mizo word and it has some meaning like 'comfort.' Aha! That is also the root idea of Nehemiah.
As time went on, I accumulated a few other cognates. To make a sentence negative in Mizo, in some cases, you add a 'lo' to the end of the sentence, a bit like לא There is a question word which is 'maw', a bit like מה The number 'one' is pa-khat like אחת , but that is where that story ends.
Mizo sentence order is object-verb-subject but Hebrew is more fluid, tending toward verb-subject-object. Mizo speakers put their adjectives after nouns as is done in Hebrew, but they have almost no prepositions, which you can clearly hear when they speak English ("I look you"). On the other hand, they have a locational ending which is -a-, similar the the Hebrew locative ה .
However, the word for 'love' is 'hmangaihna' which seems like a very long word for an very important concept, and the word for 'tea' is 'thingpui' which I was told means 'big tree'. It sounds nothing like the word for tea in the rest of the world, and it doesn't even grow on a tree.
And Mizo is a tonal language, so 'in' can mean 'house', 'you', or 'drink', depending on the tone. This fact contributed to my not having learned more of it.
Does all that add up to anything? I don't think so. It would take a lot more in depth study to come to a rigorous academic conclusion.
In almost every language, you will find similarities to Hebrew. Some people say that is because =all= languages descend from it. If you are interested in learning more about that, you can go here: http://edenics.net/
What is more compelling to me is the inclusion of pre-Babel Biblical concepts in Chinese writing. You can read more about that here: http://www.icr.org/article/genesis-chinese-pictographs/
In general, Mizos have only one very long name. The syllables mean things like 'heaven' or 'lord' or 'desire' and they are strung together. Many folks I met had a last name that started with Vanlal (meaning 'heaven' and 'Lord').....followed by several more syllables. Everyone also has a nickname derived from their longer names, which makes it all the more confusing, because sometimes the nicknames are not exactly a part of the longer name. Rather they are some of the syllables elided together. So even though Lalnunzira is called Zira and Vanlalruata is called Ruata, Lallumzwala is called Lawma. It took me a while to get the professors that I had regular contact with sorted out and, to my shame, I learned only the names of my students who had western first names. The ones with single, long Mizo names, I knew by face, personality, and number.
The young lady who accompanied me on my first shopping trip was a first year student who was also in my Hebrew class. Her name was Shalom. Hebrew names are not unusual in Mizoram. Everywhere you go you see stores named Jehovah Jireh this or Moriah that or Jerusalem the other thing. What was unusual in Shalom's case was that her father related that God told him to name her Shalom and they only in the past few weeks found out what it means. The Sunday school teacher had recently taught them this Hebrew word.
The young man who came on the initial expedition was named Hnema. I really thought he said Nehemiah, but later in the car, Shalom spelled it for me. Then she said it was a Mizo word and it has some meaning like 'comfort.' Aha! That is also the root idea of Nehemiah.
As time went on, I accumulated a few other cognates. To make a sentence negative in Mizo, in some cases, you add a 'lo' to the end of the sentence, a bit like לא There is a question word which is 'maw', a bit like מה The number 'one' is pa-khat like אחת , but that is where that story ends.
Mizo sentence order is object-verb-subject but Hebrew is more fluid, tending toward verb-subject-object. Mizo speakers put their adjectives after nouns as is done in Hebrew, but they have almost no prepositions, which you can clearly hear when they speak English ("I look you"). On the other hand, they have a locational ending which is -a-, similar the the Hebrew locative ה .
However, the word for 'love' is 'hmangaihna' which seems like a very long word for an very important concept, and the word for 'tea' is 'thingpui' which I was told means 'big tree'. It sounds nothing like the word for tea in the rest of the world, and it doesn't even grow on a tree.
And Mizo is a tonal language, so 'in' can mean 'house', 'you', or 'drink', depending on the tone. This fact contributed to my not having learned more of it.
Does all that add up to anything? I don't think so. It would take a lot more in depth study to come to a rigorous academic conclusion.
In almost every language, you will find similarities to Hebrew. Some people say that is because =all= languages descend from it. If you are interested in learning more about that, you can go here: http://edenics.net/
What is more compelling to me is the inclusion of pre-Babel Biblical concepts in Chinese writing. You can read more about that here: http://www.icr.org/article/genesis-chinese-pictographs/
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