Answer the following about Santali, a Munda language spoken around West Bengal unrelated to most Indian languages, for 10 points each.
[10m] Santali is the westernmost major language in this family that includes many minority languages spoken in inland pockets of Indochina. Vietnamese, Mon, and Khmer are the major branches of this language family.
ANSWER: Austroasiatic [reject “Austronesian”]
[10e] For Santali, Raghunath Murmu developed Ol Chiki, which is this type of writing system in which both vowels and consonants are independent letters. Vietnamese uses one of these scripts based on Latin.
ANSWER: alphabets
[10h] Reconstructing Proto-Austroasiatic is difficult due to extensive language contact. Malcolm Ross coined this English term for a network of related languages that evolved from a dialect continuum, only share innovations with nearby neighbors, and poorly fit a tree model.
ANSWER: linkages
<OL, Social Science>