ASSEB HS Advance Bodo flashcards

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Bodo Sahitya Sabha

The central literary and linguistic organisation of the Bodo people, founded in 1952 at Kokrajhar. It standardised Bodo orthography, published dictionaries and textbooks, and campaigned for constitutional recognition of the language.

Eighth Schedule inclusion

Bodo was added to the Eighth Schedule of the Indian Constitution by the 92nd Constitutional Amendment Act, 2003, which came into force in 2004, giving the language constitutional recognition.

Bodo script in use

Modern standard Bodo is written in the Devanagari script, adopted by the Bodo Sahitya Sabha in 1963. The Roman script was used earlier by missionaries and still appears in older publications.

Bodo tone

Bodo is a tonal language with two contrastive tones, high and low. Tone distinguishes words that are otherwise identical in consonants and vowels, but it is not normally marked in standard writing.

Aspiration contrast

Bodo distinguishes aspirated from unaspirated stops (ph/p, th/t, kh/k) and voiced from voiceless stops. These contrasts are phonemic, so writing the wrong letter changes the word.

Bodo word order

Bodo is a verb-final language with basic Subject-Object-Verb order. The verb carries tense, aspect, and agreement with the subject, and postpositions follow the noun.

Bodo case marking

Bodo marks grammatical relations with postpositions and enclitics rather than with inflectional case endings on the noun. Typical markers include -khou for accusative and -ni for genitive.

Bodo plural markers

Plurality in Bodo is marked by suffixes such as -phur/-fur, used mainly with human and animate nouns, and -khou/-khu more generally. The marker is optional when context makes plurality clear.

Bodo negation

Negation in Bodo is expressed by a negative suffix or particle attached to the verb, producing a single inflected negative form rather than a separate negative word before the verb.

Reduplication in Bodo

Bodo forms new words and meanings by repeating a stem. Reduplication can mark plurality, intensity, repetition of an action, or distributiveness, and is very productive in everyday speech.

Bodo ideophones

Ideophones are expressive words that depict sound, motion, colour, or manner. They are a productive lexical category in Bodo and often cannot be translated word for word.

Bodo kinship terms

Bodo kinship vocabulary is highly specific, distinguishing elder from younger siblings and maternal from paternal relatives. These distinctions are lexical, not grammatical, since Bodo has no grammatical gender.

Bodo loanwords

Bodo has borrowed vocabulary mainly from Assamese, Bengali, Hindi, and English. Recent technical terms are often taken directly from English or calqued from native roots.

Bagurumba dance

Bagurumba is the best-known Bodo folk dance, performed by young women in colourful attire. It is associated with the Bagurumba bird and with the spring season and is often performed at festivals.

Kherai festival

Kherai is the central religious festival of the Bodo, dedicated to Bathou, the supreme deity. It involves the douri priest, deodhani oracles, and ritual dance and song.

Bathou religion

Bathouism is the traditional religion of the Bodo, centred on the worship of Bathou. The sijou plant, surrounded by a bamboo fence, is the symbol and shrine of Bathou.

Bwisagu festival

Bwisagu, also called Baisagu, is the Bodo spring and New Year festival. It is celebrated with song, dance, and the bwisagu song genre, marking the agricultural new year.

Sijou plant

The sijou (Euphorbia) plant is the visible symbol of Bathou in the Bodo courtyard shrine. It is planted inside a bamboo fence with five or seven posts of ritual significance.

Deodhani and douri

The deodhani is a ritual oracle, usually a woman, who dances and speaks in trance during Kherai. The douri is the priest who conducts the Bathou rituals.

Bodo clans

Bodo society is organised into exogamous clans such as Swargiary, Basumatary, Brahma, Narzary, Iswary, and Goyary. Clan membership regulates marriage rules and social obligations.

Bodo Language Movement

The Bodo Language Movement of the 1960s and 1970s, including the 1972 script agitation, secured Devanagari as the school script and strengthened the status of Bodo in education.

Bodo associate official language

Bodo was recognised as an associate official language of Assam in 1985. The Bodo Territorial Council was later created in 2003 under the Sixth Schedule of the Constitution.

Bodo short story

The short story is the dominant modern Bodo prose genre. It typically depicts rural Bodoland and addresses land, poverty, migration, education, and the tension between tradition and modernity.

Bodo prose themes

Prescribed Bodo prose commonly treats land and agriculture, debt and alcoholism, gender inequality, education, and migration. Social realism is the dominant mode, often without explicit moralising.

Bodo poetry rhythm

Bodo poetry is strongly oral-derived, using rhythm, repetition, and refrain. Modern poems borrow metres from folk-song traditions such as bagurumba and other ritual songs.

Bodo poetic imagery

Bodo poetry draws on nature imagery such as rivers, hills, bamboo, and flowers, and on the seasons of the agricultural calendar. Love of land and language are recurrent themes.

One-act play structure

A one-act play has a single setting, few characters, and one dramatic crisis. It compresses exposition, rising action, climax, and resolution into a single continuous scene.

Bodo drama origins

Bodo drama developed from folk performance traditions such as bagurumba and kherai ritual, and from Assamese theatrical influence in the twentieth century. It often served social reform.

Stagecraft terms

Stagecraft vocabulary includes setting, props, curtain, soliloquy, and aside. In Bodo one-act plays, dialogue carries the action because stage directions are usually minimal.

Precis writing

Precis writing reduces a passage to about one-third of its length while preserving the main argument. Examples, repetition, and minor detail are removed, and no personal comment is added.

Formal letter format

A formal letter follows the standard Indian format: sender's address, date, salutation, subject, body, and closing. The register differs from informal letters in vocabulary and sentence structure.

Devanagari punctuation

Devanagari Bodo traditionally uses the danda for a full stop and the double danda for paragraph end. Modern usage also permits the ordinary full stop in printed texts.