How to honor someone in Maithili UDAYA NARAYANA SINGH Introduction In this paper I wish to show how one of the politeness strategies that Maithili has could be correlated with a number of sociocultural variables such as kinship, age, sex, caste, socioeconomic status, setting, attitude, mood, and educational level. Toward the end of this paper, an attempt will also be made to find out if these sociocultural variables form a politeness hierarchy.1 Maithili is an eastern Indo-Aryan language spoken in North Bihar and South Nepal by a large chunk of the population. The strategy in Maithili that I am referring to is positive in nature. It has to do with the selection of pronominal levels in both second and third person. It also includes the verb agreement marking in Maithili that goes with each of these levels. As we will soon see, verb agreement plays an important role in pronominal-level selection because pronouns belonging to different levels are, in some cases, identical in shape. In such cases, verb marking alone shows the difference. It is for this reason that I call this strategy pronominal/verbal-level selection (henceforth, P/V-level selection). Texts My observations in the following sections are based on a detailed analysis of 16 texts in Maithili including 15 plays and a novel published between 1955 and 1975, although some were actually written as early as in 1945.2 What is remarkable is that the grammar of P/V-level selection has remained more or less the same all these years despite the changes that have taken place in the life style and social pattern of the Maithils. The texts mentioned above were created by authors who represented a cross-section of population, including people belonging to different geographical background (and they included writers from the Terai of Nepal too), caste, and generation of litterateurs. These works depicted people belonging to different walks of life. 0165-2516/89/0075-0087 $2.00 Mouton de Gruyter, Berlin Int'l. J. Soc. Lang. (1989), pp. 87-107
88 U. N. Singh In all, I looked into 11 one-act plays of Amar (1967), Rajkamal Chowdhury (1967), Sudhanshu Shekhar Chowdhury (1967), Govinda Jha (1967), Harimohan Jha (1967), Ramdeva Jha (1967), Kiran (1967), Kisun (1967), Kumar Gangananda Singh (1967), P. N. Singh (1968), and Brajakishor Verma (1967). The full-length plays analyzed were by Dinanath Jha (1967), Gunanath Jha (1966), Malangiya (1972), and Ishanath Jha (1955). Yatri's (1965) Paaro was the only novel that was analyzed. Verb agreement in Maithili Maithili pronouns In this section we will be looking into the problem of verb agreement in Maithili (see U. N .. Singh 1979, 1980a, 1980b). The pronominal pattern in Maithili is as follows: 3 (1) First person: ham Second person: apnE (honorific I) ahaan ton (neutral; nonhonorific I; nonhonorific II) (honorific and nonhonorific) (honorific II) Third person : 0 Notice that in the second person to" and the third person o, different pro- nominal levels are combined. This means that there are three to" and two o pro-forms. That these levels exist will be evident if we look