The Frog That Swallowed the Sun: A Folktale Text in Jinghpaw

This paper presents an interlinear-glossed text in Jinghpaw, a Tibeto-Burman language spoken in northern Myanmar and adjacent areas of China and India. The text is based on one of over 2,750 narrative texts collected through collaborative fieldwork in northern Myanmar conducted by the author and collaborators from the Jinghpaw community. The text recounts a narrative about the origin of solar eclipses, which are believed to occur when a frog swallows the sun. In the story, a magical plant capable of reviving the dead leads a boy on a journey to the sky. When the plant is stolen, the boy climbs a ladder toward the sun, but the frog he carries swallows it in fear, plunging the world into darkness. The people then make loud noises to frighten the frog into releasing the sun, a practice underlying the Jinghpaw custom during solar eclipses.