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Musings on Tamil-Malayalam | ||
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| Kannan Bilingual Diglot Newbie United Kingdom Joined 5961 days ago 13 posts - 25 votes Speaks: English*, Malayalam* Studies: Tamil | Message 1 of 1 14 May 2011 at 11:18pm | IP Logged |
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This is an idea I had after reading a couple of articles. I’m aware that the logic is
far from watertight (I’m not a linguist, this is just a bit of fun), but please give it some consideration. 1. S.V. Shanmugam, "Dental and Alveolar Nasals in Dravidian", Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, 35 (1), 1972, PP.74- 84. (JSTOR link here if you have access) 2. A. Govindankutty Menon, "Some Observations on the Sub-Group Tamil-Malayalam: Differential Realizations of the Cluster *ṉt", Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, 53 (1), 1990, PP.87-99. (link here) Now, I think I can pinpoint the emergence of a distinct West Coast dialect or Proto- Malayalam. It's mostly based on the past tense morph. The basic past tense morph was “t”, and for certain consonant stems it became “(n + t)", e.g. vantēṉ "I came" (both Ta. and Old Ma.). Govindankutty Menon's article discusses the difference between Tamil and Malayalam forms when a stem ending in an alveolar "l" (but it's traditionally classified as dental due to Sanskrit influence) encounters this morph. The main example he discusses is that of "kol" (to kill): kol + (n + t) + ēṉ (first person ending). In Tamil, this results in the dental "n + t" being straightforwardly assimilated to the alveolar "l" by becoming alveolar "ṉt”, so that “I killed” is “koṉtēṉ” (by the Middle Tamil period, this had become “koṉrēṉ” due to the loss of the alveolar plosive). A similar situation occurs with the stem “koḷ” (the “ḷ” here is a retroflex lateral approximant) - koḷ +n + t + ēṉ becomes koṇṭēṉ, with the nasal and the plosive assimilating to the “l” and becoming retroflex themselves. But what happens in Malayalam? “Koḷ” is exactly the same – the retroflexes assimilate, giving Old Ma. koṇṭēṉ, Mod. Ma. koṇṭu (Mod. Ma. no longer conjugates verbs for person). However, this does not apply to “kol” (with the alveolar “l”) – the dental consonants “n + t” stay the same instead of assimilating, giving Old Ma. kontēṉ (Mod. Ma. konnu). To make sense of this, it is necessary to consider what exactly happens to the “l” in the stem. Where did the idea of the “l” being assimilated into the “n” come from? The original (Proto-Tamil-Malayalam) form cannot have been “*kolntēṉ”, as that would be pretty much impossible to pronounce and would not fit into Dravidian phonology at all, so there must have been an intervening vowel. I believe this vowel to have been “i” because of the existence of certain alternative past tense forms that end in “i”, such as “colliṉēṉ” (Ta. and pre-Mod. Ma., Mod. Ma “colli”) from stem “col” + past tense + 1st person. Now, “colli” is the dominant form in Mod. Ma, but you find “connēṉ” (Old Ma. “contēṉ) etc. as archaic/ poetic alternatives, and in Tamil both “collinēṉ” and “coṉr ēṉ” (Old Ta. coṉt ēṉ). However, the reverse does not occur – “*kolliṉēṉ” never existed as an alternative past tense of “kol” in either language. Thus, using “iṉ” as a past tense morph must have been an innovation that became semi-popular in the proto-language but didn’t become popular enough to be applied consistently. This suggests that the “in” had some previous association with the past tense – maybe it was part of the morph discussed earlier. I’m thinking of forms like “col” + “in” + “t” + “ēṉ”, i.e. “*collintēṉ” (the gemination of the “l” is just something that happens in this sort of environment). Now, let’s say that some people start dropping the “t”, so that it becomes “colliṉēṉ” – the n becomes alveolar here because of a rule stated by Shanmugam, that alveolar ṉ was the intervocalic allophone of dental n (still the case in Mod. Ma.). Now imagine that some other speakers (who haven’t dropped the “t” for the most part) start being lazy with that vowel “i”, so that they start running the “ll” into the “n”. This leaves them two choices for pronunciation (remember “*colntēṉ” isn’t a valid option): to leave the n alone, or assimilate it to the ll that they’re dropping. But if they assimilate the ll to the n, they’ll also have to assimilate the t that immediately follows to the n, because *ṉt is not valid (as Shanmugam says, it’s always the dental n that occurs before t), and thus make it ṉt. It seems that both East and West Coasters chose to assimilate for the retroflexes (e.g. koḷ -> koṇṭēṉ), but the latter demurred when it came to the alveolar lateral approximant [l]. This must be the point where the dialects split, as the elision of the ll would have happened when there was still a common language, but one way of doing it became overwhelmingly popular in the West and the other in the East. Does that make any sense at all? Edited by Kannan on 15 May 2011 at 12:40am 3 persons have voted this message useful |
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