Transparency and onomatopoeic particles in India

[Jess Tauber]

Currently I've been assembling materials from the Munda language Santali,
from the massive dictionary of Bodding.

This language has many thousands of transparent forms, but what is
interesting from a theoretical point of view is that many of the fuller
forms appear to have corresponding "particle" like forms that are much
shorter.

The longer forms are quite formulaic in their phonosemantics, but the
shorter particle-like forms are quite a bit less transparent. Indic within
IE appears to share a great many of these particle-like items, and many
are shared with Dravidian as well. Neither Dravidian nor Indic appear to
have such large scale expressive sets that Santali has, nor do they have
the structural range allowed in forms larger than these particle-like
forms.

We are left with a sort of chicken-and-egg problem here. It appears that
specialists in languages of India believe that the particle-like forms are
primary, and the longer forms are derivative. But is it possible that in
reality it is the other way round?

Tucker Childs has hypothesized that in some African languages ideophones
can be created from regular lexical items. Could we be seeing some sort of
parallel creation in India?

It should be noted that the Munda group that Santali belongs to (Kherwari)
appear more influenced by Indic than do the more southerly languages,
which may be more similar to the ancestral Austroasiatic languages.
Expressives in these southern languages are a bit different. In addition,
I've been collecting data from Khasi, Mon-Khmer, Aslian, and Nicobarese
within Austroasiatic. There is a good deal of variation, but particle-like
terms appear to be relatively rare overall, which might help support my
hypothesis that they are a secondary development in India.

Perhaps the morphosyntactic development of the languages in the area drove
forms to take on more particle-like structure, and many of these could
then have been back-borrowed then into Santali? It would possibly be
instructive to compare other languages with tendencies towards such
particle-like elements (Basque, various Australian languages, etc.) both
in expressives and other word classes and see how they do things. It would
be good to hear from specialists on the list. Thanks.

Jess Tauber
phonosemantics at earthlink.net