30.3689, Review: Kurumba, Betta; Language Documentation; Text/Corpus Linguistics: Coelho (2018)

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Subject: 30.3689, Review: Kurumba, Betta; Language Documentation; Text/Corpus Linguistics: Coelho (2018)

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Date: Tue, 01 Oct 2019 11:03:55
From: Sanford Steever [sbsteever at yahoo.com]
Subject: Annotated Texts in Beṭṭa Kurumba

 
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Book announced at http://linguistlist.org/issues/30/30-1256.html

AUTHOR: Gail  Coelho
TITLE: Annotated Texts in Beṭṭa Kurumba
SERIES TITLE: BSSAL
PUBLISHER: Brill
YEAR: 2018

REVIEWER: Sanford B Steever,  

SUMMARY

Based on the author’s quarter-century study of the language, Annotated Texts
in Beṭṭa Kurumba (ATBK) is the most comprehensive and authoritative treatment
of the Beṭṭa Kurumba (BK) language ever to appear. BK is a non-literary South
Dravidian language spoken in the Waynad-Nilgiris micro-linguistic area of
South India, a mountainous region that includes Ālu-Kuṟumba, Badaga, Irula,
Kota and Toda, among other languages. One defining isogloss of the micro-area
is use of the Dravidian etymon *kāṭu ‘wasteland, wilderness’ (DEDR 1438) to
mean ‘field’, more precisely ‘swidden’, i.e. a field created by burning
wasteland. The Kolami word vēgaṭ- ‘field’ illustrates how this semantic
transition occurred: it a compound of vē- ‘burn, be scorched’ (DEDR 5517) and
kāṭu ‘wasteland’. Interestingly, the Kongunadu dialect of Tamil, which abuts
this micro-area from the east, also uses kāṭu in this meaning, as in the
recent novel Mātorupākan ‘One Part Woman’. 

Contacts with the three surrounding literary languages Kannada, Malayalam and
Tamil have led to a degree of bilingualism in the BK speech community. One
text (p. 462) records that the ancestral god of a certain BK phratry speaks
Malayalam! In another (pp. 251-55), the protagonist sings songs in Kannada.
Former administrative languages such as Urdu and English have also left their
imprint on the BK lexicon.

With approximately 32,000 speakers spread over three states, BK does not
appear endangered in the near term. However, maintenance of the various
non-official languages is a low priority of state administrations, so BK
remains subject to external pressures that may alter the language and its use.
Coelho’s informants, for example, live in a hamlet within the Theppakkadu
National Park, where some of their traditional hunting-gathering economic
activities have been curtailed, and replaced by new ones promoted by the
government.

ATBK is, to my knowledge, the only collection of South Dravidian texts to
appear with interlinearized glossing. Reading texts in Ālu Kuṟumba, Kota and
Toda generally requires one to skip back and forth between the originals and
their translations, attempt to match up the original words with their
translation, and guess at their morphological and syntactic analysis.

The Introduction (Chapter 1) contains an overview of BK, including a
grammatical sketch and information about the physical, historical and social
context. The sketch will enable readers to interpret the glossed sentences in
the various texts. Phonology consists of an inventory of phonemes, certain
phonotactic constraints and remarks on syllable and word structure. BK
morphology is agglutinating and exclusively suffixal. A primary distinction is
made between nouns and verbs; adjectives constitute a minor category. BK also
has a set of postclitic particles, which generally deal with discourse and
pragmatic phenomena.

Nouns are marked for case: nominative (unmarked), accusative, genitive,
dative, comitative and locative. The cases are distributed differently between
human and non-human nouns, e.g., while non-human locatives simply take the
case marker, human locatives require a postpositional phrase, often involving
insertion of a human body part to which the locative case marker is then
suffixed, e.g. pəṇəkkən benntl nambikki ‘trust in a woman’ [woman body-LOC
trust] (p. 275). BK preserves a Proto-Dravidian distinction in the first
person plural between exclusive naŋgǝ ‘we (not you)’ and inclusive yaŋgǝ ‘we
(and you)’ forms, but has lost gender oppositions in all its pro-forms. This
latter development has implications about how speakers keep track of referents
in a discourse.

The word-formation rule for verbs is complex, with as many as 11 internal
morpheme boundaries (p. 25), making the language look polysynthetic. It may be
simplified by reanalyzing the theme formatives (TF) as automatic adjustments
to following derivational (DS) or inflectional suffixes (IS). In effect, the
TFs create stems to which a DS or IS can be suffixed. TFs lack distinctive
meaning, being the residue of earlier morphology. For example, the
transitional verb form kel-t-əŋa ‘upon reading’ is glossed as read-PST-TRNL
with three morphemes and two morpheme boundaries, but there is no non-past
alternative *kel-p-əŋa to contrast with, so the –t- here is not a full-fledged
morpheme with past tense meaning. 

Some of this complexity arises from the fact that certain verb forms are
contractions of earlier compound verb constructions, having undergone
univerbation, so that an old auxiliary verbs are now bound morphemes (p. 34).
Most are related to independent verbs. Only the morpheme –ūr- ‘to halve’ has
no independent use; however, it is likely cognate with Kota ūry- ‘throw’,
which serves as an intensive auxiliary verb in that language, e.g., en āḷ idn
tavarčṯ ūrykō ‘my husband killed it off’ [I-GEN husband it-ACC kill-CNJ
throw-PST-3] (Emeneau 1944-46, Text 21.127).

As elsewhere in Dravidian, BK distinguishes between finite and nonfinite verbs
(see Steever 1988), with finite verbs restricted to certain positions, e.g.
the final verb in a sentence or before the quotative verb ān- ‘say’. BK has
elaborated its set of nonfinite forms to convey a variety of aspectual and
temporal uses; it has at least ten (pp. 35-7). Nonfinite forms are used in
forming coordinate, subordinate and cosubordinate (verb-chaining) structures.

The typical finite form (apart from hortative and imperative forms) consists
of a verb base, tense marker and subject-verb agreement (SVA) marker, with a
typical nominative-accusative system of alignment. Interestingly, BK has two
sets of SVA markers. Set I contrasts only singular –ǝdǝ versus plural –ǝgǝ.
Set II, with two subsets, makes further distinctions. Set IIa has /-i/ for 1S,
2S, /-a/ for 3S and /-o/ for plural; Set IIb /-iya/ for 1S, /-i/ for 2S, /-a/
for 3S and /-iyo/ for plural. Set I appears when the action is backgrounded,
while Set II is used to mark ‘heated action’ (p. 86). Though Dravidian dative
subjects do not usually trigger SVA, Coelho shows that in some BK
dative-subject constructions, /-i/ marks agreement with a dative subject.

Coelho draws attention to the following paradigm: navǝ ǝḍtǝdǝ ili ‘I did not
take it’ [I take-PST-S be.NEG.1S], naŋgǝ ǝḍtǝgǝ ilo [we take-PST-PL
be.NEG.PL], navǝ ǝḍpǝdǝ ili ‘I do not take it’ [I take-NPST-S be.NEG.1S],
naŋgǝ ǝḍpǝgǝ ilo [we take-NPST-PL be.NEG.PL]. These compound verb
constructions are serial verbs (in the sense of Steever 1988): the preceding
main verb, which may occur independently as a finite verb, shows number
agreement with the following finite auxiliary. Some similarities may be drawn
with Malayalam past and present negative compound verbs, which also consist of
two forms each of which is independently finite. The BK and Malayalam forms
could be independent innovations or, perhaps, restructured retentions of an
earlier negative serial verb formation. The gradual loss of
person-number-gender marking of the proto-serial verb leads to the BK
paradigms, its complete loss to the Malayalam.

ATBK also sheds light on a set of formulaic compounds consisting of two finite
verb forms, e.g. nəyra barəy ‘come look’ [see-IMP come-IMP-S]. The second verb
in these formulas is restricted to ‘come’ or ‘go’. Other South Dravidian
languages have similar formulas, e.g. Kota tinkōm vām ‘let’s eat’ [eat-HORT
come-IMP], but Coelho is the first to draw attention to this pattern in the
modern South Dravidian (SDr) languages.

While typical of a SDr language, BK has a number of unusual features
morphosyntactic features. It lacks echo-compound formation with ki- ~ gi-,
e.g. Tamil oṭampu kiṭampu ‘body and the like’, Kannada prīti gīti ‘love and
such’, Kota kūv gīv ‘all sorts of food’, Ālu Kuṟumba bēci gīci ‘cooking and
such preparations’. It also lacks obvious, widespread reflexes of the
coordinating clitics *=ō ‘any, or, whether’ and *=um ‘all, and’, which
function as quantifiers and conjunctions. This throws some of the burden of
conjunction onto the processes of simple juxtaposition and compounding.

The texts include folktales and dialogues, but the two genres are not entirely
distinct. On the one hand, the telling of BK folktales requires audience
participation in the form of backchanneling; as Coelho notes (p. 59),
“Storytelling is generally a dialogic event… ” On the other, the interlocutor
in the dialogues provides minimal input, encouraging the informant to continue
at length. All the texts are preceded by their full English translations.

The section on folktales (Chapters 2-6) includes a Prelude and four tales:
Turban Maker (289+ sentences); Fish Prince (80+ sentences); Offended Daughter
(130+ sentences); and Prince who Subdivided Himself (99+ sentences). The
section on dialogues (Chapters 7-10) include a Prelude (311-64); Aspects of
Community Life (325+ sentences); Legends about Deities (298+ sentences); and
Legends about Ancestors (409+ sentences). Included in both the discussion and
the texts of the dialogues is information about kinship, e.g. what constitutes
marriage, legitimate and otherwise. This will help readers contextualize the
motif of incestuous marriage in ‘Offended Daughter’ and ‘Prince who Subdivided
Himself’.

The content of these tales and dialogues abound in non-BK themes, e.g. they
contain references to princes and princesses, even though BK society has
nothing comparable to royalty or kingship. This is not surprising: many
societies, having transitioned to democracies, persist in telling stories
about royals and royalty. Another example of assimilating external themes and
culture is a folktale (p. 301) that includes a motif of writing down a history
of events, even though BK is not itself a written language. (Some speakers may
have a degree of literacy in such languages as Tamil.)

Coelho shows how BK storytellers weave this external content into a
distinctive BK narrative style. One narrative device is the alternation
between the two sets of SVA markers noted above. Another is apocope (pp.
61-63): in speech, all words except the last in an extended phrase lose their
final vowels (most words are vowel-final in citation form). The scope of
apocope often coincides with grammatical units such as sentences or with
narrative periods. Further instances of BK narrative style are discussed
below.

The book is rounded out by a Glossary of BK words (613-38), References and an
Index.

There are very few printing errors in this book; most are self-correcting.
However, the transposition of ‘former’ and ‘latter’ on page 86 gives the
impression that perfective aspect is used for backgrounding and imperfective
aspect for foregrounding, when the opposite is meant. Apocope is absent from
the Index. The phrase ‘light-verb jingle’ for ‘light-verb jungle’ in the
References (p. 639) gave me a chuckle.

EVALUATION

Not only does ATBK admirably succeed in its primary goal (p. 78) of providing
material for grammatical, particularly syntactic analysis, it also offers new
material for comparative linguists, anthropologists, sociologists and
folklorists.

One immediate, important result is that comparison of BK texts and grammar
with those from Ālu Kuṟumba (Kapp 1982), reveals that BK and Ālu Kuṟumba are
two distinct languages, not dialects of one. 

A comparative linguist might provide the DEDR numbers for most of the entries
in the Glossary. The Glossary will also furnish material for a dictionary of
the Nilgiris micro-area lexicon, long a desideratum. For example, BK kisəl ‘be
able’ is one of a very few cognates of the Old Tamil auxiliary kil- ‘be able’,
which became the present tense marker in Modern Tamil.

A specialist in folklore will be able to identify the motifs used in the
various texts. For example, ‘Turban Maker’ contains the motif ‘love through
the sight of a hair of unknown woman’ which prompts the search for that woman
(Thompson 1946:498). It is adapted into different South Dravidian oral
literatures in different ways: in a folktale in Kota (Emeneau 1944-46) and Ālu
Kuṟumba (Kapp: 1982:257) the hair is found inside a fish caught in a stream,
in the BK folktale it is found woven into the fabric of a turban cloth. The
absence of echo formation means that BK is unlikely to borrow a motif based on
this grammatical process; Kota does have such a grammatical process and uses
it as a motif (Emeneau 1944-46, Story 19).  

The following are some grammatical observations and suggestions I have gleaned
from my reading of the texts; they do not exhaust the potential riches to be
found there. Further, they could not be imagined without the rich collection
of texts in ATBK. Coehlo has made a major contribution to Dravidian
linguistics simply by enabling scholars to make them (thanks, again, to those
interlinearized texts).

The texts reveal that marking in BK may mark honorification, e.g. igə ēn māḍṇō
nārāyən? What did he, (the god) Narayan, do?’ [they-PL what do-PRF-PL
Narayan]. BK also has collective plurals, e.g., gəṇḍāla ubbaru [husband
both.HUM] means ‘husband and wife’, not ‘two husbands’; pəṇḍə ərru āḷu [wife
two person] means ‘husband and wife’, not ‘two wives’; and ammən-rər-ka
[father-PL-DAT] means ‘to the father’s people, household’, not ‘to the
fathers’. 

As typical of Dravidian, polarity is a verbal category. The grammar offers
speakers two ways expressing negation, through a single verb, e.g. dārə banrlo
‘no-one came’ [who come-PST-NEG-PL], or a compound verb, e.g. kə̄ṭəgə ilo
‘(they) did not ask’ [ask-PST-PL be.NEG-PL]. A closer study of the texts may
reveal whether these are free variants or contextually conditioned. The texts
appear to contain other auxiliary compound verbs, such as a prospective future
tense, e.g. toḍḷa pə̄səŋ ‘upon going to touch’ [touch-INF go-TRNL] (p. 514). 

No reader of BK texts can fail to notice how frequently expressions may be
repeated, sometimes by simple reduplication but other times with an
elaboration of the base of the repeated expression. Some instances are
attributed to false starts (and are noted as such in the texts), but these
patterns are too pervasive not to be systematic. Further research is needed to
determine whether such repetition is due to grammar, narrative style or both.
The varieties of repetition include the following.

BK has a Tail-To-Head device: the final verb of one sentence is repeated at
the beginning of the next, usually in a nonfinite form. This helps to ensure
coherence between parts of the narrative, e.g., gǝṇḍāḷǝ ḏressǝ ōṭǝya bǝyrnu
uṭṭǝdǝ. uṭṭaṭu idǝ pǝ̄sǝdǝ ‘Getting men’s clothing, she wore them.
Wearing/having worn (them), she went’ [man-GEN clothing all get-ACP wear-PST-S
wear-CMP go-PST-S] (p. 188). In ‘Fish Prince’ it occurs 20 times in 80
sentences; in ‘Prince Who Subdivided Himself’, it occurs 41 times in 99
sentences. This device appears in folktales and dialogues. It occurs
throughout the nonliterary languages from Kota to Kuvi to Kurux, but is rare
in written texts of the literary languages. Nonetheless, it may be a source of
the poetic device known in Tamil as antāti ‘end-beginning’, where that last
word of one stanza is repeated at the onset of the next.

Simple reduplication may signal such notions as intensity, e.g. təbbə təbbə
‘very close’ from təbbə ‘nearby’ or quantification dārə dārə ‘whoever, who
all’ from dārə ‘who’. In a few cases, it signals addition, e.g. ə̄ḷu ə̄ḷu
pānāku moḷi ‘seven seven, i.e. fourteen, cubits’ [seven seven fourteen cubit]
(p. 162). Doubling of verb roots, one in finite one in non-finite form,
signals emphasis, e.g. naḍidənu naḍida ‘he did walk’ [walk-ACP walk-PST-3S].
Parallels abound in other languages, e.g. Kota arčak arčvē ‘I really did know’
[know-CNJ know-PST-1S] (Text 11.53).

Examples of repeated and elaborated NPs are startling in the Dravidian
context. Consider the following example (p. 62): [[vanrǝ mutki kīrl], [kaḷi
oḍkǝ mutki kīrl], [pǝynigivǝ mutki kīrl] idenu] ‘living in an old woman’s
house, in an old sweeper woman’s house, in the house of an old working woman’
[one old.woman house-LOC floor sweep-RC old.woman house-LOC work.do-RC
old.woman house-LOC live-ACP]. Here three NPs with the same head noun (and,
presumably, referent) precede the clause-final verb: the first consists of a
numeral + N; the second two, a relative clause and head N. 

Another example from page 64: [[alli tana] [tan māmǝnrǝ kīrl tana] idǝnaḍdǝ]
‘she stayed there itself, (at) her father-in-law’s house itself’ [there EMP
self-GEN father.in.law.GEN house-LOC stay-PST.PRF-S]. The first NP has a
locative adverb and emphatic particle, the second two genitives preceding a
locative case-marked noun and emphatic particle. In many cases, the first NP
is represented by a bare noun or a numeral and bare noun, while the second NP
contains other modifiers, such as demonstratives, adjectives and relative
clauses. The general progression (there are exceptions) is from general to
specific. Such doubling appears occasionally in Kota, e.g.  nin pādtn ām nimd
kunǰ nimn kubiṭr vadēmē ‘we, your children, keep worshipping you, your feet’
[you-GEN foot-ACC we-NOM you-GEN child you-ACC worship-CNJ come-PRS-1PEX]. It
is not, however, nearly as exuberant or widespread as in BK. In the 370
sentences of the first two texts in ATBK, there are at least 106 instances of
repeated and expanded NPs. At first glance, BK NPs tend not to overburden
their head nouns with long strings of modifiers, distributing them instead
over several NPs with the same head. This is likely a stylistic tendency, not
a grammatical rule.

The rhetorical device of chiasmus often draws attention to a focal point in a
narrative. For example, on page 229 … kūṯnu attōḍḍə. atti kūṯnaḍədə ‘sitting
she cried. Crying, she sat’ [sit-ACP cry-PST-PROG-S cry-STAT sit-STAT-S]
signals an emotional turning point in the story. The third- and second-to-last
sentences of the same story (p. 236) have one chiastic structure embedded in
another, to nail the landing, so to speak, and end the story: [[porāmaynu ōṭa
… [batkisəgə ubəru. ubəru batkisəŋa] ōṭəya āməŋa poṭṭkissə] … nala batkisəgə]
‘all (the others), being jealous, the two of them prospered. The two of them
prospering, while all the others were jealous … they prospered nicely’
[jealousy.be-ACP all prosper-PST-PL both both prosper-TRNL all=DISTR they-DAT
jealously nicely prosper-PST-PL]. As a poetic device chiasmus is much used in
Toda song language (Emeneau 1971), but in BK texts it may serve a grammatical
function. The doubling and chiasmus of a pair of nouns gives rise to a
reciprocal construction, e.g. pəṇḍə gəṇḍāḷə gəṇḍāḷə pəṇḍə samədāni mayrnu
‘husband and wife agreeing with each other’ [wife husband husband wife
acceptance do-ACP] (pp 167-68).

A brief, non-BK aside. In ‘Offended Daughter’ (pp. 251-255), the heroine sits
on a tree branch and sings, nān(u) barula ‘I will not come’ in response to
entreaties to come down. The song is supposed to be in Kannada. While nān(u)
is clearly the Kannada first person singular pronoun, I suspect that barula is
a BK rendition of the older Kannada baral olle ‘I do not want to come, will
not come’ [come-INF like-NEG-1S] rather than baral-illa ‘I did/do not come’
[come-INF be-NEG-NPST].

The texts in ATBK are only a part of those that Coelho has collected over the
past quarter century. Dravidian scholars will applaud her admirable
achievement and look forward to the future publication of additional texts and
grammatical analysis of this fascinating, understudied language. ATBK is the
foundational study on which all subsequent study of BK will stand.

DISCLOSURE

I served on the author’s dissertation committee at the University of Texas.

ABBREVIATIONS

ACP – accompanying event; CLF – classifier; CMP – completed event; CNJ
–conjunctive form; DAT – dative case; DEDR – A Dravidian etymological
dictionary,2nd edition; DISTR – distributive; DS – derivative suffix; GEN
–genitive case; HORT – hortative; HUM –human; IMP – imperative; INF –
infinitive IS – inflectional suffix; LOC – locative; NEG – negative; NPST –
nonpast; PRF – perfect; PROG – progressive; PST – past ;  STAT – stative; TF-
theme formative; TRNL – transitional event.

REFERENCES

Burrow, Thomas and Murray Emeneau. 1984. A Dravidian etymological dictionary,
2nd edition. Oxford: Clarendon Press.

Emeneau, Murray B. 1944-1946. Kota texts (Cols. 1-4), University of California
Publications in Linguistics 2. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Emeneau, Murray B. 1971. Toda songs. Oxford: Clarendon Press.

Kapp, Dieter B. 1982. Ālu-Kuṟumbaru Nāyan: Die Sprache der Ālu-Kuṟumbas
(Beiträge zur Kenntnis südasiatischer Sprachen und Literaturen 7). Wiesbaden:
Otto Harrassowtiz.

Murukan, Perumal. 2012. Mātorupākan. Kalachuvadu Publications.

Steever, Sanford. 1988. The Serial Verb Formation in the Dravidian Languages.
Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass.

Thompson, Stith. 1946. The Foktale. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston.


ABOUT THE REVIEWER

Sanford Steever is an independent scholar, specializing in the study of the
Dravidian language family. His areas of interest include syntax, historical
linguistics and the grammar of Tamil.





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