Transparency and onomatopoeic particles in India

[Sanford Steever]

Jess,

I find the materials in the Indic languages
fascinating, and maybe I can provide some input from
the Dravidian side.

Dravidian languages tend also to exhibit 'short' and
'long' forms of expressives. In many such cases, the
long forms are simply reduplications of the short
forms, in which case the short forms would be
privileged in some sense. And there are some
expressive forms that seem not to reduplicate even
though both kinds share roughly the same syllablic
structure CVC(V), again implying the primacy of the
'short' form.

The reduplicated (or compound) expressives have
another subvariety in which the second part of the
compound 'echoes' the first rather than repeating it
'literally'. From the Tamil form koncam 'little' you
get koncam-nancam 'itsy-bitsy'. Far more common are
those whose echo-syllable begins in ki- or kii-, e.g.,
maaTu 'cattle' vs. maaTu-kiiTu 'cattle, shamttle'. I
don't know whether such phenomena would fall under
some concensus understanding of expressives, but they
do appear to shape how Dravidian linguists working on
expressives perceive them.

The only Munda language I have worked on, and that was
20 years ago, is Sora. While I didn't pay much
attention to expressives, there is a phenomenon that
might correlate with what you have observed in
Santali. Sora permits noun incorporation in a variety
of contexts. The incorporated form is generally
shorter than the full, free-standing form and, as best
I can tell, derived from the fuller form, not the
other way around. In what contexts do the Santali
'particle' forms of the expressives occur? If it is in
'incorporating' contexts, including compounds, there
might be an explanation for their behavior lurking
around.

--- Jess Tauber <phonosemantics at EARTHLINK.NET> wrote:

> 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
>




	
		
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