Reviews Of Different Books

Author(s): J W De Jong
Publisher: J W De Jong

Page 32

328 REVIEWS differences. The Nancilnad dialect of V. I. Subramoniam and the considerable number of dies of M. Shanmugam Pillai show the application of modern linguistic principles to the study of Tamil dialects. Last, but not the least, is the detailed study of K. Zvelebil. At present a number of young scholars are actively engaged in this endeavour around the centres in Tamilnadu and Kerala. The present work is part of the outcome of the project 'The Linguistic Survey of Tamilnadu' undertaken by the Centre of Advanced Study in Linguistics of the Annamalai University. It seeks to present a descriptive account of the linguistic structure of the Tirunelveli Tamil dialect spoken in the north-western part of Tamilnadu. This work, based on the author's field work, gives for the first time a full account of the phonology, morphology and vocabulary of this dialect. It is not necessary to deal in detail with the obvious positive contributions of this study. The discussion will be limited to a few conflicting cases where disagreement is unavoidable. Since the book misses an introduction and a highly desirable map, most of the readers are left in the dark regarding the exact location where this dialect is spoken, the number of speakers, the caste or castes to which the informants belong and the relationship of this dialect to the other dialects of Tamil. What we know at all about the informants is that they are all people belonging to the older generation of sedentry areas". The author has given a detailed description of the phonemics. No contrast is found between the voiced and the voiceless plosives even though a number of Sanskrit loan words are listed in the vocabulary. The phonemes lp, t,c,t,k/ have equal number of allophones such as voiced, long voiceless, voiceless and half-long voiceless. In order to maintain this artificial regularity, such phones as 0,8, s and h are treated as separate phonemes even though the author does not even offer a single minimal pair to justify his analysis. The artificiality is also evident from the absence of the word /veya/ 'boy' in the vocabulary which gives all the other words in phonemic writing. The description is over simplified when the author just mentions the well-known descriptions, such as /o/ as a bilabial voiceless fricative, /8/ as an interdental voiced fricative and /s/ as a palatal voiceless fricative. One would like to know rather the distribution of these phones than their description. While -pp-, -tt-, C-, -kk- and -ttare treated as long consonants, -mm-,-nn-, -nn-, -Il-, -!!-, -yy- and -vv- are described as geminated consonants. The suprasegmental features of Modern Tamil have been briefly dealt with in one of the articles of Rudin. Until now this remains an unfilled gap in any description of Tamil. The author has also relegated this task to a future publication. The sandhi rules and the rest of morphology have to be well coordinated in order to avoid confusion and redundancy. A case in point are the sandhi rules five and ten. According to five, for example, ali+nt +u would become alincu 'having perished' and according to ten, for example, kan+t+u would become kantu 'having seen'. Because of the sandhi rule five, the author does not mention a separate allomorph -nc- for the past tense. But contradiction arises when he posits an allomorph-t-in spite of the sandhi rule ten to account for instances like kantu. Lack of coordination is again visible in the sandhi rule C.2 which deals with the fricativisation of stops after relative participles. The author has taken // and /h/ as separate phonemes, although their occurrences are perfectly predicted by this rule, e.g., vanta +peya becomes vanta veya 'fellow who came' and vanta + kale becomes vanta hale 'bull which came'. This sandhi rule does not justify the author's decision to interpret and has separate phonemes. The most interesting part of the description is morphemics. Under this heading the author has set up six types of "morphemic words", namely verbs, nouns, adverbs, adjectives, postpositions and indeclinables. Word classification is still an unsolved problem in Tamil. The author defines five types of "words" but the definition for noun is missing. The definition of word types are based on different criteria. In the case of verbs, nouns(?) and indeclinables it is the capacity to take a particular suffix versus incapacity; in the case of adverbs, adjectives and postpositions the syntactic relationship forms the criterion. It goes without saying that these two yard-sticks are not mutually exclusive. For example, the relative participle vanta 'who came' is described under "verbs" because it takes a tense suffix -nt-, whereas on the basis of its syntactic relationship it comes under adjectives since it is a co-occurrent of a noun. Another extreme case