Reviews Of Different Books

Page 37

REVIEWS (i.e. Kunux, Kurukh, K.Z.) of India, but is spoken by people living in the Dhanusa district of Southern Nepal. About 10.000 persons in Nepal speak the language (National Census report, Part II, p. 20, Table 8, 1961)." Unfortunately, one does not see much of it in the very meagre illustrations which occur in this highly theoretical paper. From what one can see, though, it indeed looks like a Kulux dialect, cf. Kur. as: Dh. aas that man, Kur. asge (Hahn) dat.: Dh. aasge id., Kus. kukos (Hahn) boy: Dh. kukkos male child, Kur. alla dog: Dh. alla (DED 2377), Kus. mankha, Malt. mangu buffalo: Dh. manxa, Kur. khedd foot: Dh. xeDD (DED 165) id., Kur. Dh. xekk (DED 1683) id., Kur. kira, Malt. kire (DED 1350): Dh. kuRa hunger, Kur. mandar (Ta. maruntu, DED 3863): Dh. mandar medicine. Some of these items (e.g. DED 1350) occur only in Kunux, Malto and Dhangar, i.e. only in Proto-North East Dravidian. Cf. also such correspondences as Dh. enghai my: Kur. enghai, and the agreement in verb-terminations, e.g. -d-an pres.1.m.s., -d-as pres.3.m.s.; and the plural marker --- gutThi of Dh. and -guthi of Kunux. Zvelebil quotes a few Tamil and Telugu examples in his effort to show that Chafe's 'balanced view of language may be applied profitably to Dravidian structure. T. Burrow (pp. 18-25) has discussed the Dravidian words for 'horse': kutirai (DED 1423), probably a South Dravidian item to be derived from kuti 'to jump, leap' (though Burrow does not discuss anywhere the derivational apparatus of this item; should we posit two derivative suffixes, -r and -ai?). DED 3268 Ta.Ma. pari is a verb-noun of pari 'to run, gallop'. DED 3917 Ta. ma, Te. mavu are specialized meanings of 'animal, beast'. Ta. puravi (classical poetry) has no cognates, and kissai seems to be only lexical. Burrow then discusses at some length the Sanskrit ghotaka- 'horse', and concludes that the word is of Prakrit origin (cf. its earliest form in the Jaina texts, viz. ghodaga-), and that it has no connection with any of the above mentioned Dravidian items. While discussing the Te. gurramu, he suggests that this is likely to be a loanword from Indo-Aryan. However, I still believe that a Dravidian etymology of this Telugu word cannot be dismissed, particularly if we proceed to derive it by a series of ordered rules from kutirai, i.e. *kutiray. By rule nu. 1, we would get *kutiray > *kutray on account of accent. The second rule would be a monophthongization rule resulting in *kutra. The third rule would account for the voicing (as in so many Te. words which manifest spontaneous voicing), resulting in *gudra. An assimilation rule would produce *gurra with an alternative *gurra, and finally the addition of the very productive Te. suffix -mu would result in the actual form gurramu. This is of course not so simple and straightforward as an Indo-Aryan borrowing, but a lot more probable, with each step accounted for by a rule. Burrow finally shows that the "primitive" Dravidian word for horse is the one occurring only in Old Tamil and Brahui, viz. Ta. ivuli, Br. hulli. The comparison of the two is not such an obvious equation" as Burrow thinks (p. 24), but is indeed not ruled out. If he is right, two important conclusions may be drawn from his paper: first, it would once again show that we must regard ancient Tamil literary texts as an invaluable mine of linguistic information; second, it would support the North Western 'origins of the Dravidiants, for the horse is not native to South India, and if Dravidian had "originated" in the South we would expect it not have a word for 'horse'. Bright's paper "The Enunciative Vowel" (26-55) sums up very ably one of the more complicated problems of Dravidian phonology. According to his conclusions, from an early period, a rule has operated in most languages which adds a vowel after "most consonants" when a consonant or pause follows. The quality of this vowel is "basically" non-front, non-low, and unrounded. It is usually not basic, but predictable by rule. In my book Comparative Dravidian Phonology (1970, 53, 1.13-1.41) I have characterised the final u as non-morphemic, obligatory "and therefore fully predictable". Bright's approach is, however, generative, while mine was traditionally structuralist. V. I. Subramoniam (137-43) has dealt with rules of nasal assimilation in Malayalam.