In Bodding's Santali dictionary one finds the traditional Indic-style
orthographic convention of a set of plain and aspirated stops, which
some more recent work does not recognize.

For some months I've been attempting to figure out the internal
structure of the expressive/ideophone system using the dictionary as
resource. In quite a few cases Bodding explicitly includes in glosses
that such and such an aspirated form is stronger or more forceful than
the corresponding plain one. In terms of raw sound symbolism, on the
other hand, the aspirates often have a different overall sense than
the plain ones.

For example- the set in jh- includes many forms defined as having
multiple hanging parts (such as hair, fruits, and such) while such a
sense is largely lacking in j- terms. Terms in ph- involve much more
wholesale release of air than terms in p-, and terms in kh- involve
high friction, scraping as opposed to those in k- (while the latter
often encode the idea of a stiff linear element (such as a neck of an
animate being) straining from being lifted or otherwise deflected
(people interested in larger areal/genetic issues should note that in
SEAsia this is often encoded by velar nasal ng-).

In fact, many of the plain terms seem to refer to more linear or
piecemeal effects while the aspirates go with more global ones, though
this is often obscured by augmentative/diminutive shifting (one sees
similar obfuscation of the underlying system in Korean expressives).

It may be that such a distinction might have been borrowed from Indic-
I am too new at this to really be sure. However a good many of the
forms in Santali involved in the expressive system are noted as having
Indic equivalents in the Bodding dictionary- it may well be that the
Santals took these and expanded mightily upon them- Santali appears to
have one of the largest such systems of expressive forms in the world.

At least one Dravidian language utilizes contrasts for its expressives
that are not represented in the orthography of the stops. This leads
me to suspect that a four-way system might have some universality in
the region.

Bodding also notes that the dental terms freely alternate with
interdental ones, which is interesting- could the 'dental' set, for
expressive terms, have been the result of a conflation? The mixed
sound symbolism there might imply something of the sort. Indeed, there
are a good number of sets of expressives that make me suspect a
somewhat larger, but surfacially underspecified, underlying phonology
for the expressive system.

I wonder whether this also might be true for the other Munda languages
at least for their expressive forms.

Jess Tauber
phonosemantics@...