--- In mundarica@yahoogroups.com, "yahganlang" <phonosemantics@...>
wrote:

> Does anyone here have any information about borrowings between
> Dravidian (specifically more northerly languages) and Munda?


See "Dravidian Influence on Munda.pdf", a paper by Gregory Anderson I
have uploaded in the group's Files section.

Regards,
Francesco Brighenti

Does anyone here have any information about borrowings between
Dravidian (specifically more northerly languages) and Munda?

Thanks.
Jess Tauber
phonosemantics@...

For the past few weeks I've been again going over Bodding's Santali
materials, and want to know whether there is any interest in talking
here about expressive formations. Quite a few are onomatopoeias, many
more than one sees listed in dictionaries of languages from other
families. Many of the non-onomatopoeic expressives are very similiar
to forms from Indic.

But if folks want to talk about other aspects of Munda languages,
that's fine too, so long as topics are based on some level of reality.

Jess Tauber
phonosemantics@...

Posting taken from LINGUIST List
http://linguistlist.org/issues/19/19-2190.html#2



Full Title: North East Indian Linguistics Society
Short Title: NEILS

Date: 13-Jan-2009 - 17-Jan-2009
Location: Shillong, Meghalaya, India
Contact Person: Stephen Morey
Meeting Email: s.morey@...
Web Site: http://www.latrobe.edu.au/rclt/Neils/Neils.htm

Linguistic Field(s): General Linguistics

Call Deadline: 15-Sep-2008

Meeting Description:

The Fourth Meeting of the North East Indian Linguistics Society
(NEILS) will be
held at North-Eastern Hill University (NEHU) Shillong, Meghalaya,
India from
13-17 January 2009. There will be a two day workshop followed by three day
conference meeting.

Papers which treat any aspect of North East Indian languages and
linguistics are
invited for submission. We particularly welcome papers which make use
of primary
descriptive data, and/or which approach their topic from a descriptive,
functional, and/or typological perspective.

Abstracts are sought by 15th September 2008, and should be sent to
s.morey@...

Call for Papers

We are pleased to announce the Fourth International Meeting of the
North East
Indian Linguistics Society (NEILS), to be held January 13-17, 2009 at the
North-Eastern Hill University (NEHU), Shillong, Meghalaya, Assam, India.

As last year, NEILS 2009 will include paper presentations over three days,
preceded by an optional two-day programme of workshops, as well as an
optional
cultural excursion. Details and a provisional schedule will be
available shortly
on the NEILS website: http://www.latrobe.edu.au/rclt/Neils/Neils.htm.

Scholars wishing to present a paper at NEILS 2009 should send an
abstract of no
more than 500 words (exclusive of data, figures/tables and references,
if any)
via email on .pdf (preferred), .doc or .txt attachment, or as inline
text by
September 15, 2008 to s.morey@..., or via post to NEILS,
Department
of Linguistics, Gauhati University, Guwahati, Assam 781041, India.

Paper presentations will be limited to thirty minutes, inclusive of
question
time. Papers which treat any aspect of North East Indian languages and
linguistics are invited for submission, however we particularly
welcome papers
which make use of primary descriptive data, and/or which approach
their topic
from a descriptive, functional, and/or typological perspective. Paper
whose sole
or primary aim addresses purely formal and/or theoretical concerns are not
likely to be accepted for presentation. If you do not wish to submit
an abstract
at this time, but would like to consider attending without presenting
a paper,
please notify the organizers to ensure that you continue to receive email
communications relating to NEILS 2009 organization. The organizational
fee of
Rs. 2000 (international non-student) Rs. 1000 (international student/local
non-student) Rs. 200 (local student) remains unchanged from last year,
and may
be paid on arrival.

Any questions may be directed to the email address listed above, or to
m.post@.... We look forward to a productive and enjoyable
meeting,
and especially, to seeing you there.

With our warmest regards,

NEILS 4 Organizing committee

North East Indian Linguistics Society:
Dr. Jyotiprakash Tamuli (Co-Chair)
Dr. Stephen Morey (Co-Chair)
Mark Post (Secretary) http://www.latrobe.edu.au/rclt/Neils/Neils.htm

Proto-Dravidian had a number of formative or primary derivational
suffixes,  some of which are reconstructed as having tense value
according to Krishnamurti(1)- past nt, t, tt, ntt; nonpast mp, p, pp,
mpp and Nk, k, kk, Nkk (there may be a possible nc, c, cc, ncc unless
all are from morphophonological shift from the t set- K. maintains
there is no evidence for an independent set of such forms). Alveolar
and retroflex sets are supposed to be due also to sandhi effects.

p, mp; k, Nk were intransitive, pp, mpp; kk, Nkk transitive.

Krishnamurti writes (285) 'But why should there be so many series of
suffixes fulfilling the same function?' and (288) 'Within the
non-past, there must have been a morphological contrast between the
labial and velar series, but the contrast tended to be blurred later.'

For me, specializing in phonosemantic analysis of lexical and
expressive systems, Dravidian has been an especially hard nut to
crack, even with such resources as Burrow and Emeneau's 'A Dravidian
Etymological Dictionary (2nd ed.-DEDR)' on hand. I have put aside
attempts more times than I care to mention.

However, the first glimmer of hope follows hard on the heels of my
first pass analysis of Santali expressive and adverbial forms.

Looking through DEDR at what are said to be roots hardly any pattern
is apparent. Pattern starts to emerge, however, when also taking into
account the derivations containing the formatives.

Looking JUST at forms of the shape (C)VCV(n)(C)Cu ((C)VCV(n)(C)Ci-) (so no long
vowels, no short forms, etc.), and only in Tamil (the first entry for many
etymological sets) a systematic tendency is found as fast as one compiles heads
and definitions.

For the strong majority with velar formatives the sense is one of loss
of rank or independence of action, firmness, etc., ranging from
inanimate to animate interpretations. The sense is SO strong in fact
that the meaning of the root itself is often blurred by its presence.

I haven't as yet compiled all the labial formative derivatives but
already their sense is clear- that of throwing off whatever burden
would encompass or crush structure or will, and the dentals appear
largely to encode the notion of linearity (often hierarchical
establishment)- further work will piece the latter articulations and
their sense out more fully.

What is truly interesting here is that these SUFFIXAL formatives
(which apparently have not received all that much attention, being
considered mostly from the morphological side of things, and
neglecting lexical or expressive aspects of their meanings) share a
great deal semantically with the first consonant in Santali forms.

Santali initial labials very often involve the notion of exhuberance,
unwillingness to be confined, throwing off unwanted burdens, making a
free and open space for oneself, and such, while the velar initial
forms often contain the idea of actively seeking or passively
accepting a secondary or subservient position in a relationship, when
social senses are the focus.

If the analyses hold water, and the Dravidian and Munda elements draw
from the same semantic sources (even if realized differently
structurally), we may still have to explain why the different
positioning within forms. I don't know of any study that claims that
Dravidian was ever anything but verb-final in structure, but some
believe that Munda (or Austroasiatic?) originally was verb-medial or
perhaps even verb-initial. Perhaps metrical issues determined where
the derivation occurred long ago? Certainly one sees such things when
viewing alliteration versus rhyming from a typological perspective.

If folks are interested in seeing some of the forms I'm using here (or
even numbered references in DEDR) for further discussion, please let
me know.

Sources:

Krishnamurti, Bhadriraju (1997 orig.publ.) The Origin and Evolution of
  Primary Derivative Suffixes in Dravidian), pp.284-306 in
Krishnamurti, Bh. 2001 Comparative Dravidian Linguistics (Oxford U.
Press).

Burrow, T. and Emeneau, M.B. 1984 A Dravidian Etymological Dictionary,
Second Ed. (Clarendon Press).


Jess Tauber
phonosemantics@...

--- In mundarica@yahoogroups.com, Harald Hammarström <harald@...> wrote:
>
> What is the evidence for Munda being related to Mon-Khmer? Is there
> some recent summary of the case somewhere? There's a great deal of
> new data since W Schmidt (to say the least), which should make
> the issue clearer.

As far as I know, Heinz-Juergen Pinnow's 1959 _Vergleichende
Lautlehre der Kharia Sprache [Comparative Phonology of the Kharia
Language]_ is probably still the most comprehensive source for post-
Schmidt evidence of Munda being related to Mon-Khmer. The book also
provides much evidence for Schmidt's Austroasiatic hypothesis being a
valid taxonomic construct. Pinnow's work is of course dated because
it was produced well before the new data explosion began to take
place in both the Munda and Mon-Khmer areas.

Also see my web site at http://home.att.net/~lvhayes/home.htm where a
glossary of 458 Austric comparisons is presented. Munda vocabulary is
included. A great deal of it comes from Pinnow 1959, but other
material is also included. Most of the Munda data is still dated, and
it will be a delight to see _The Munda Online Comparative Dictionary_
come online (whenever that will be) with its "roughly 50,000 entries
from 12 languages" (http://www.livingtongues.org/moremunda.html).

LV Hayes

What is the evidence for Munda being related to Mon-Khmer? Is there
some recent summary of the case somewhere? There's a great deal of
new data since W Schmidt (to say the least), which should make
the issue clearer.

Thanks for any input,

H

In Bodding's Santali dictionary there are many forms that are infixal
derivations, but not all are marked as such. Given the degree of
expressive sound symbolism in the Munda (and larger Austroasiatic)
family (though not necessarily in all the individual languages), which
is formulaic as a kind of phonosemantic algebra, are people absolutely
sure that all supposedly infixed forms are in fact straightforwardly
derived morphologically?

If one starts with a basic form of CVC, with infixed CVXVC's, one ends
up with a family of semantically related terms. At the same time,
though, examination of the larger dictionary landscape reveals that
one can also substitute initial and final C's, V's as well and STILL
often have related terms, leading to questions about what constitutes
an infix as well as a root. How deep does combinatoriality go?

Such questions then may relate to the difficulties one often finds in
getting exact correspondences between Munda languages etymologically,
or at higher taxonomic levels.

Perhaps they can also help shed some light on functional ambiguity of
some infixes (and suffixes). Such ambiguity would not be expected in
normal morphology, would it? It would, OTOH, be par for the course in
expressives and ideophones- a kind of 'antimorphology'.

Opinions? Thanks.

Jess Tauber
phonosemantics@...

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@...

--- In mundarica@yahoogroups.com, "yahganlang" <phonosemantics@...> wrote:

> Question for the folks- anyone know how to load to the list functions
> a usable font set for relevant languages?

I thought Yahoo Groups web functionality was restricted to 8-bit
codesets - ideally a single one for each group.  Posting via the web
using character codes that use the bytes 0x91, 0x92, 0x93 and 0x94
will result in corruption, even after switching to the relevant
encoding.  See http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/JRW_test/message/16
for an example of the loss when using Unicode encoded as UTF-8.

We could use the UTF-7 encoding, but Internet Explorer seems not to
support it!  Firefox does support it, and for e-mail, Outlook Express
does.

Richard.

Hello everyone, and thanks Francesco for the unexpected bounty!

Question for the folks- anyone know how to load to the list functions
a usable font set for relevant languages?

Jess Tauber
phonosemantics@...--- In mundarica@yahoogroups.com,
"Francesco Brighenti" <frabrig@...> wrote:
>
>
>
> Dear Jess,
>
> I've added a lot of files to the Files section and a lot of links to
> the Links section. Actually I've almost transferred my
> Munda/Austroasiatic/Austric archive onto this new List!
>
> Now, what about inviting the specialists to debate here?
>
> Best wishes,
> Francesco
>

Dear Jess,

I've added a lot of files to the Files section and a lot of links to
the Links section. Actually I've almost transferred my
Munda/Austroasiatic/Austric archive onto this new List!

Now, what about inviting the specialists to debate here?

Best wishes,
Francesco