Questions tagged [dravidian]
For questions about the Dravidian language family and their members.
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u vs ŭ in Tamil transcriptions
When romanizing Tamil, it is common to transcribe the word-final /u/ just as it is, eventhough it is implicitly transcribed by native speakers as an epenthetic vowel. For non-native speakers, it is ...
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Why is there no nuqta in Malayalam? How are Perso-Arabic consonants written in Malayalam script?
Dravidian languages like Kannada (and Telugu) have the nukta diacritic (಼) to represent foreign consonants, and Tamil has a special character (ஃ) which can similarly be used, as shown in the table ...
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Why is there such a dramatic shift in Tamil script during the 3rd to 5th AD?
I am relatively new to Lingustics.SE. I have no formal knowledge in Linguistics and I am unsure if this question is better suited for History.SE or here.
Recently, I was reading about the Old Tamil ...
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Why did Modern Tamil reduce its alphabet from Middle Tamil to Old Tamil?
It is generally known that Modern Tamil (since around a century) totally simplified its alphabet from covering all Indic consonants to only consonants in Old Tamil (as written in Tolkāppiyam grammar ...
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Halegannada/Proto-South Dravidian Phonological Changes
What is the explanation behind the /p/ to /h/ phonological change from Halegannada to Kannada?
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Does the Telugu script have near perfect phonemic orthography?
I was trying to find the proper term for when a language's alphabet has one to one correspondence between the letters written and the pronunciation for those letters. Turns out its called phonemic ...
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Why does the Malayalam script have seemingly redundant ways to kill implicit vowels?
In the Malayalam script there are two ways to kill implicit vowels. The most widely applicable is the chandrakkala diacritic, similar to the virama that appears in other Brahmic scripts. There are ...
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Has a Dravido-Australic superfamily been proposed?
There seem to be striking typological similarities between Dravidian and Australian languages (see, e.g., the answers to this question Are there languages with the three-fold articulation place ...
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What decides the language family of a language the most structure/grammar or the vocabulary?
My assumed premise:
Indo-European language classification is broad. We can always find two languages of this family which are grammatically so different, and also the languages grammatically similar.
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Are Tamil and Malayalam mutually intelligible?
I have read that Malayalam originates from Middle Tamil. This leads me to ask whether Tamil and Malayalam are mutually intelligible. Or perhaps just partly, or asymmetrically?
I prefer either answers ...
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Statistic data on average morpheme-to-word ratios
I wonder whether there is any statistic data on morpheme-to-word ratio of certain languages. Is this something that can be and has been measured? The languages I am most interested in are the ...
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Are Indian languages distinct or are they just different dialects?
I speak Malayalam, one of the Indian languages and also Hindi but there are always common words which I assume are original Sanskrit words? So are the languages truly distinct or can I say they are ...
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Do some words have secondary or unintended click consonants?
I am currently trying to learn Tamil.
My friend who is teaching me seems to be making a clicking sound with one word in particular, and she can't seem to tell she's making it.
The word is குளம் ...
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Wanderwort origins and the Indus Valley Civilization?
I have noticed that there seem to be many words that have travelled the globe due to trade, such as the word orange or rice, which have plausible origins in proto-Dravidian. Meanwhile, it is ...
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Is syllable-timing in Indo-Aryan languages due to contact with Dravidian languages?
Most Indian languages are classified as syllable-timed. Some Dravidian languages, such as Tamil and Telugu, are mora-timed, which in recent research on speech rhythm has been called super-syllable-...
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