Questions tagged [dravidian]
For questions about the Dravidian language family and their members.
17
questions
5
votes
0
answers
101
views
Do the "gibberish lines" in the Charition farce reflect a Dravidian language?
The Charition farce (P.Oxy. III, 413) is a Greek theatre play which tells the story of a girl, Χαριτίων Charitíōn, who is held captive in a coastal kingdom of India. The only manuscript of this ...
- 680
1
vote
1
answer
150
views
How many grammatical cases does Telugu have?
I can't figure out how many grammatical cases Telugu has:
Wikipedia says 8 (Telugu grammar)
Telugu itself says 8, but I'm not sure if they map 1-1 to linguistic cases (విభక్తులు/viḅaktulu)
I found a ...
- 113
2
votes
3
answers
166
views
Do Dravidian languages have postpositions? Do any of them also have any prepositions?
I know that the Dravidian languages are agglutinating type and have noun cases but I was interested in whether they also have postpositions. I'm assuming they do. I also wonder if some might also have ...
- 14.6k
2
votes
1
answer
147
views
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 ...
- 265
2
votes
0
answers
149
views
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 ...
- 121
3
votes
1
answer
475
views
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 ...
- 265
4
votes
4
answers
376
views
Halegannada/Proto-South Dravidian Phonological Changes
What is the explanation behind the /p/ to /h/ phonological change from Halegannada to Kannada?
6
votes
4
answers
1k
views
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 ...
- 171
5
votes
1
answer
313
views
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 ...
- 151
8
votes
3
answers
1k
views
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 ...
- 29.8k
5
votes
2
answers
529
views
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.
...
- 222
13
votes
4
answers
23k
views
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 ...
- 848
4
votes
0
answers
457
views
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 ...
- 1,030
3
votes
4
answers
4k
views
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 ...
- 149
4
votes
2
answers
322
views
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 ...
- 880
5
votes
1
answer
379
views
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 ...
- 91
4
votes
2
answers
1k
views
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-...
- 4,279