| 421.4.6.2 : CHARACTERISTIC FEATURES OF
MUNDA LANGUAGES |
|
| Three vowels
appear to be more stable in the Munda language. They are
i, u, a. while i, u, a, e and o can be treated as proto
vowels. The duration of utterance of vowels may be brief
or prolonged but it is not phonemic. The stressed vowels
are long in isolated words. Instead of treating them as
short and long vowels, we should treat them as short and
'double' vowels. By double vowel, we mean a cluster of
two homophonic and bimorphic vowel sounds. Nasalisation
has phonemic value. Though uniform picture is not found
in the matter of aspiration, the possibility of the voiced
glottal fricative h being a native element of Munda cannot
be ruled out. The aversion to aspiration which we find
in SM and Juang may be due to the influence of a Dravidian
substratum. The stops are divided into the same five series
by place of articulation as in the majority of Indo-Aryan
and Dravidian languages (Korku and Savara, however lack
the cerebrals), within which the voiced/unvoiced and aspirate/nonaspirate
contrasts are operative. Savara has no aspirates. In addition
there is an incomplete series of glottalised surds which
occur in word (or root) final position, /p' /, / t' /
, / c' / , / k' / . In addition to labial and dental there
are palatal and velar nasals. Vowel harmony is quite predominant
in Munda languages. |
|
| The Munda
languages have a strongly agglutinative structure. The
root of the word may take upto a dozen or so affixes whose
various combinations derive the most complex and delicate
shades of meaning. Division of Munda words into parts
of speech can only be done very tentatively, as Munda
has no formal markers for grammatical class, and one and
the same word can appear in various functions - as noun,
as adjective or as verb. There is no grammatical gender.
Where necessary, the masculine or feminine gender of nouns
referring to animate beings may be lexically distinguished
by adding marker words. |
|
| e.g. Ho |
Kui |
hon |
duaughter |
|
Kua |
hon |
son |
| Kw. |
era |
hon |
female child |
|
herel |
hon |
male child |
|
|
| While this
system of employing a separate word is wide spread in
Munda, it is found to be more predominant in Kher. On
the other hand, the suffixation of a particle (which is
either an abbreviated form of a keyword or a bound morpheme),
though widespread in Munda, is more frequently used outside
Kherwari. |
|
| An animate
/ nonanimate contrast can be detected through the differences
in the construction of various grammatical forms. In addition
to singular and plural there is a dual number. Nominals,
pronouns, verbal forms and some adjectival forms in Munda
are declined to number. Five South Munda languages Didey,
Bož·, Gutob, Parengi and Savara do not use any suffix
to express dual. In these languages plural usually takes
the place of dual in the conjugation. It is a widespread
phenomenon to use suffixes and infixes to indicate dual
number. But in this branch the expression of dual or plural
number is possible by dispensing with the affix if the
dual or plural of the object in question is already expressed
with the help of numeral or any other word denoting the
degree of non singularity. The formation will be something
like two man, some man, all man, bird-flock, etc. The
practice of using numeral classifier after the numeral
to indicate whether the object is masculine or feminine
is quite widespread in Munda. Case relation or usually
expressed syntactically by word order, pronominal affixes
and post positions. |
|
| The 1st
person dual and plural have inclusive and exclusive forms.
Together with primary pronouns, there is a series of pronominal
affixes (suffixes, infixes) which convey different meanings.
In combination with verbs and nouns, they act, depending
on their form, as subject, direct object, indirect object
and attributive (i.e. possessive pronoun). Certain kinship
terms are never used without these pronominal affixes
- an example of over riding tendency in Munda towards
maximum concretization of speech and the avoidance as
far as possible of abstract and general concepts. The
same urge towards concretization can be seen in the manifold
variety of demonstrative pronouns, which provide for a
whole series of degrees of distance of the object referred
to. As in Dravidian, there are no relative pronouns. |
|
| Verbal system
is one of great complexity. Although the root by itself
carries and expresses the verbal meaning, in practice
it is usually amplified by a string of affixes which,
in addition to the basic temporal, modal, etc. categories,
express various supplementary meanings. A crucial part
is played by pronominal suffixes and infixes. In the absence
of grammatical modulation of nouns, these are the main
indices of the grammatical relations between the words
in a sentence. They can also serve as personal markers.
They are added to the word immediately preceding the verb.
If there are no other components in the sentence, they
are attached to the verb itself. -a which is the usual
final element in the verb form acts as a finite form marker.
Verbs without this form marker, are equivalent to participles
or verbal nouns. The verbal affixes can be combined in
a great many different ways and this helps to explain
the extra-ordinary variety of verbal forms which provide
on the one hand total concretization of discourse, and
on the other for the articulations of extremely fine shades
of meaning. |
|
| Word formation
is of affixal type, in which prefixes and especially infixes
play a much more important role than suffixes. New words
can also be formed by the reduplication of the base. The
subject comes first and the predicate last. The qualifier
precedes the qualified. Spatial, temporal modifiers may
precede the Subject. A complete prepostition can be expressed
in one single verbal form, equipped with relevant affixes.
e.g. dal - ket' - ko - tam - a - ”. 'I struck your oxen'
where the verbal root is followed by markers in the following
order - temporal, objective, possessive, predicative,
subjective. Postpositions and pronominal affixes are used
to secure greater precision in the expression of grammatical
relations. |
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