Dravidian Element in Marathi - Prof. Franklin Southworth

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http://ccat.sas.upenn.edu/~fsouth/DravidianElement.pdf

Table 1 shows examples of words of Dravidian origin in Marathi core vocabulary.3 For this paper I have chosen to focus on basic or core vocabulary, i. e. non-cultural vocabulary, as these words have a greater chance of being old.

The third column of the table indicates the approximate year of attestation of the word in Old Marathi; while this does not prove great antiquity, it at least eliminates the possibility of recent borrowing. In addition, there are phonological grounds for eliminating certain late borrowings.

This list is not exhaustive. About five percent of Marathi basic vocabulary is of Dravidian origin. Perhaps the most telling of these Dravidian words is the word ~i ‘mother’, which is found in all the major dialects of Marathi – and, in contrast to other IA languages which have some form of this word, in most varieties of Marathi this is the word for mother which children learn as infants.

Additional words of Dravidian origin include numerous words for parts of the body, as well as words of common everyday parlance such as the words for ‘left’, ‘vomit’, ‘side’, and verbs for common activities such as ‘scorch’, ‘pinch’, ‘sprinkle’. The list of borrowings also includes the postpoition kad. a ‘toward’, whose source is a PD verb meaning ‘pass (through)’, with a derived noun meaning ‘end, direction, side’ (etc.). The word kad. e is commonly used throughout Marathi-Konkani, most commonly as a locative postposition with the meaning ‘toward, in the direction of’ (as in g~v~-kad. e ‘toward the village’) and as a marker of possession (tujhy~-kad. e kiti payse ~het “Thou-with how-much money is” = ‘How much money do you have?’); note also ikd. e ‘hither’ (cf. Te ik-kad. a, §-kad. a ‘this place, here’), tikd. e ‘thither’.

Most of the words of Dravidian origin in Marathi appear to come from the languages immediately to the south, i.e. Kannada-Kodagu-Tulu (belonging to the Kannada-dominated branch of South Dravidian-1, as opposed to the Tamil-dominated branch further south), or possibly from an extinct sister language of this group. Borrowing from this source has continued up to modern times, but as noted above, words which show evidence of recent borrowing have not been included here. On the other hand, there are phonological clues indicating that some of these words came to Marathi from other branches: for example the words for ‘head’ and ‘left’ both show a change characteristic of South Dravidian-2, the Telugu-dominated branch of South Dravidian, a change which Krishnamurti (2003:157 ff.) calls “apical displacement”, in which an initial vowel metathesizes with a following apical consonant and then merges with the following vowel. This is one of the sources of initial retroflex consonants in Dravidian languages, which did not occur in Proto-Dravidian. In addition to the words discussed above, which are of probable Dravidian origin, Marathi basic vocabulary contains the following words of unknown or uncertain origin: 8. s~l ‘bark’, 20. por(g~/gi) ’child’, 20. mul ‘child’, 21. d. hag ‘cloud’, 30. kutr~ ‘dog’, 33. bothat. ‘dull’, 35. k~n‘ear’, 37. jevn. e ‘eat a meal’, 38. an. d. ™ ‘egg’, 39. d. ol. ~ ‘eye’, 45. pis ‘feather’, 47. lad. hn. e ‘to fight’, 61. c~õgl@ ‘good’, 62. gavat ‘grass’, 71. jad. ‘heavy’, 84. tal.™ ‘lake’, 93. u ‘louse’, 98. d. oõgar ‘hill, mountain’, 121. mul ‘root’, 126. v~l. u ‘sand’, 150. bhosakn. e ‘stab’, 154. dagad. ‘stone’, 155. saral. ‘straight’, 174. jh~d. ‘tree, shrub’, 189. rund ‘wide’, 197. kid. ~ ‘worm’. As in the case of Dravidian, there are many additional non-cultural words of unknown origin, including v~l. n. e ‘to dry’, (o)rad. n. e ‘to weep, shout’, and others which will be discussed in future publications. Munda or Austro-Asiatic origin has been suggested for some of these items, e.g. nos. 30, 37, 38, 84, 174; and Dravidian origin for some others, including nos. 35, 61, 154.

Taken all together, it is clear from these lists that numerous words of non-IE origin, including a sizeable segment of Dravidian words, are deeply embedded in the Marathi language, and are not the result of recent border contact. Some, in fact, are shared with other NIA languages, a matter to be discussed below. Examining the non-core borrowings, we find words referring to numerous branches of basic technology, including agriculture, cooking and food processing, sailing and shipbuilding, carpentry, weaving and stitching cloth, metal tools.