Old Telugu
| Old Telugu | |
|---|---|
| Era | evolved into Telugu ca. 1000 CE |
Dravidian
| |
| Bhattiprolu | |
| Language codes | |
| ISO 639-3 | None (mis) |
| Glottolog | oldt1249 |
Old Telugu (Telugu: ప్రాదెనుగు, romanized: prādenugu) is the Telugu language which transformed from Pre-old Telugu[1]
Grammar[edit]
Phonology[edit]
Old Telugu's phonological system included a series of voiced and voiceless stops, aspirated stops, and sibilants due to Indo-Aryan influences. The language had a distinct set of vowel lengths and a unique handling of nasals and diphthongs. The phonemes /ẓ/, /ḍ/, and /r/ exhibited interesting historical developments, with certain sounds being lost or altered over time.
| Labial | Dental | Alveolar | Retroflex | Palatal | Velar | Glottal | ||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Nasal | m (మ) | n (న) | ṇ (ణ) | ñ (ఞ) | ṅ (ఙ) | |||
| Stop | Voiceless | p (ప) | t (త) | ṟ (ఱ) | ṭ (ట) | c (చ) | k (క) | |
| Aspirated | pʰ (ఫ) | tʰ (థ) | ṭʰ (ఠ) | cʰ (ఛ) | kʰ (ఖ) | |||
| Voiced | b (బ) | d (ద) | ḍ (డ) | j (జ) | g (గ) | |||
| Breathy | bʰ (భ) | dʰ (ధ) | ḍʰ (ఢ) | jʰ (ఝ) | gʰ (ఘ) | |||
| Fricative | s (స) | ṣ (ష) | ś (శ) | h (హ) | ||||
| Approximant | v (వ) | l (ల) | ḷ (ళ) | y (య) | ||||
| Rhotic | r (ర) | ḻ (ఴ) | ||||||
Morphology[edit]
Old Telugu is an agglutinative language primarily utilizing suffixes to express grammatical relationships. Noun morphology included gender markers and various derivational processes, while verb morphology was highly developed with distinct markers for tense, mood, and aspect. Old Telugu exhibited flexibility in word order due to its inflectional richness.
Parts of Speech[edit]
Nouns in Old Telugu could be primary or derived, with primary nouns often being free forms and derived nouns formed through suffixation. Gender was signaled by specific suffixes and the overall morphology was influenced by both native Dravidian elements and Indo-Aryan borrowings.
Verbs[edit]
Old Telugu verbs were categorized into finite and non-finite forms, with various suffixes indicating tense, mood, and agreement with subjects. The language had three primary tense paradigms: past, non-past, and negative. Additionally, Old Telugu featured several derived verb forms, including causatives and denominal verbs.
Pronouns[edit]
The pronominal system in Old Telugu marked person, number, and gender. Reflexive pronouns and a range of demonstratives, interrogatives, and indefinites were also used.
Syntax[edit]
The structure of Old Telugu sentences typically involved nominative-accusative alignment, with case markers indicating the grammatical roles of nouns. The language employed a variety of case forms and postpositions to express detailed semantic relations.
See also[edit]
- Telugu-Kannada script
- Kadamba script
- Telugu language
- Telugu literature
- Old Tamil
- Old Kannada
- Old Malayalam
References[edit]
- ^ * P. Ramasubramayam, "Old Telugu" in Sanford B. Steever, ed., The Dravidian Languages (London: Routledge, 2019) pp. 239-260.
Sources[edit]
- Krishnamurti, B. (2003). The Dravidian Languages. Cambridge University Press. ISBN 0-521-77111-0.
- Ramasubramayam, P. (2019). "Old Telugu". In Stever, Sanford (ed.). The Dravidian Languages (2nd ed.). Routledge. pp. 1–44. ISBN 978-1-138-85376-8.
- Steever, Sanford (2019). "Introduction to the Dravidian languages". In Steever, Sanford (ed.). The Dravidian Languages (2nd ed.). Routledge. pp. 1–44. ISBN 978-1-138-85376-8.