Toda is a
Dravidian language
The Dravidian languages (or sometimes Dravidic) are a family of languages spoken by 250 million people, mainly in southern India, north-east Sri Lanka, and south-west Pakistan. Since the colonial era, there have been small but significant ...
noted for its many
fricatives and
trills. It is spoken by the
Toda people, a population of about one thousand who live in the
Nilgiri Hills of southern
India
India, officially the Republic of India ( Hindi: ), is a country in South Asia. It is the seventh-largest country by area, the second-most populous country, and the most populous democracy in the world. Bounded by the Indian Ocean on the ...
. The Toda language originated from
Toda-Kota subgroup of South Dravidian.
Phonemic inventory
Vowels
For a Dravidian language, Toda's sixteen vowels is an unusually large number. There are eight vowel qualities, each of which may occur long or short. There is little difference in quality between the long and short vowels, except for , which occurs as when short and as when long.
Consonants
Toda has an unusually large number of fricatives and trills. Its seven
places of articulation are the most for any Dravidian language. The voiceless
laterals are true fricatives, not voiceless
approximants; the
retroflex lateral is highly unusual among the world's languages.
[Spajić et al. (1994)]
Voiceless
In linguistics, voicelessness is the property of sounds being pronounced without the larynx vibrating. Phonologically, it is a type of phonation, which contrasts with other states of the larynx, but some object that the word phonation implies v ...
fricatives are
allophonically voiced intervocalically in Toda. There are also the invariably voiced fricatives , though the latter is marginal. The
nasals and are allophonically devoiced or partially devoiced in final position or next to voiceless consonants.
All of these consonants may occur in word-medial and word-final positions. However, only a restricted set occur word-initially. These are in boldface above.
Unlike the other dental consonants, is
interdental. Similarly, is
labiodental whereas the other labials are
bilabial.
Apical consonants are either alveolar or postalveolar. The actual feature that distinguishes and is uncertain. They have the same primary place of articulation. Spajić and colleagues have found that the rhotic that may occur word initially (erroneously called "
dental" in previous literature, perhaps because Dravidian coronals tend to be dental by default) has a
secondary articulation, which they have tentatively identified as
advanced tongue root
In phonetics, advanced tongue root (ATR) and retracted tongue root (RTR) are contrasting states of the root of the tongue during the pronunciation of vowels in some languages, especially in Western and Eastern Africa, but also in Kazakh and ...
until further measurements can be made. This analysis is assumed in the transcription .
Another difference between them is that is the least strongly trilled, most often occurring with a single contact. However, unlike a
flap, multiple contacts are normal, if less common, and is easily distinguishable from the other trills when they are all produced with the same number of contacts.
The retroflex consonants are
subapical. Retroflex is more strongly trilled than the other rhotics. However, it is not purely retroflex. Although the tongue starts out in a
sub-apical retroflex position, trilling involves the tip of the tongue, and this causes it to move forward toward the alveolar ridge. This means that the retroflex trill gives a preceding vowel retroflex coloration the way other retroflex consonants do, but that the vibration itself is not much different from the other trills.
Grammar
Verbal Morphology
As described by Murray B. Emeneau, in his "Toda Grammar and Texts,"
[Emeneau (1984)] the entire Toda verbal system is based on the addition of many suffixes to the two base verb stems, stem 1 (henceforth, S
1) and stem 2 (henceforth, S
2). There are fifteen classes of verbs in Toda, each of which uses one of four suffixes to form its S
2 from its S
1. A short summary is given below:
1Emeneau lists the rule "S
1 -ṟ/-ɬ/-ṛ/-ꞎ/-ḍ/-x + -t- = S
2 -ṯ/-ṯ/-ṭ/-ṭ/-ṭ/-k; S
1 -r/-l/-n/-s̠/-ḷ/-ṇ + -t- = S
1 -d/-ḏ/-ḏ/-ḏ/-ḍ/-ḍ" for this class.
To each of these stems, further suffixes may be added to create verb forms indicating different tenses and moods. The following table summarizes them:
See also
*
E. E. Speight
Ernest Edwin Speight (6 December 1871 – 17 September 1949), usually known as E E Speight, was a Yorkshireman who travelled in Japan and India and was a professor of English for twenty years at the Imperial University, Tokyo, Japan a ...
, who was compiling Toda grammar in the period before his death
Notes
External links
The Toda Language as part of the Endangered Languages project
at the
UCLA
The University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) is a public university, public Land-grant university, land-grant research university in Los Angeles, California. UCLA's academic roots were established in 1881 as a Normal school, teachers colle ...
Phonetics Archive
Todaresources
Todaswadesh list
Bibliography
* Emeneau, Murray B. 1984. ''Toda Grammar and Texts''. American Philosophical Society, Memoirs Series, 155. Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society.
* Siniša Spajić, Peter Ladefoged, P. Bhaskararao, 1994. "The rhotics of Toda". In ''UCLA Working Papers in Phonetics 87: Fieldwork Studies of Targeted Languages II''.
{{DEFAULTSORT:Toda Language
Agglutinative languages
Dravidian languages
Languages of Tamil Nadu
Languages of Kerala