Malayalam

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vijayjohn
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Re: Malayalam

Postby vijayjohn » 2014-12-11, 20:26

eskandar wrote:Thanks for your informative post! The impression I get from what you wrote is that while there may be lexical and grammatical differences, they are not so great as to render the two registers mutually unintelligible for the most part, even if one were only familiar with one register. Would you say that's accurate?

Yes.
Also, interesting that you should mention the Lakshadweep dialect. I was just reading about the islands!

Lakshadweep Malayalam is really interesting. Unfortunately, literally the only resource I know of in the whole world that describes it at all is one phrasebook, written in Malayalam, and (fortunately) available at the university library here. I've taken notes on it as much as I could from the few times I got to go through it. I've also noticed that if I try to say something to my dad in Tamil, he can tell I'm speaking Tamil (or at least trying to :P), but if I say something in Lakshadweep Malayalam, he says, "What kind of language is this?!" :lol:

Koko

Re: Malayalam

Postby Koko » 2015-06-02, 3:52

A few questions struck me when I saw your posts on the "Last word in your mother tongue you have learnt" thread:

What does [(dɪ?)kʲʊga] mean? I saw it only on the end of verbs, so is it some sort of infinitive?

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Re: Malayalam

Postby vijayjohn » 2015-06-02, 4:05

Koko wrote:A few questions struck me when I saw your posts on the "Last word in your mother tongue you have learnt" thread:

What does [(dɪ?)kʲʊga] mean? I saw it only on the end of verbs, so is it some sort of infinitive?

-/uka/ is an infinitival suffix; -/ik/ is a valence-increasing one, i.e. a suffix that changes intransitive verbs to transitive ones or transitive verbs to causatives.

Koko

Re: Malayalam

Postby Koko » 2015-06-02, 4:18

Hm. Interesting. So I was kinda right :D

So the voiced coronals of the verbs before those two suffixes have nothing to with them, and merely the ends of verb stems?

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Re: Malayalam

Postby vijayjohn » 2015-06-02, 4:32

Koko wrote:Hm. Interesting. So I was kinda right :D

Yeah. :lol:
So the voiced coronals of the verbs before those two suffixes have nothing to with them, and merely the ends of verb stems?

Yeah, that's right. In any case, voiced stops don't occur in Malayalam except either in loanwords or as allophones of voiceless stops between two voiced sounds. Breathy voiced stops (e.g. [d̪ʱ]) occur only in loanwords from Sanskrit (and perhaps occasionally other Indo-Aryan languages).

Koko

Re: Malayalam

Postby Koko » 2015-06-02, 4:37

Are there rules to when you should pronounce a voiceless stop as it's voiced counterpart? It seems that when you transcribe words into IPA they appear frequently, but so do the voiceless stops in the same environments :lol:

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Re: Malayalam

Postby vijayjohn » 2015-06-02, 6:38

Well, yeah, voiceless stops do occur between vowels, for example, but that's when they're underlyingly geminate.

For example, 'inside/interior' is underlyingly /akam/ but pronounced [əˈgəm].

'Number' is underlyingly /akkam/ but may be pronounced either [əˈkəm] or [əkˈkəm]. Very often, geminate stops are phonetically realized as singletons.

Bryn
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Re: Malayalam

Postby Bryn » 2015-06-05, 8:00

Not to interrupt, but I'm also learning Malayalam and have been struggling to find some good resources to learn from.

mafke wrote:Anyway this course looks _much_ better and more suited to self-study

http://www.eric.ed.gov/PDFS/ED197626.pdf

entitled "University course and reference grammar"

Plus it has audio! Which you can download! at:

http://www.laits.utexas.edu/malayalam/index.html


Does anyone have a copy of this pdf? The link is dead, and my searches to find it have turned up fruitless.

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Re: Malayalam

Postby vijayjohn » 2015-06-06, 10:21

Bryn wrote:Not to interrupt

No worries! You're not interrupting anything. :)
but I'm also learning Malayalam and have been struggling to find some good resources to learn from.

Yeah, so was I years ago. :| I'm honestly not convinced that they exist yet.
Does anyone have a copy of this pdf? The link is dead, and my searches to find it have turned up fruitless.

I'm afraid I don't, I'm sorry. :(


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