Proto-Munda language

Proto-Munda
Proto-Munda
Reconstruction of	Munda languages
Region	Mahanadi River Delta and adjacent coastal plains
Era	c. 2000 – c. 1500 BCE
Reconstructed; ancestor	Proto-Austroasiatic
Lower-order reconstructions	Proto-North Munda; Proto-Kharia; Proto-Juang; Proto-Sora-Gorum-Juray; Proto-Gtaʔ; Proto-Gutob-Remo;

Proto-Munda is the reconstructed proto-language of the Munda languages of South Asia. It has been reconstructed by Sidwell & Rau (2015). According to Sidwell, the Proto-Munda language split from Proto- Austroasiatic in Indochina and arrived on the coast of Odisha around 4000 – 3500 years ago.^[6]

Reconstruction

The following Proto-Munda lexical proto-forms have been reconstructed by Sidwell & Rau (2015: 319, 340-363).^[7] Two asterisks are given to denote the tentative, preliminary state of the proto-language reconstruction.

Gloss	Proto-Munda
belly	**(sə)laɟ
big	**məraŋ
to bite	**kaˀp
black	**kE(n)dE
blood	**məjam
bone	**ɟaːˀŋ
to burn (vt.)	**gEˀp
claw/nail	**rəmAj
cloud	**tərIˀp
cold	**raŋ
die (of a person)	**gOˀj
dog	**sOˀt
to drink (water)	uˀt, uˀk
dry (adj./stat.)	**(ə)sAr
ear	lutur, luˀt
earth/soil	**ʔOte
to eat	**ɟOm
egg	**(ə)tAˀp
eye	**maˀt
fat/grease/oil	**sunum
feather	**bəlEˀt
fire	**səŋal
fish (n.)	ka, kadO(ŋ)
fly (v.)	**pEr
foot	**ɟəːˀŋ
give	**ʔam
hair (of head)	**suˀk
hand	**tiːˀ
to hear/listen	**ajɔm
heart, liver	(gə)rE, ʔim
horn	**dəraŋ
I	**(n)iɲ
to kill	**(bə)ɡOˀɟ
leaf	**Olaːˀ
to lie (down)	**gətiˀc
long	**ɟəlƏŋ
louse (head)	**siːˀ
man/husband, person/human	**kOrOˀ
meat/flesh	**ɟəlU(Uˀ)
moon	harkE, aŋaj
mountain/hill	**bəru(uˀ)
mouth	**təmOˀt
name	**ɲUm
neck	kO, gOˀk
new	**təmI
night	**(m)ədiˀp
nose	**muːˀ
not	**əˀt
one	**mOOˀj
rain	**gəma
red	**ɟəŋAˀt
road, path	**kOrA
root (of a tree)	**rEˀt
sand	**kEˀt
see	**(n)El
sit	**kO
skin	**usal
sleep	**gətiˀc
smoke (n.)	**mOˀk
to speak, say	sun, gam, **kaj
to stand	tənaŋ, tƏŋgə
stone	bərƏl, sərEŋ
sun	**siŋi(iˀ)
tail	**pata
thigh	**buluuˀ
that (dist.)	**han
this (prox.)	**En
thou/you	**(n)Am
tongue	**laːˀŋ
tooth	**gənE
tree	**ɟiːˀ
two	**baːˀr
to walk, go	**sEn
to weave	**ta(aˀ)ɲ
water	**daːˀk
woman/wife	selA, kəni
yellow	**saŋsaŋ

Proto-Munda reconstruction has since been revised and improved by Rau (2019).

Morphosyntax

Syntactic shift

Although the modern Munda languages show a standard head-final subject–object–verb (SOV) order in unmarked phrases, most scholars believe that proto-Munda was head-first, VO like proto-Austroasiatic. The first linguist to noticed this peculiarity, Heinz-Jürgen Pinnow (1959, 1960), observed strong traceable evidence for a proto-Munda VO order. VO order has been found in compounds, noun incorporation verbal morphology in the Sora^[8]-Gorum languages, and to a lesser extent in Gutob, Remo, Kharia, and Juang. By any given verb conjugations, the Munda verbs (including Kherwarian (Santali, Ho,...) and Korku) always show internal head-first, V-P order, with two main overall syntactic orders of transitive verbs: A-V-P and V-P-A, corresponding to Austroasiatic clausal syntaxes SVO and VOS. Most Munda compounds are also head-first and right-branching, with new loan words from Indian languages following the Indian norm of head-final and left-branching.^[9]^[10]

Remo:

gui-ti

wash-hand

'wash hand'

Sora:

ɲen

1SG

dʒum-te-ti-n-ai

eat-banana-NPST-INTR-1SG.SUBJ

'I am eating banana'

Juang:

ba-ama-gito-ke

1DU.SUBJ-NEG-sing-PRES.TR

'We two don't sing'

Gorum:

ne-r-ab-so’ɟ-om

1SG.SUBJ-NEG-CAUS-learn-ACT:2SG.OBJ

'I didn’t teach you'

Winfred Lehmann (1973) reviewed,^[11]

"If we examine further evidence provided by Pinnow, we note that Munda contains VO characteristics. It has VO order in compounds (Pinnow [1960], 97); it also provides examples of NG [noun-genitive] order and of prefixes. Since the Khmer-Nicobar languages are consistently VO, I assume that it was the Munda languages which were modified syntactically... We may conclude that Proto-Austroasiatic was VO and non-agglutinative in morphological structure."
— Lehmann, 1973:57

Pinnow (1963, 1966) proposed that proto-Munda was SVO and that was the syntax of proto-Austroasiatic, which was also highly synthetic like Munda, whereas he attributed analytic and isolating typological features in modern Mon-Khmer to language contact in the Mainland Southeast Asia linguistic area.^[12] Disagreeing with Pinnow, Donegan & Stampe (1983, 2004) argued that proto-Munda was VO but non-agglutinative like its sister languages in Southeast Asia. According to Donegan & Stampe, Munda synthesis and SOV order were not stimulated by just language contact within the South Asian linguistic area, but by internal restructuring that caused the Munda word prosody to shift its rhythmic patterns from typical Austroasiatic rising, vowel reduction, iambic stressed to falling, vowel harmony, trochaic stressed profile, thus reversed the clausal syntactic structure and triggered word agglutination.^[13]

For the reason why the Munda languages keep head-first order in compounds and polysynthetic morphology, Donegan & Stampe (2002) believed that words, like the verb-noun compounds, are more resistant to internal changes of rhythms and ordering than phrases.^[14] Stanley Starosta (1967) explained that, during its early formation stage when Munda was still head-first SVO, verb-noun incorporation was facilitated as seen in modern Sora, but then it did a syntactic shift to head-final SOV and added more morphology. The polysynthetic verb phrases thus had become crystalized since that time. Sora verbs may incorporate another indirect object, but the theme argument would fall within the scope of different oblique arguments; the oblique noun is showed in thematic position. Sora also can incorporate transitive subjects and form verb serializations with incorporated nouns. Since the Sora NIs function like the mirror images of typical well-studied polysynthetic languages, it was suggested by Mark Baker that Sora simply operates the opposite way to the head movement theory proposed by the polysynthesis parameter.^[15]

Donegan & Stampe's prediction of Munda synthetic shift caused by change of rhythmic holism is contested by Horo & Anderson et al. (2017, 2020, 2022). Field acoustic researches on various Sora and Santali dialects show that both languages have consistently second-or-last-syllable prominence with clear iambic patterns (first light syllable, followed by a second heavy stressed syllable) in disyllabic and tetrasyllabic words (Horo & Anderson 2022).^[16]^[17]

Proto-Munda predicate

Anderson and Zide (2001, 2007)

Gregory D. S. Anderson & Norman Zide (2001, 2007) reconstructed the head-marking bound predicate of Proto-Munda with A-V-P order as following:

Proto-Munda Predicate (Zide & Anderson 2001)
Slot	+4	+3	+2	+1	core	-1	-2	-3
role	SUBJ	NEG	RECIP/CAUS	DERIV	verb stem	PASS/INTR	TRANS/TNS	OBJ

Rau (2020)

Felix Rau (2020) concludes that Proto-Munda predicate structure was verb-medial SVO,^[18] though he suggests that it might have been less inflected with fewer bound elements, which may cause the Munda predicate development to become divergent later.^[19]

Proto-Munda Predicate Clause
Slot	+6	+5	+4	+3	+2	+1	core	-1	-2	-3
role	SUBJ	MOD/ASP	NEG	RECIP	CAUS	DERIV	verb stem	ASP	[other voices]/valency	OBJ
reconstruction (Rau 2020:231)		A O Vj mO	əˀt Um	*kƏl	*Oˀp	bə- tA- **A-		=lə Perf =tə Imperf	n MID ˀt ACT

At some points during their early development in South Asia, due to either language contact led to adoptions of South Asian areal features or internal rhythmic changes, the Munda languages presumably made a syntactic shift from head-first, prefixing SVO to head-final, suffixing SOV.^[20]^[21] Proto-North Munda restructured all prefixes and prepositions into suffixes. The situation is quite different in South Munda languages, especially Juang, Gtaʔ, and Sora-Gorum, where the original proto-Munda prefix slots are well-preserved, but later additional developments of their predicates are mostly suffixes or enclitics.^[22]

Noun incorporation

According to Anderson (2014, 2017, 2021), Munda syntactic noun incorporation is very archaic and may be the oldest feature of Austroasiatic morphology, with cognates are attested in across every subgroup,^[23] but the status of noun incorporation in proto-Munda still difficult to determine. Rau notes that "it is possible that some sort of incorporation was already present in proto-Munda and worked along the lines attested in modern Sora."^[24]

References

^ Rau, Felix; Sidwell, Paul (2019). "The Munda Maritime Hypothesis". Journal of the Southeast Asian Linguistics Society (JSEALS). 12 (2). hdl:10524/52454. ISSN 1836-6821.
^ Rau, Felix and Paul Sidwell 2019. "The Maritime Munda Hypothesis." ICAAL 8, Chiang Mai, Thailand, 29–31 August 2019. doi:10.5281/zenodo.3365316
^ Blench, Roger. 2019. The Munda maritime dispersal: when, where and what is the evidence?
^ Rau & Sidwell (2019:35)
^ Anderson (2020:160)
^ Sidwell, Paul. 2018. Austroasiatic Studies: state of the art in 2018 Archived 2019-05-03 at the Wayback Machine. Presentation at the Graduate Institute of Linguistics, National Tsing Hua University, Taiwan, 22 May 2018.
^ Sidwell, Paul and Felix Rau (2015). "Austroasiatic Comparative-Historical Reconstruction: An Overview." In Jenny, Mathias and Paul Sidwell, eds (2015). The Handbook of Austroasiatic Languages. Leiden: Brill.
^ Baker (1996:32)
^ Donegan & Stampe (2002:114–116)
^ Donegan & Stampe (2004:6)
^ Lehmann, Winfred P. (March 1973). "A Structural Principle of Language and Its Implications". Language. 49 (1). Linguistic Society of America: 47–66. doi:10.2307/412102. JSTOR 412102.
^ Donegan & Stampe (2004:7).
^ Donegan & Stampe (2004:26-27)
^ Donegan & Stampe (2002:116)
^ Baker (1996:33)
^ Horo, Luke; Anderson, Gregory D. S. (2021). "Towards a prosodic typology of Kherwarian Munda languages: Santali of Assam.". In Alves, Mark J.; Sidwell, Paul (eds.). Papers from the 30th Annual Meeting of the Southeast Asian Linguistics Society. JSEALS Special Publications 8. University of Hawai'i Press. pp. 298–317.
^ Horo, Luke; Anderson, Gregory D. S.; Singha, Aman; Sonowal, Ria Borah; Gomango, Opino (2023). "Acoustic phonetic properties of p-words and g-words in Sora". Proceedings of (Formal) Approaches to South Asian Linguistics 12: 144–167.
^ Rau (2020:227)
^ Rau (2020:225)
^ Rau (2020:228)
^ Anderson (2021:46)
^ Rau (2020:230)
^ Anderson (2021:37)
^ Rau (2020:209)