Onomatopoetics in the Indian Linguistic Area

Abstract

In two of the language families of India, Dravidian and Indo-Aryan, there is a common pattern of onomatopoetics, in their formation and also in part in their syntactic use, with proliferation of items in most of the languages for which there is adequate information. Comparison, based on the etymological dictionaries of the two families, yields some forty areal etymologies, i.e. overlapping which provides what within a single family would be considered clusters of etyma. Since the Indo-Aryan family seems not to inherit the pattern from Indo-European, diffusion is postulated from Dravidian both for the pattern and for some etymological items. We are still in the process of identifying the traits that mark the Indian subcontinent as a linguistic area.' An abundance of loanwords have diffused in both directions between the two major families of the area, Indo-Aryan and Dravidian; but all-pervasive as this type of diffusion has been, it is not the most significant evidence for the characterization of the subcontinent as a linguistic area. More significant, and at the same time more difficult to identify and to analyse historically, is the diffusion of structural traits. An early diagnosis of the situation was provided by Jules Bloch, who in the decade from 1925 to 1934 summed up the tentative suggestions of almost a century of scholarship, to the effect that Indo-Aryan had undergone, from the beginning of its presence in India, an Indianization through contact with Dravidian (and probably with other language families). This view has gone through a process of demonstration that has been capped recently by Kuiper 1967. The hypothesis has achieved acceptance, I think, and is in the public domain to an extent that makes it unnecessary to list the already identified structural diffusions each time the situation is mentioned. Nor is it necessary now, when introducing a new instance of structural diffusion into the evidence, to go through the formality of defending the general thesis. In this paper I will undertake the treatment of onomatopoetics as a structural trait of the Indian linguistic area. Attention will be given to the description of the evidence on both sides of the linguistic boundary (insofar as description is available or possible on the basis of defective data), to the areal comparative treatment, and, in general terms, to the possibility of treating onomatopoetics as a sub-corpus of linguistic material that will in fact yield to comparative treatment. No detailed description of onomatopoeia has been published for any of the Indian languages except Sanskrit (Hoffmann 1952). It will be more satisfactory here to start from a non-literary Dravidian language, Kota, in which onomatopoetics are of common occurrence and for which sufficient descriptive material 1 Defined as in Emeneau 1956:16, n. 28: 'an area which includes languages belonging to more than one family but showing traits in common which are found not to belong to the other members of (at least) one of the families'.