By Ruwan Laknath Jayakody
There remains much to be done in order to sufficiently document the syntax of the indigenous aboriginal Vedda community’s language and to thereby compose a comprehensive grammar, a local study observed.
This conclusion was arrived at by M.G.L. Ananda (attached to the University of Sri Jayewardenepura’s Department of English and Linguistics) in his article published recently in the International Journal of Multidisciplinary Studies, titled “The Syntax of the Vedda Language”.
In recent times, Ananda notes, the aboriginal inhabitants who are the Veddas have been subjected to numerous socio-political-economic changes, causing the near extinction of these dwellers, noting that not only have they dwindled in number but also in terms of the territory occupied by them which today covers only a small region in the northern Uva and southern Thamankaduwa areas, scattered in Dambana, Maha Oya, and some places in Badulla, with the existing Vedda country confined today to Dambana.
Syntax refers to the principles governing the structure, arrangement, construction, and order of words and phrases to create proper well formed sentences in a language. Grammar deals with the set and system of structural constraints including rules and regulations, on speakers or writers composition and formation of clauses, phrases, and words used to form a sentence, using a language, or simply the set of rules a language uses to convey meaning. Lexicon is the complete set of meaningful units in a language.
The Vedda language, which according to K.N.O. Dharmadasa’s “Creolisation (process by which elements of different cultures blend together to create and produce a new culture, in this case, the mixing of languages), Legend, and History: An Aspect of the History of the Veddas of Sri Lanka” is creole, has been overpowered as pointed out by Ananda, by the dominant Sinhala language, as a result of the Veddas interaction with the Sinhala and Tamil community and contact with the Sinhala language. The situation is further complicated with the increasing hybridisation of the Vedda language due to overwhelming linguistic and cultural contact with the majority Sinhalese and the pressure upon the minority Veddas to integrate with the majority community for various reasons, Ananda explains, adding that therefore, the Vedda language has been at the receiving end of all these socio-political-economic-cultural dynamics, to such an extent that today it is a threatened aboriginal language facing extinction. Hence, the fact that a comprehensive grammar of the Vedda language with a special focus on its syntax is yet to be compiled is a serious matter, and one which Ananda emphasises, merits urgent attention.
M.W.S. De Silva’s “The Vedda Language of Ceylon” and “Dambane Vaedi Basa”, analyses the morphology, case system, and parts of speech of the Vedda language.
G.C. Seligmann and B.Z. Seligmann’s “The Veddas”, which comments on the Vedda lexicon and the periphrastic (of a case or tense formed by a combination of words rather than by inflection, the latter being a change in the form of a word, typically the ending, to express a grammatical function or attribute such as tense, mood, person, number, case, and gender) nature of Vedda words (explained by the duo as being due to the need to converse among themselves in a secret language when in the presence of the Sinhalese), speaks, whilst adopting W. Geiger's “The Language of the Veddas” and “'The Creolisation of an Aboriginal Language, The Case of the Vedda in Ceylon”, of a “so called Vedda language, which is but a dialect of Sinhalese, as a foreign language which the Veddas long ago adopted in the place of their own”. The Seligmanns’ trace the origin of the Vedda language for the most part to Sanskrit and Sinhala, and identify the evolution of the Vedda dialect as “in the first stage, their original language is effaced by an archaic form of the Sinhalese; the formation from this of a large number of secret words constitutes the second stage; while the third stage is represented by the process of substitution of more or less modern and colloquial Sinhalese words for the majority of archaic words and forms, during which process many of the modern words underwent phonetic (patterns of sounds) changes”. Further, the Seligmanns discuss non-Aryan (relating to or denoting a people speaking an Indo-European language [relating to the family of languages spoken over the greater part of Europe and Asia] who invaded northern India in the second millennium Before Christ) words of the Vedda vocabulary, which, according to them, are of unknown origin.
Dharmadasa observes that “the emergence of a creole from a pidgin (a grammatically simplified form of a language, some elements of which are taken from local languages, used for communication between people not sharing a common language, essentially non-native speakers), as attested to in Jamaican Creole and Melanesian Pidgin English, appears to have taken place with the Vedda language too.” He provides evidence from the Vedda language phonology, morphology, syntax, and lexicon to substantiate the theory of creolisation from the source language Sinhala, due to contact with the latter language. Dharmadasa traces the process of the restructuring of phonological, morphological, and syntactic elements and the lexical items of the Vedda language from the source language through a process of reduction and simplification. The comparative method is adopted by Dharmadasa with respect to the sound system, case forms, number and gender marking, negation (a lexical item that denies or inverts the meaning of another lexical item or construction, and thereby expresses negation), pronominal forms, and many other grammatical categories.
Moreover, De Silva has covered areas of the Vedda language such as its creolisation, lexicon, etymology (the study of the origin of words and the way in which their meanings have changed), word classes, and their case forms and uses, drawing contrasts with Sinhala where relevant. He accounts for the morphological structure of the words in terms of the grammatical categories of number, case, mood, and tense. He therefore identifies three major word classes, namely, nominals (features definite/indefinite and common forms), verbals (according to the forms of tense, mood, finite, and non finite nature) and invariables (demonstratives, postpositions, adverbials, and particles – a classification made on the basis of their high frequency occurrence with adjacent nominal and verbal forms).
The data for the study was collected by Ananda during two field visits made between February and March 2020 to the Dambana administrative Division under the Mahiyangana Divisional Secretariat in the Uva Province. According to De Silva, the Dambana people have a wider vocabulary and a greater degree of fluency. The sample consisted of five Veddas: three older Veddas and two Vedda youths, all of whom were native speakers of the Vedda language. The two Vedda youths who were bilingual (the Vedda language and Sinhala) acted as translators and facilitators during the interview-cum-discussion sessions.
Ananda’s study sought to initiate a Vedda language documentation project in which a comprehensive grammar is composed from a generative syntax (rigourous formal modelling of linguistic patterns to extract cross linguistic commonalities in order to characterise a core system of grammar shared by all natural languages called universal grammar which is seen as a system of primitives and principles that determine how these primitives can be put together to form complex linguistic structures by recursive structure building operations that will construct an infinite set of sentences and characterize the relations between them) perspective, also taking into account historical sources, hybridisation, dialectal varieties, and important factors that affect linguistic conclusions, by examining the Vedda language in terms of its syntactic phenomena. The said syntactic phenomena include the word order and configurationality (a configurational language is a language that has a fairly rigid word order based on a specifically ordered structure), phrase structure, clause structure, agreement, anaphoric relations (special relationships that exist between certain pairs of elements in a language and involves an anaphor – being a word that refers to a word used earlier in a sentence and replaces it – and its antecedent, where the interpretation of the use of an expression depends upon another expression in the context which is known as its antecedent), negation and NegPs (abstract functional head negation with its own projection), heads (the head of a phrase is the word that determines the syntactic category of that phrase, and on its own can perform the syntactic function of the whole construction) and their positions, movement, topic and focus (a grammatical category that conveys which part of the sentence contributes new, non derivable, or contrastive information, which refers to the portion of an utterance which is especially informative or of high communicative interest or important within the context, and which is marked as such through some linguistic means such as by stress, and is information that typically occurs late in a sentence, and complements the presupposed information typically presented early in the sentence).
The most important conclusions deduced by Ananda in the study are that despite the availability of many scrambling (a syntactic phenomenon where sentences can be formulated using a variety of different word orders without any change in the meaning) opportunities, the Vedda language remains configurational; that it does not allow certain word orders which are present in the Sinhala language; that it is strongly head final as is the case with the Sinhala language; that it does not have an articulated left periphery (CP – the beginning of the sentence) or inflectional layer (TP) periphery (an inflectional phrase is a functional phrase that has inflectional properties such as tense and agreement and contains as its head an abstract category called an inflection); that their Neg marker serves a number of modal functions in addition to Neg marking; that both the focus and Wh (the formation of syntactic dependencies involving interrogative words) are located in the focus head; and that on the whole, the syntax of the Vedda language largely aligns with the syntax of the Sinhala language.
In conclusion, Ananda found that one could trace the relation of the Vedda language to Sinhala with respect to all the syntactic phenomena presented. Yet, he pointed out that much more needs to be done in order to go for a sufficient documentation of the syntax of the Vedda language and in this regard, noted that while the present study was limited to some of the main clause (clauses that can stand alone as a sentence) phenomena, things could differ in the case of embedded clauses (a clause used in the middle of another clause or simply a group of words that includes a subject and a verb, and which is within a main clause, usually marked by commas), and that therefore, an important area to be researched is the embedded periphery. Ananda also observed that there are other syntactic phenomena to be covered pertaining to the Vedda language. These include PRO (is a pronominal determiner phrase without phonological content) and control (a construction in which the understood subject of a given predicate is determined by some expression in the context), exceptional case marking (ECM – the subject of an embedded infinitival verb seems to appear in a superordinate clause and, if it is a pronoun, is unexpectedly marked with object case morphology), subjacency (a general syntactic locality constraint on movement which specifies restrictions placed on movement and regards it as a strictly local process) and island violations (an island is a term in syntactic theory which refers to a clause or structure from which a word cannot be moved and island constraints are restrictions of movement rules by which some words or constructions or structures cannot be moved out from islands), extra-position (a mechanism of syntax that alters the word order in such a manner that a relatively heavy constituent appears to the right of its canonical position), morphology-syntax interface, movement possibilities and corresponding semantic and pragmatic readings.
PHOTO © Sergio Carbajo and SayLluiiis
Document Vedda syntax to compose holistic grammar – Linguist
10 Jun 2021
Document Vedda syntax to compose holistic grammar – Linguist
10 Jun 2021