Exploring Linguistic Phenomena in Judeo-Malayalam
Languages behave in fun and quirky ways and Judeo-Malayalam is no exception!
In the previous article ‘The Sounds of Judeo-Malayalam’, I documented and explored the linguistic sound inventory of Judeo-Malayalam, explained the linguistic method behind doing this, and showed why it’s important: we were able to identify, purely through sounds, the unique character of Judeo-Malayalam. This data was collected using a 400-word wordlist that was actually comprised of many grammar words as well as many cultural words. In this follow-up article, I’ll be looking at the most interesting of these categories to illustrate more linguistic phenomena in Judeo-Malayalam that is only visible at a word or grammar level.
Greetings
From the data collected, it appears that Judeo-Malayalam speakers use Malayalam and Hebrew greetings interchangeably, giving both of these influences equal presence in their language. These greetings are “namaskaram” and “shalom” respectively.
Pronouns
Pronouns in Judeo-Malayalam are, interestingly, somewhat distinct from Malayalam and Hebrew. The table below shows the Judeo-Malayalam pronouns collected from Thapan written using the IPA symbols which we discussed in the previous article.
Hebrew is a pro-drop language, meaning they don’t actually have to say the pronoun in the sentence if the relevant information about gender, number, and person can be determined from agreement on the verb. This does not happen in Judeo-Malayalam. Looking at its similarities to Malayalam, there is still a three-way person distinction between first, second, and third as there is in English (“I”, “You”, and “They”) because the first-, second-, and third-person pronouns differ. Similarly, there is still a two-way number distinction between singular and plural as there is in English (“I”, “We”) because the singular and plural pronouns differ. There is also a three-way gender distinction between masculine, feminine, and neutral as there is in English (“He”, “She”, “It”) because the masculine, feminine, and neutral pronouns differ too.
Where the languages seem to differ, however, is in case. Case refers to the “role” of the pronoun in the sentence: in English, we have the subject case where the pronoun is, typically, the agent of the action (“I petted the dog”). We also have the object case where the pronoun is the one affected by the action (“The human petted me”). Finally, we also have the possessive case, where the pronoun is the one owning something (“My house”). There are no case markers in Hebrew but there are case markers in Judeo-Malayalam: subject and object pronouns are the same, as seen in the table, but the possessive case is formed by the suffix /-deɪ/ or /-ɭɖeɪ/ to these pronouns. This differs greatly to Malayalam where all three cases are distinct.
The reason that there are two variations in the possessive suffix is because the sounds /ɹ/ and /d/ cannot co-occur: looking at the possessive forms of the third-person singular and plural pronouns and the first-person plural pronoun, a /ɭ/ has to be inserted between the two sounds. This does not happen in every other phoneme; none of them have a /ɹ/ and /d/ sound next to each other. Thus, this must be the trigger for this phenomenon. Even more interestingly, the insertion of a retroflex sound actually affects the /d/ in the suffix, making this sound become retroflex too: /ɖ/. This is an example of consonant harmony, where a sound changes to become like another sound, usually to benefit the speaker’s tongue movements in speech.
Articles
Judeo-Malayalam only has one article, the indefinite article: /ʌdu/. In English, the indefinite article is “a” or “an”. We also have a definite article: “the”, and Judeo-Malayalam does not have this. This is different from Hebrew and Malayalam because both of these languages do have definite articles.
Co-/Sub-Ordination and Negation
Judeo-Malayalam shares an interesting structural similarity with Malayalam: they are both agglutinative. This means that phrases and even sentences can be expressed with a single word; not multiple words, as the English sentences here required. It is clear that, in both languages, multiple sentences can occur together in a single word because the words we use to combine sentences, such as “and” and “if”, are suffixes in Judeo-Malayalam. The same is true of negation, with words such as “no” and “not” also being suffixes in Judeo-Malayalam. Negation can manifest itself as prefixes in English, such as “un-“, but “no” and “not” are separate words in English.
Human Body
Sometimes, when looking at the words in a language, you spot quirky differences. An example of this is found in the words for parts of the human body in Judeo-Malayalam: they have the same word for “leg” and “foot”: /kaːllɘː/. Why do they not distinguish the two parts? Do they consider the whole leg from thigh to foot as the same thing? Perhaps this relates to a perception that, in practicality, they are the same: you can’t hunt or travel without both. Being able to ask these questions, and hypothesising about how speakers captured and perceived the world through their language, is one of the most interesting aspects of linguistics.
Verbs
Returning to suffixes, all dictionary forms of Judeo-Malayalam verbs are formed with the suffix /-uga/ or /-əʊga/. Variation between the two is, again, due to the sound environment: if the sound before the suffix is /ɖ/, /t/, /ð/, or /ɪ/, the suffix will be /-uga/; if it’s /n/, /tʰ/, /kʰ/, /i/, /l/, or /ɹ/, the suffix will be /-əʊga/. Unfortunately, this is not a “clean” predictor (it never is in Linguistics): not every verb is accounted for by this rule as sometimes the same sound can occur before either suffix, such as /j/. Thus, this is the closest rule we can generate to predicting this variation.
Modal Auxiliary Verbs
This is, perhaps, the most interesting phenomenon I found in Judeo-Malayalam. In many languages, auxiliary verbs can be used to alter the power of a verb to match a speaker’s intentions. For example, they can express possibility, like “may” and “might”, and these are called epistemic modals. They can also express obligation, like “should” and “shall” do, and these are called deontic modals. There are also modal verbs that can express ability, like “can” and “could” do, and these are dynamic modals. As you can see, English has multiple words that can be categorised under each type; Judeo-Malayalam, however, has just one suffix (keeping to the agglutinative structure) for each type of modality: /-aɪðɪ̆ʔkʰʲjum/ for epistemic modality, /-ʊm/ for deontic modality, and /-pʰaːʔtʰum/ for dynamic modality. Malayalam similarly uses suffixes, but excitingly Judeo-Malayalam appears to use its own suffixes and makes a distinction between epistemic and dynamic modality which Malayalam doesn’t.
Weather
This is another rather fun observation about how languages capture and organise the world. It appears that, in Judeo-Malayalam, any weather associated with clouds has the prefix /mː/, such as rain (/mma˞ɹaː/), cloudy (/mmeɪgɾan/), fog (/mmaɲjeː/), and snow (/mmaɲjeː/).
Missing Words
I’ve grouped these together because they demonstrate another linguistic approach we can take: what words didn’t show up in Judeo-Malayalam? A lot of these, of course, relate to objects in the world: if you don’t encounter something, how can you name it? This is why many words relating to flora and fauna don’t exist in Judeo-Malayalam; its early speakers, prior to contact with other languages, never encountered such flora and thus never had a need to name it. Such flora and fauna include lice, shrews, tapirs, pines, conifers, spruces, junipers, laurels, maples, alders, and willows. A rather interesting gap, however, is the word autumn: despite having words for spring, summer, and winter, Judeo-Malayalam does not have a word for autumn. Does this suggest that Judeo-Malayalam speakers did not find autumn a useful distinction to make in the seasons of the year?
Conclusion
In this article we’ve looked at a lot of different linguistic phenomena and different types of linguistic phenomena in Judeo-Malayalam that highlights its individuality from Hebrew and Malayalam as well as its ties to Malayalam. In doing so, we’ve also looked at even more aspects of Linguistics and linguistic methods as a whole to find out how unique Judeo-Malayalam is and how, ultimately, it is so much more than just a variety of Malayalam.
