A Word on Konkani accents

 

A Word on Konkani accents

 Shrikant G. Talageri

 

I get a bit tired of unnecessary and superfluous combative interaction with people who compulsively criticize for the heck of it, and who do it not on the basis of any genuine point but simply because their textbookworm instincts fail to allow them to understand what I am writing if it is outside the purview of their textbooks. One such critic is the twitter contributor whose name appears to be Sameer, but who, by his claims of "shattering" my article on the Elephant in the IE debate, has earned the tongue-in-cheek title (at least in my eyes) of the "Shatterer". After lying low for some time, the much-battered-and-shattered Sameer seems to be at it again, doing what he does best: textbook quoting. I thought I was free of such textbook-based attacks, but apparently it is not to be.

After exhausting (and losing) all his weapons in the field of Rigvedic analysis, he now trains his guns on my article "Is or Was Konkani a Dialect of Marathi". And as he probably does not know the Konkani language at all (and certainly not the Chitrapur Saraswat Konkani that I have analyzed in my article) ─ and, in any case, the features of Konkani that my research have uncovered were not noticed even by Konkani speakers before I pointed them out: not even by the late SM Katre, considered one of the foremost linguists in India, and himself a Chitrapur Saraswat who actually wrote books on the Konkani language ─ it is not likely that he could have uncovered any linguistic mistakes in my article.

But he chooses to speak as an authority in respect of my findings on the tonal/pitch accent system in Konkani by quoting (what else?) textbook analyses of Vedic accents!

The following three consecutive tweets by him dated 29/3/2023 have been brought to my notice:

1. In the first tweet, he quotes textbook cases of Vedic accentuation, showing where in one instance we get "udātta matching udātta" and in another "udātta matching anudātta" to show that Konkani accents do not match Vedic accents tone for tone.

But nowhere in my articles or books have I claimed that Konkani replicates a high tonal accent (udātta) in words where Vedic has a high tonal accent and a low tonal accent (anudātta) in words where Vedic has a low tonal accent. As I did not think I would have to argue on this point with anyone (and the truth of Konkani accents can be verified by anyone only on hearing the Konkani words as they are actually pronounced), I did not repeat all this in every instance where I wrote about Konkani accents. But this is what I had written on the subject in my very first book in 1993: "Moreover, it must be noted that while the three-accent system was lost even in later Classical Sanskrit, it is still found in the Konkani language (spoken at present on the West Coast but originating in Kashmir) — how far the three accents of Konkani correspond to the three accents of Vedic and proto-Indo-European can be a matter for study, but Konkani also undoubtedly "reflects, albeit in somewhat changed form, an ancient Indo-European principle"".

What he fails to note is that I have merely written that Konkani preserves the three-accent system as in PIE, Vedic and Greek. And later on in the article I have gone into much more detail on the varied occurrences of the three pitch accents in Konkani, even giving the analogy of a string held taut or loose, and a rubber band stretched tightly, to try to illustrate the three tones in Konkani (based on Konkani phonetic rules and not on Vedic phonetic rules or with any claim that Konkani accents follow Vedic accents word-for-word).

Later I have similarly shown the complex nature of inflectional verbal-form formation preserved in Konkani, as in Vedic or Sanskrit inflectional formation ─ Konkani being the only modern Indian language preserving that kind of complex inflection ─ but again based on the study of Konkani inflectional features and not as a diachronic linguistic study of how Sanskrit inflection got carried over into Konkani inflection form-for-form).

2. Then he goes on to give his own judgment on the possible nature of the tones in Konkani:

But what he is writing is not something unknown to me, or not explained by or referred to by me in my first book.

Whom am I quoting when I write: "Konkani also undoubtedly "reflects, albeit in somewhat changed form, an ancient Indo-European principle.""?

I am quoting Lockwood, who wrote (and I quoted the full quote one paragraph earlier in my book): "About Lithuanian, Lockwood points out that it is "particularly conservative in these matters. It not only preserves the free accent of the parent tongue, but by distinguishing acute and circumflex intonation, it reflects, albeit in somewhat changed form, an ancient Indo-European principle."". The Lithuanian language belongs to the Baltic branch (in respect of which branch, the above tweet mentions the "new metatonic processes" which result in the "somewhat changed form" of the original PIE/Vedic/Greek tonal accents). In fact, as I pointed out in the same book: "Proto-Indo-European, as reconstructed by philologists, had a free pitch-accent, and Lock-wood points out that Vedic also had a free pitch-accent. Ancient Greek had a pitch-accent, but it was not a free accent. Lockwood points out that "the accent was not completely free, as it could not occur further back than the third syllable from the end." Lithuanian had a free accent, but it was not a pitch-accent. Lock-wood points out that "the accent is predominantly one of stress."". Konkani tonal accent, in contrast to Lithuanian, is a pitch-accent as in PIE and Vedic!

3. Then he points out where my conclusion is apparently "not supported by the data", as if he is well-versed in all the data pertaining to Konkani accents:

His comment is totally incomprehensible. I defy him to show where, anywhere in the article he cites or in any other previous article or book, I have ever written that "Konkani preserves svarita as highest pitch".  In fact, in the very page from my article he shows in his tweet, I have written (please check his actual tweet above): "the svarit accent is a rare middle tonal accent found only in some words or grammatical forms".

One more long and technical textbook tweet follows on the non-tonal development of the original Vedic accent in the pre-Marathi Prakrit, which does not concern my study on the actual three-accent system actually prevalent in Konkani, so I will not comment on that..

To end: even if the tone of my above words may not have indicated this, on the whole I must admit I find it genuinely nice to know that someone is actually reading and trying to analyze my work on Konkani accents, and perhaps should be grateful to Sameer for having given me a chance to elaborate on the subject!