nijakku halegannaDa vyAkaraNa entahadu? (ನಿಜಕ್ಕೂ ಹಳೆಗನ್ನಡ ವ್ಯಾಕರಣ ಎಂತಹದು?)

Author: D. N. Shankara Bhat (ಡಿ. ಎನ್. ಶಂಕರ ಭಟ್) | Published: 2005 | Language: Kannada

Outline

  • Chapter 1 — Introduction (ಪೀಠಿಕೆ): The purpose of grammar; two types of grammars (prescriptive vs. descriptive); the grammar of Old Kannada; existing grammars and their shortcomings; the structure of this book.
  • Chapter 2 — Use of Technical Terms (ಪಾರಿಭಾಷಿಕ ಪದಗಳ ಬಳಕೆ): How Sanskrit grammatical terms (lopa, āgama, ādesha, kāraka) were incorrectly applied to Old Kannada grammar; the resulting errors and confusions; a call for Kannada-native technical terminology.
  • Chapter 3 — Use of Phonemes (ವರ್ಣಗಳ ಬಳಕೆ): Old Kannada’s phoneme inventory versus Sanskrit’s; the misapplication of Sanskrit phonological ordering; rules of phonological combination (sandhi) in Old Kannada and how they differ from Sanskrit sandhi.
  • Chapter 4 — Parts of Speech (ಪದವರ್ಗಗಳು): Old Kannada’s word-class system; the structure of nominal clusters; pronouns and person words; borrowed words and their grammatical integration into Kannada.
  • Chapter 5 — Internal Structure of Words (ಪದಗಳ ಒಳರಚನೆ): Old Kannada’s agglutinative suffix system; the structure of compound words; how Old Kannada compounding differs from Sanskrit samāsa taxonomy.
  • Chapter 6 — Nature of Nouns (ನಾಮಪದಗಳ ಸ್ವರೂಪ): Old Kannada noun classification; the distinct uninflected adjective class (guṇapada) unique to Kannada; problems in existing grammars’ noun descriptions.
  • Chapter 7 — Gender and Number (ಲಿಂಗ ಮತ್ತು ವಚನಗಳು): Old Kannada’s semantic gender system versus Sanskrit’s lexically-arbitrary gender; the separate plural suffix gaḷ versus Sanskrit’s fused case-number endings.
  • Chapter 8 — Case Suffixes and Semantic Roles (ವಿಭಕ್ತಿಗಳು ಮತ್ತು ಕಾರಕಗಳು): Old Kannada’s agglutinative case system; caseless nouns in Old Kannada syntax; the mismatch between Kannada case suffixes and Sanskrit’s kāraka theory; specific errors in the classical grammarians’ treatment of each case.
  • Chapter 9 — Verb Forms (ಕ್ರಿಯಾರೂಪಗಳು): The agglutinative structure of Old Kannada verb morphology; tense and aspect suffixes; negation; events versus states.
  • Chapter 10 — Sentence Connectives (ವಾಕ್ಯಗಳ ಜೋಡಣೆ): Old Kannada’s system of converb and participial forms used to connect clauses; comparison with Sanskrit’s kṛdanta forms; the old grammarians’ failures in this domain.
  • Chapter 11 — Embedded Clauses (ವಿಷಯವಾಕ್ಯಗಳು): Old Kannada’s participial relative clause system (without relative pronouns); comparison with Sanskrit’s relative pronoun constructions; complement clauses and existential sentences.
  • Chapter 12 — Conclusion (ಮುಕ್ತಾಯ): A systematic critique of all existing Old Kannada grammars; the apparent complexity of Old Kannada grammar as an artefact of wrong analysis; a call for grammars built on Dravidian typology.

Summary

Nijakku Halegannada Vyakarana Entahadu? (“What is Old Kannada Grammar Really Like?”) is D. N. Shankara Bhat’s systematic scholarly investigation into why every existing grammar of Old Kannada is fundamentally flawed. The book’s central argument is precise and devastating: the classical grammarians of Old Kannada — most importantly Keshiraja, whose Shabdamanidarpana (c. 1260 CE) is the most authoritative classical Kannada grammar — were trained in Sanskrit grammatical science (the Paninian tradition) and applied Sanskrit’s analytical framework to a language whose grammar is of a completely different typological type. Old Kannada is a Dravidian language with agglutinative morphology, separate plural and case suffixes, uninflected adjectives, participial relative clauses without relative pronouns, and SOV word order — structurally opposite to Sanskrit’s fusional Indo-Aryan structure. When Keshiraja described Old Kannada using Sanskrit terms like lopa (elision), āgama (insertion), ādesha (substitution), kāraka (semantic role), and vibhakti (case ending), he was not merely borrowing convenient labels — he was importing a conceptual architecture that actively misrepresents how Old Kannada works.

The historical explanation for these errors is not personal inadequacy on Keshiraja’s part but structural inevitability: the discipline of comparative linguistics, which would later make clear the typological gulf between Indo-Aryan and Dravidian languages, did not exist when he wrote. Keshiraja and his contemporaries worked in an intellectual world where Sanskrit grammar was the pinnacle of linguistic analysis and the natural model for any grammatical description. Applying it to Kannada was not a failure of intelligence; it was the application of the best available framework to a domain for which that framework was unsuited. Bhat’s book is notable for making this critique without animus: it is a diagnosis of a structural problem, not an indictment of the ancient scholars who could not have known better.

The book proceeds chapter by chapter through every major domain of grammar — phonology, technical terminology, word classes, word structure, nouns, gender and number, case, verbs, clause connectives, and embedded clauses — demonstrating in each domain both what Old Kannada actually does and how the existing grammars misrepresent it. The conclusion is that modern Kannada grammar, which has inherited all of these foundational errors from the classical tradition, requires complete reconstruction on the basis of Dravidian typological evidence. This is not a peripheral scholarly question: a language’s grammar shapes how it is taught, how it is standardized, and how its speakers are evaluated in formal contexts. Getting Old Kannada grammar right is therefore both a linguistic and a social obligation.

Critical Takeaways

  • Dravidian vs. Indo-Aryan typology is the core issue: The errors in Old Kannada grammatical description are not random but systematic — they all flow from applying an Indo-Aryan (Sanskrit) framework to a Dravidian language. Understanding this typological divide is the key to understanding both what the ancient grammarians got wrong and what a correct description would look like. This is Bhat’s most important methodological contribution: he frames the problem as a typological mismatch, not a collection of individual errors.
  • Why classical Kannada grammarians failed: Keshiraja’s failures were not personal but intellectual-historical. Pre-comparative linguistics, there was no way to know that Dravidian and Indo-Aryan grammatical structures are fundamentally different in kind. The Paninian tradition was the most sophisticated linguistic analysis available; using it for Kannada was the natural choice. Bhat’s critique is therefore both incisive and respectful — he exposes the errors without dismissing the scholars who made them.
  • The prescriptive/descriptive distinction matters deeply: Ancient grammarians were largely prescriptive (telling people how to write correctly in the Sanskrit-influenced literary register) rather than descriptive (recording what the language actually does). Bhat insists on purely descriptive grammar for Old Kannada, since it is a classical literary language that cannot be changed retroactively. Every prescription dressed as description is a distortion.
  • Implications for modern school grammars: Modern Kannada school grammars have inherited the classical tradition’s Sanskrit-derived framework virtually unchanged. Students learning Kannada grammar are therefore learning a system designed for Sanskrit, not for the language they actually speak and write. This has practical consequences for how Kannada literacy is taught and assessed — another connection between grammatical theory and social equity that Bhat makes explicit.
  • Relation to Bhat’s other reform-oriented work: This book is continuous with Bhat’s broader project. Kannadakke Mahaprana Yake Beda? argues that Kannada script should be simplified to reflect how Kannada is actually spoken (not how Sanskrit is written). Nijakku Halegannada Vyakarana Entahadu? argues that Kannada grammar should be described in terms of how Kannada actually works (not how Sanskrit grammar works). Both books challenge Sanskrit prestige as a distorting force in Kannada linguistic scholarship; both call for Kannada to be understood on its own terms.
  • Significance for Kannada linguistic identity: The deepest implication of the book is that Kannada — ancient, rich, and distinct — has never been accurately described in its own grammatical terms. The language has existed for at least fifteen centuries, generated extraordinary literature, and developed a sophisticated grammatical structure that is entirely Dravidian in character. Recognizing this, and building grammars that reflect it, is both a scholarly responsibility and a form of cultural justice.

My Takeaways

  1. This book is the most technically demanding in Bhat’s corpus, requiring familiarity with both Sanskrit grammar (particularly Paninian categories) and the basics of Dravidian linguistics to fully appreciate its arguments. But the core insight — that applying the grammar of one language type to a language of a completely different type produces systematic misdescription — is intuitive and widely generalizable. Anyone who has seen English grammar categories (subject, predicate, object, active/passive voice) applied to a language that organizes sentences differently will recognize the problem immediately.

  2. The parallel between this book’s argument and the Eke romanization system is illuminating. Eke is a romanization of Kannada designed to reflect Kannada’s actual phonology — not Sanskrit’s phonology. Bhat argues in Kannadakke Mahaprana Yake Beda? that Kannada script should be simplified to reflect Kannada phonology; this book argues that Kannada grammar should be described to reflect Kannada grammatical structure. The Eke project in this repository implements Bhat’s descriptive/native philosophy at the writing-system level — and this book is its grammatical counterpart.

  3. The DNS Bhat methodology used throughout this repository — preferring native Dravidian vocabulary over Sanskrit borrowings in Kannada text — is directly grounded in the arguments of this book. If Old Kannada grammar is genuinely Dravidian, then native Dravidian vocabulary is not just aesthetically preferable but more grammatically natural: the words fit the grammar that uses them. Sanskrit loanwords, however common and useful, are guests operating in a grammatical system that is not their own.

  4. The specific demonstration about the plural suffix gaḷ — which Keshiraja called an āgama (meaningless insertion) because Sanskrit encodes plural information in the case ending and has no separate plural morpheme — is one of the clearest examples in the entire book. Calling a morpheme with clear independent meaning (plural number) a “meaningless insertion” is not a minor error; it is a fundamental misidentification. And it cascades: once gaḷ is an āgama, Keshiraja must then say that avu is an ādesha substituting for that āgama — producing a rule that is structurally incoherent. One misidentification begets a chain of errors. This is the book’s central demonstration at its clearest.

Footnotes