kannaDakke bEku kannaDaddE vyAkaraNa
Kannada Needs Its Own Grammar
Title (Kannada): ಕನ್ನಡಕ್ಕೆ ಬೇಕು ಕನ್ನಡದ್ದೇ ವ್ಯಾಕರಣ Title (Eke): kannaDakke bEku kannaDaddE vyAkaraNa Author: D. N. Shankara Bhat (ಡಿ. ಎನ್. ಶಂಕರ ಭಟ್) Year: 2000 (1st edition); 2013 (7th revised edition — this OCR) Publisher: D. N. Shankara Bhat (author-published); Navakarnataaka Prakashan (distributor), Bengaluru Pages: ~245 (7th edition) Language: Kannada (standard orthography) Topic: Linguistics — the case for a Kannada-native grammatical tradition; critical examination of existing grammar frameworks applied to Kannada
Book Overview
This book makes the foundational argument that Kannada needs — and deserves — a grammar written in its own terms, not borrowed from Sanskrit, Latin, or English grammatical traditions. The author opens the preface with two stated purposes: to show what kind of grammar should be taught to high school students, and to show university researchers what direction would make their grammar scholarship productive. He argues that the grammar textbooks currently used in schools teach unnecessary and incorrect material — applying Sanskrit categories to a Dravidian language that works according to entirely different structural principles — and that this wastes students’ time and produces no genuine understanding of how Kannada actually works.
The book is organised as a guided tour through the major domains of Kannada grammar — phonology, word classes, morphology, compounding, gender and number, case, pronouns, verb forms — demonstrating in each domain that the Sanskrit or European categories applied by existing grammars either distort or simply fail to describe what Kannada does. Three grammatical traditions are identified: the Sanskrit-based tradition (Keshiraja’s Shabdamanidarshana and its descendants), the European missionary tradition of the 19th century (grammars written in English following Latin/Greek templates), and the 20th-century American descriptive tradition. All three, the author argues, share the same fundamental failure: they impose an external framework on Kannada rather than discovering the framework that Kannada speakers actually carry in their minds.
The book is intended for grammarians, teachers, university researchers, and informed readers interested in Kannada language. It was first published in 2000 and sold out within a year; by the seventh revised edition (2013) it had become a standard reference in the argument for Dravidian-native linguistics. The author’s method throughout is to present the standard textbook rule or category, then demonstrate with Kannada examples that the rule either does not apply, applies differently, or requires a completely different formulation when viewed from the perspective of what Kannada speakers actually do.
Table of Contents
- Chapter 1 — Preview (ಮುನ್ನೋಟ)
- Chapter 2 — Sandhi Rules (ಸೇರಿಕೆಯ ನಿಯಮಗಳು)
- Chapter 3 — Word Classes (ಪದವಗ್ರಗಳು)
- Chapter 4 — Internal Structure of Words (ಪದಗಳ ಒಳರಚನೆ)
- Chapter 5 — Compounds (ಸಮಾಸಗಳು)
- Chapter 6 — Gender and Number (ಲಿಂಗ ಮತ್ತು ವಚನಗಳು)
- Chapter 7 — Case Markers and Karaka (ವಿಭಕ್ತಿಗಳು ಮತ್ತು ಕಾರಕಗಳು)
- Chapter 8 — Case Suffixes (ವಿಭಕ್ತಿಗಳು)
- Chapter 9 — Case Alternation (ವಿಭಕ್ತಿಪಲ್ಲಟ)
- Chapter 10 — Pronouns and Numerals (ಸರ್ವನಾಮಗಳು ಮತ್ತು ಎಣಿಕೆಯ ಪದಗಳು)
- Chapter 11 — Verb Forms (ಕ್ರಿಯಾರೂಪಗಳು)
- Chapter 12 — Conclusion (ಮುಕ್ತಾಯ)
- Key Terms Glossary
Chapter 1 — Preview
(ಮುನ್ನೋಟ)
The opening chapter establishes the book’s thesis through an account of Kannada’s grammar-writing tradition. Over the past thousand years, more than a hundred grammar books and articles have been written about Kannada — in Kannada itself, and in English, Sanskrit, Marathi, Hindi, and Russian — spanning sutra-style treatises, commentaries, textbooks, and research monographs. The author identifies three grammatical traditions in this body of work: the Sanskrit tradition (Keshiraja, Bhattagalanka, and most school textbooks), the 19th-century European missionary tradition (grammars of Modern Kannada written in English following Latin/Greek templates), and the 20th-century American descriptive tradition. The key common failure of all three, he argues, is that none attempts to discover Kannada’s own grammatical structure from within — each begins with the categories of a foreign language and tries to fit Kannada into them.
The author distinguishes sharply between unconscious grammatical knowledge (the rules stored in every speaker’s brain below the threshold of awareness) and explicit grammatical knowledge (the rules written in grammar books). Every Kannada speaker already possesses the former perfectly — no fluent speaker ever makes case-suffix errors — but cannot describe those rules explicitly. The job of a grammarian is to make that tacit knowledge explicit. The chapter argues that Modern Kannada has its own distinct grammar, different from both Old Kannada grammar and from Sanskrit, Latin, or English grammar, and that Kannada grammarians’ first duty is to discover and describe that Modern Kannada grammar specifically, not to impose Sanskrit or European frameworks. The chapter closes by outlining the book’s structure: each subsequent chapter takes one domain of Kannada grammar and shows what goes wrong when foreign categories are applied, and what a Kannada-native description would look like instead.
Chapter 2 — Sandhi Rules
(ಸೇರಿಕೆಯ ನಿಯಮಗಳು)
This chapter examines the treatment of sandhi (phonological changes at morpheme and word boundaries) in Kannada school grammar textbooks. The author shows that textbooks typically present Sanskrit sandhi rules first — rules governing vowel coalescence, consonant assimilation, and related phenomena in Sanskrit — and then attempt to find Kannada examples that fit those Sanskrit rules. When Kannada examples cannot be found, the textbooks often supply Sanskrit loanwords as illustrations of “Kannada sandhi.” This, the author argues, is methodologically inverted: the task is to describe what Kannada speakers actually do at phonological junctions, not to demonstrate that Kannada obeys Sanskrit phonological rules.
The chapter surveys the actual differences between Sanskrit and Kannada phonological systems, noting that the vowel inventory, the consonant inventory, and the phonological environments where changes occur differ substantially between the two languages. Section 2.6 provides parallel lists of Sanskrit vowels, Kannada vowels, and consonants, illustrating how the traditional eight-vowel Sanskrit scheme (a, aa, i, ii, u, uu, e, ai, o, au, etc.) maps imperfectly onto the Kannada vowel system, which distinguishes short e/o from long E/O in ways Sanskrit does not. The chapter concludes that sandhi rules, like all grammatical rules, need to be derived empirically from Kannada data rather than derived from Sanskrit theory.
Chapter 3 — Word Classes
(ಪದವಗ್ರಗಳು)
Chapter 3 addresses how Kannada words are categorised into classes (noun, verb, qualifier/adjective, and others). The author argues that the three primary classes — noun (ಹೆಸರುಪದ), verb (ಎಸಕಪದ), and qualifier (ಪರಿಚೆಪದ / ಗುಣಪದ) — are independently defined by their syntactic behaviour in Kannada sentences, and that this three-way distinction is typologically consistent with Dravidian languages generally. The chapter examines how qualifiers function as modifiers and how nouns can serve as modifiers too, but that these two modifier functions are grammatically distinct. Sections on compound-phrase construction (ಪದಕಂತೆ) show how noun-phrase structure in Kannada operates differently from Sanskrit’s agreement-based nominal phrase, where adjectives must agree in gender, number, and case with their head nouns. In Kannada, qualifiers are invariant — they never inflect for gender, number, or case.
The chapter also introduces the distinction between tatsama words (Sanskrit loans adopted with minimal phonological change) and tadbhava words (Sanskrit-derived words that have been extensively phonologically nativised). This distinction is important because tatsama words may carry Sanskrit grammatical properties (internal structure, compound-membership patterns) into Kannada, creating a two-tier morphology. The author shows that existing grammar textbooks conflate this distinction, treating tatsama-heavy formal registers as normative Kannada and thereby misrepresenting the language’s actual structure.
Chapter 4 — Internal Structure of Words
(ಪದಗಳ ಒಳರಚನೆ)
This chapter analyses morphology — the internal structure of Kannada words — beginning with the key distinction between naming (ಹೆಸರಿಸುವುದು) and describing (ವರ್ಣಿಸುವುದು). A noun names a referent and carries a cluster of properties associated with that referent; a qualifier selects and predicates a single property. This distinction has direct consequences for morphology because nouns and qualifiers form compounds in different ways and combine with affixes on different terms. The chapter contrasts compound words (ಜೋಡುಪದ) with noun phrases (ಪದಕಂತೆ), showing that the two are structurally distinct even when superficially similar in surface form.
The traditional Sanskrit classification of affixes into krit (suffixes attached to verbal roots to derive nouns) and taddhita (suffixes attached to nouns or adjectives to derive new nouns or adjectives) is examined and shown to require significant modification for Kannada. The chapter pays special attention to the -ike/-ige suffix (ಇಕೆ/ಇಗೆ), the most productive nominalising suffix in Modern Kannada, which has no direct Sanskrit parallel and whose productivity and polysemy are characteristic of native Kannada morphology rather than borrowed Sanskrit morphology. The chapter also covers the formation of verbs (using causative -isu and other productive patterns) and qualifiers, demonstrating that each word class has its own characteristic set of derivational processes.
Chapter 5 — Compounds
(ಸಮಾಸಗಳು)
Chapter 5 provides the book’s most detailed grammatical analysis, examining the Sanskrit samasa (compound) taxonomy and its application — or misapplication — to Kannada. The traditional Sanskrit taxonomy identifies six or eight compound types: tatpurusha, karmadharaya, dvandva, bahuvrihi, avyayibhava, dvandva, and two additional types sometimes recognised for Kannada (kriyasamasa and gamaka samasa). The author works through each type systematically, showing that Sanskrit compound formation is fundamentally different from Kannada compound formation in four key respects: Sanskrit compounds delete case suffixes at the internal junction (the second member appears in its stem form), while Kannada compounds typically do not; Sanskrit allows a much wider range of internal syntactic relations to be expressed in compounds; the concept of “subject” or topic-prominence that organises Sanskrit compounds does not apply to Kannada; and the set of Dravidian-native compound types visible in Modern Kannada does not map onto the Sanskrit taxonomy.
The chapter proposes a Kannada-native classification of compounds based on the word class of the first member: noun-first compounds (ಹೆಸರುಪದ ಜೋಡುಪದ), verb-first compounds (ಕ್ರಿಯಾಪದ ಜೋಡುಪದ), and qualifier-first compounds (ಗುಣಪದ ಜೋಡುಪದ). This classification reflects how Kannada compounds actually work — specifically, that the head is almost always the rightmost element and that the internal relation between the two members is constrained by the semantic categories of the first member in ways that the Sanskrit taxonomy cannot capture.
Chapter 6 — Gender and Number
(ಲಿಂಗ ಮತ್ತು ವಚನಗಳು)
This chapter examines gender (ಲಿಂಗ) and number (ವಚನ) in Kannada and shows that both categories operate on fundamentally different principles from Sanskrit. Sanskrit has three grammatical genders (masculine, feminine, neuter) that are partly arbitrary and not consistently derivable from natural gender; Sanskrit adjectives and demonstratives must agree with their head nouns in gender, number, and case. Kannada, by contrast, has a two-way distinction between rational/human and non-rational/non-human (ಮಾನವ vs. ಅಮಾನವ) that is semantically motivated, not grammatically arbitrary. This distinction controls only certain grammatical phenomena — notably pronoun selection and some verb agreement suffixes — and qualifiers do not agree in gender with their head nouns at all.
On number, Kannada distinguishes singular from plural, but the marking of this distinction is far less obligatory than in Sanskrit or English. Kannada noun phrases often leave number unmarked (the context making it clear), and the rules governing when plural marking is required differ from both Sanskrit plurality rules and English countability rules. The author argues that imposing the Sanskrit three-gender framework on Kannada produces a systematic misrepresentation: it makes Kannada appear to have grammatical gender agreements that it does not have, and obscures the semantically principled two-way distinction that Kannada does make.
Chapter 7 — Case Markers and Karaka
(ವಿಭಕ್ತಿಗಳು ಮತ್ತು ಕಾರಕಗಳು)
This chapter examines the Sanskrit karaka (ಕಾರಕ) system — the traditional semantic classification of nominal participants in relation to a verbal action (agent, patient, instrument, beneficiary, source, location) — and asks whether this system is applicable to Kannada grammar. The Sanskrit karaka system was developed within Panini’s framework to account for the relationship between semantic roles and the selection of case suffixes; a single semantic role (karaka) may be marked by different case suffixes in different syntactic contexts, and a single case suffix may mark different semantic roles. The chapter shows that Kannada case suffixes (ವಿಭಕ್ತಿ) relate to semantic roles in ways that are similar in broad outline but differ substantially in detail.
The author argues that Kannada does not need the karaka framework because Kannada organises its sentences differently from Sanskrit. Specifically, the distinction between “subject” (nominative agent) and “topic” or “experiencer” is handled differently in Kannada, where a single nominative form can mark agents of transitive verbs, subjects of intransitive verbs, and experiencers of psychological states, while case alternations (see Chapter 9) handle the distinctions that Sanskrit handles through the karaka system. The chapter proposes that Kannada grammar should be described using notions derived from Kannada sentence structure rather than from the Sanskrit karaka inventory.
Chapter 8 — Case Suffixes
(ವಿಭಕ್ತಿಗಳು)
Chapter 8 provides a systematic description of Kannada case suffixes (ವಿಭಕ್ತಿ), showing how they differ from Sanskrit case suffixes in their form, their number, and their semantic range. Sanskrit is traditionally analysed as having eight cases (nominative, accusative, instrumental, dative, ablative, genitive, locative, vocative); Kannada grammarians have typically followed this eight-case scheme, but the author shows that many of the purported “Kannada cases” are either absent, merged, or operate on different semantic principles. The Kannada locative suffix -alli, for instance, covers semantic territory that Sanskrit distributes across locative and other case forms. The genitive suffix -a/-ina/-ra covers possession relations that Sanskrit handles through genitive agreement that requires modification of the first noun’s ending.
The chapter documents that case suffix selection in Kannada is sensitive to the animacy and rationality of the noun being marked: the dative suffix (-ige for rational nouns, -kke for non-rational nouns) illustrates how Kannada’s human/non-human distinction cuts through the case system. This is a Dravidian-native phenomenon with no parallel in Sanskrit case grammar, and its systematic treatment demonstrates why a Kannada-native grammatical description requires different categories from those borrowed from Sanskrit.
Chapter 9 — Case Alternation
(ವಿಭಕ್ತಿಪಲ್ಲಟ)
This chapter analyses case alternation (ವಿಭಕ್ತಿಪಲ್ಲಟ) — situations where the same noun appears with different case suffixes without a change in the verb, producing subtle differences in meaning or viewpoint. For example, ಅವನು ಊರಿಗೆ ಹೋದನು (“he went to the village,” with goal-marking dative) versus ಅವನು ಊರಿನಲ್ಲಿ ಹೋದನು (with a locative reading) differ not in the verb but in how the spatial relation is conceptualised. The chapter systematically catalogues the conditions under which case alternation occurs, grouping them into: cases involving completeness vs. partiality of the action; cases involving volitionality vs. compulsion; cases involving adjacency or proximity; and cases with additional semantic distinctions.
The chapter also examines case alternation in Sanskrit and argues that while Sanskrit has its own patterns of case alternation, they differ from Kannada’s in both the categories involved and the grammatical principles at stake. The chapter shows that treating Kannada case alternation through Sanskrit karaka categories produces a confused picture because the semantic distinctions that Kannada encodes through case alternation are not the same distinctions that Sanskrit encodes through its case alternation patterns.
Chapter 10 — Pronouns and Numerals
(ಸರ್ವನಾಮಗಳು ಮತ್ತು ಎಣಿಕೆಯ ಪದಗಳು)
Chapter 10 examines pronouns (ಸರ್ವನಾಮ) and numerals (ಎಣಿಕೆಯ ಪದ) in Kannada, showing that both categories differ structurally from their Sanskrit counterparts in ways that existing grammars misrepresent. The pronoun system in Kannada encodes a three-way distinction in the second and third persons: proximate (ಇವನು, ಇವಳು, ಇದು), medial (ಅವನು, ಅವಳು, ಅದು), and remote/respectful (ಅವರು). The traditional Sanskrit pronoun categories — which distinguish masculine/feminine/neuter and first/second/third person without a proximate/medial distance distinction — map poorly onto this system. The chapter also examines Kannada inclusive/exclusive distinctions in first-person plural pronouns, which have no Sanskrit parallel.
On numerals, the chapter shows that Kannada numeral words have a distinctive internal structure: numbers above ten are formed compositionally using a Dravidian base, and the way numerals interact with noun phrases (particularly in classifier constructions) follows Dravidian rather than Indo-Aryan typological patterns. Sanskrit numeral grammar, which requires complex agreement of the numeral with the head noun in gender and case, is entirely absent from Kannada; instead, Kannada numerals are syntactically uninflecting adjuncts.
Chapter 11 — Verb Forms
(ಕ್ರಿಯಾರೂಪಗಳು)
The penultimate chapter examines the Kannada verb system, which is the most complex and most distinctively Dravidian part of Kannada grammar. The chapter addresses tense (ಕಾಲ), showing that the traditional Sanskrit tense scheme (ten lakaras covering past, present, future, and various aspects and moods) cannot be applied to Kannada. Kannada distinguishes three tenses — past, present, and future — with the present/future distinction being aspectually complex, but the internal structure of these tenses is built on different morphological bases from Sanskrit. The chapter discusses the traditional Sanskrit concepts of parasmaipada and atmanepada (active and middle/reflexive verbal inflection) and shows that while these categories may have historical relevance for Old Kannada, they do not function as grammatical categories in Modern Kannada.
The chapter examines two further topics of major pedagogical significance: the negative verb forms (ಅಲ್ಲಗಳೆಯುವ ವಾಕ್ಯಗಳು) and interrogative verb forms (ಕೇಳುವ ವಾಕ್ಯಗಳು). In Kannada, negation and question formation are expressed through verb-internal morphological modifications (adding negative suffixes to the verb stem) rather than through auxiliary verbs or sentence-level operators. This is typologically characteristic of Dravidian languages and has no parallel in Sanskrit verbal grammar; existing textbooks that attempt to describe Kannada negation and interrogation through Sanskrit verbal categories systematically misrepresent how these constructions work.
Chapter 12 — Conclusion
(ಮುಕ್ತಾಯ)
The concluding chapter synthesises the book’s findings and draws out their implications for grammar teaching and university research. The author identifies the root cause of all the problems documented in Chapters 2–11: all three existing grammatical traditions (Sanskrit-based, European missionary, and American descriptive) began from the grammar of a non-Dravidian language and attempted to fit Kannada into that framework, rather than observing what Kannada speakers actually do and constructing categories from those observations. This methodological inversion has produced two centuries of grammar books that, at best, describe Sanskrit, Latin, or English grammar with Kannada examples, and at worst teach students incorrect rules about their own language.
The chapter calls for a new direction: high school grammar teaching should focus on Modern Kannada’s actual grammatical structure (the system students already carry in their minds), using Kannada examples throughout and building categories from those examples. University research should similarly begin from empirical observation of Modern Kannada data, using the existing body of Dravidian linguistics research as a comparative framework. The book ends with a bibliography (ಆಕರಸೂಚಿ) and a subject index (ವಿಷಯಸೂಚಿ).
Key Terms Glossary
| Kannada | English | Eke |
|---|---|---|
| ಸೊಲ್ಲರಿಮೆ | grammar / linguistics | sollarime |
| ಹೆಸರುಪದ | noun | hesaru pada |
| ಎಸಕಪದ | verb | esaka pada |
| ಪರಿಚೆಪದ / ಗುಣಪದ | qualifier / adjective | parice pada / guNa pada |
| ಜೋಡುಪದ | compound word | jODu pada |
| ಪದಕಂತೆ | noun phrase / word-bundle | pada kante |
| ಒಟ್ಟು | affix / suffix | oTTu |
| ವ್ಯಾಕರಣ | grammar | vyAkaraNa |
| ಸೇರಿಕೆ | sandhi / phonological joining | serike |
| ಸಮಾಸ | compound (Sanskrit term) | samAsa |
| ತತ್ಸಮ | Sanskrit loan (unadapted) | tatsama |
| ತದ್ಭವ | Sanskrit loan (nativised) | tadbava |
| ವಿಭಕ್ತಿ | case suffix | vibakti |
| ಕಾರಕ | semantic case role (karaka) | kAraka |
| ಲಿಂಗ | gender | liNga |
| ವಚನ | number (singular/plural) | vacana |
| ಕ್ರಿಯಾರೂಪ | verb form | kriyArUpa |
| ವಿಭಕ್ತಿಪಲ್ಲಟ | case alternation | vibaktipaLLaTa |
| ಸರ್ವನಾಮ | pronoun | sarvanAma |
| ಎಣಿಕೆಯ ಪದ | numeral | eNikeya pada |
| ಒಳರಚನೆ | internal structure | oLaracane |
| ಕಟ್ಟಲೆ | grammatical convention / rule | kaTTale |
| ನುಡಿ | language / speech | nuDi |
| ದ್ರಾವಿಡ | Dravidian | drAviDa |
| ಪಟ್ಯಪುಸ್ತಕ | textbook | paTyapustaka |
This document is an English-language overview of D. N. Shankara Bhat’s ಕನ್ನಡಕ್ಕೆ ಬೇಕು ಕನ್ನಡದ್ದೇ ವ್ಯಾಕರಣ (2000/2013), based on the original Kannada text. The Kannada text can be read in the companion file 28-kannaDakke-bEku-book.md.
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