Gorum, or Parengi, is a nearly extinct minor Munda language of India.
Names
The name
Gorum most likely comes from an animal/people prefix
go- and root -
rum meaning 'people', and is possibly related to the ethnonym
Bonda language (Anderson 2008:381).
Parengi, or Parenga, is of obscure origin.
Status
Gorum is 60 percent endangered and may soon become extinct. Few people under the age of thirty years can understand the language, while those who do know it are likely to deny knowing it.
[http://www.endangeredlanguages.com/lang/4953 Endangered Language Project] This language seems to have been first researched in 1933.
[Sitapati, G.V. 1933. "Pareng." A Miscellany of Papers Presented to Rao Sahib Mahopadhyaya Gidugu Venkata Ramamurthi. Madras. 145-65]
Origins
Gorum is a member of the
Munda languages family, as shown by the glottal consonants that are used in
creaky voice. However, it has borrowed some elements from nearby Dravidian languages, such as doubly inflected
Auxiliary verb structures.
[Anderson, Gregory D.S. & Felix Rau. 2008. “Gorum.” In: Gregory D.S. Anderson]
Distribution
Gorum speakers are located in the following areas of eastern India (Anderson 2008:381).
Gutob language is spoken to the north of Gorum, and Gta language to the west of Gorum.
Phonology
Consonants
In Gorum, palatal stops are completely replaced by fricatives /s/ and /z/. Stop aspiration and dental-retroflex distinction are also absent.
Vowels
Creaky voice in Gorum is part of the morphology, i.e. grammaticalized, to demonstrate the affectedness of the verb stems. Although it has been suggested that creaky voice is reconstructible in proto-Austroasiatic, Anderson (2007) raises possibilities of whether Gorum creaky voice is true archaicism or pseudo-archaism.
Word stress
Aze (1971) described that stress in generally found in word-final position in Gorum words produced in isolated utterances, while in nominal forms, stress falls in the penultimate syllable. In the case of verbal forms, the pattern may not be determined due to morpholexical complications.
[Anderson & Rau (2008:386)]
Morphology
Nouns
Number
Gorum distinguishes two numbers on nominals: unmarked singular and plural
-gi.
[Anderson & Rau (2008:387)]
Person
Noun phrases are marked for possession. These possessive markers occur primarily with inalienable nouns, i.e. body parts, kin terms, and some lexical terms that are socioculturally determined to be inalienable like irrigated rice fields.
[Anderson & Rau (2008:390)]
| +
!
!Possessive |
| | -niŋ |
| | -nɔm |
| | -ɖɔy |
| | -leŋ |
| | -beŋ |
| | -ɖɔy(-gi) |
Case
Gorum has two types of nominal marking to demonstrate clausal relation: objective/oblique/recipient marker
e- and locative postposition
etur. The conditions of variation in both cases and whether they carry any productive meaning or not remains unclear.
[Anderson & Rau (2008:389)]
Gender
Gorum, like any other Munda languages, does not have a morphological concept of gender. Word pairs that show gender distinction are usually borrowed from Indo-Aryan and Dravidian. However, there is, at least, some kinds of word class distinction based on animacy exist, but the evidence is faint or frozen in Gorum.
[Anderson & Rau (2008:391)]
Pronouns
Derivation
In Gorum, there are several word derivation methods: affixation,
reduplication, and compounding, etc. Monosyllabic stems can take
prefixes such as
pi-,
bu-/bo-/ɔ-,
u-,
a- k/gV-,
su-/sV-, infixes
-n-,
-ʔ-, suffixes
-om,
-li, partial or full reduplicate, and pair with verbs or nouns to form new words.
[Anderson & Rau (2008:394-395)] There are verb-noun compounds, i.e. noun incorporation. Eg.
zɔɖaʔ ('to (white) wash the walls'), composed of
zɔd ('to wipe off') and
ɖaʔ ('water'). Noun incorporation in Gorum is akin to the feature that also exists in
Sora language,
Juray language,
Bonda language,
Gutob language,
Kharia language, Gtaʔ, and Kherwarian languages. Similar classificatory incorporation is found in Nicobarese and
Khasic languages as well and may be an archaic feature of Austroasiatic morphosyntax.
Verb
Person indexation
Two third plural subject markers
-ey and
=gi may co-occur on the same predicate at the same time in some contexts without any clear motives.
[Anderson & Rau (2008:397-398)]
Possessor of a logical argument in Sora-Gorum is marked by the object type.
Version
Version ("affectedness") is a highly marked feature in Gorum verbal morphology and is distinctive from voice markers is that it does not occupy a slot in Gorum verb structure and nor an indication of relations between verbal actants marked in the verbal complex, but to encode their status of being affected in the discourse space. As mentioned above, Gorum version is represented by creaky voice vowels. It is used optionally to denote the notions of primary affectedness, discourse salience, and discourse deictic orientation.
[Anderson & Rau (2008:405)]
1. (subject affecting)
2. (passive agent/indirect experiencer subject object-as-subject)
Syntax
Gorum follows regional South Asian
word order of SOV, but the positions of demonstratives, possessives, numerals in the NPs and verbal indexation show support for the evidence that a different word order was historically used predominantly in earlier Gorum syntax.
[Anderson & Rau (2008:415)]
Sample text
Gorum folklore:
The Shrew that became a Tiger
Further reading
External links
