LANGUAGE IN INDIA

Strength for Today and Bright Hope for Tomorrow

Volume 21:10 October 2021
ISSN 1930-2940

Editors:
         Sam Mohanlal, Ph.D.
         B. Mallikarjun, Ph.D.
         A. R. Fatihi, Ph.D.
         G. Baskaran, Ph.D.
         T. Deivasigamani, Ph.D.
         Pammi Pavan Kumar, Ph.D.
         Soibam Rebika Devi, M.Sc., Ph.D.

Managing Editor & Publisher: M. S. Thirumalai, Ph.D.

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Svara Sandhi in Odia – An Optimality Theoretic Study

Suhasini Dash, Ph.D. Research Scholar

Abstract

This study attempts to present an Optimality Theoretic (Prince and Smolensky,1993) analysis of the svara sandhi changes occurring in Odia (An Indo-Aryan language spoken in the eastern state of Odisha, India). Odia, like other major Indian languages such as Bengali, Telugu, Malayalam, etc., has been influenced by Sanskrit and has hence subsumed the phenomenon of sandhi occurring in Sanskrit.

The phenomena of two sounds combining to form a new sound, or the insertion of glides in certain other constructions, or how two vowels of differing heights combine to result in a sort of Vowel Harmony where instead of one vowel influencing the other, both vowels influence each other and result in a sound which has qualities of both vowels. These are some of the processes that will be looked into.

This paper uses the Optimality Theoretic framework to explain these processes. Newly developed constraints such as COALESCENE, *Diphthongs, (low, back V + low, back V = /a/) are proposed in this study along with certain other common and well-established faithfulness constraints such as MAX-V and DEP-V. The study analyses the svara sandhi process in Odia which has evolved from Sanskrit and shares the same features in most constructions while simultaneously showing the applicability of Optimality Theory in such a study.

Keywords: sandhi; svara sandhi; Odia; Optimality theory; vowel harmony; epenthesis

Introduction

The aim of this paper is to exhaustively discuss the svara sandhi rules in Odia and to analyse them using the optimality theory (OT) framework given by Prince and Smolensky (1993). Sandhi is a cover term for changes that occur between word or morpheme boundaries. Two words or morphemes combine to form a new word and these result in certain sound changes at the boundaries of the words. The main aim of sandhi is to provide an ease in pronunciation. This paper endeavours to break down the complex processes that occur in svara sandhi using the OT framework for a step-by-step clarification.

Sandhi is a term that originates from the Sanskrit Grammatical tradition and was adopted by modern western linguistics. Freidrich Max Müller was the first scholar to coin the terms internal and external sandhi in 1866. According to the Concise Oxford Dictionary of Linguistics (Matthews, 1997) internal and external sandhi can be defined as:

“external sandhi: Process of phonological modification that takes place at or across word boundaries. Thus, by one common process of external sandhi in English, an initial /s/ in words like steak is assimilated to a /?/ in e.g. fish steak.” (Matthews, 2007)

This is only the beginning part of the article. PLEASE CLICK HERE TO READ THE ENTIRE ARTICLE IN PRINTER-FRIENDLY VERSION.

Suhasini Dash, Ph.D. Research Scholar
The English and Foreign Languages University
Hyderabad 500061
suhasini.dash24@gmail.com
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