The Pre-Toda Verb A Reconstruction

Abstract

Toda is a Dravidian language that is well known for its aberrant phonology, namely due to ubiquitous vowel dropping, simplification of consonant clusters, and phonemic diversification. Although efforts have succeeded to some extent in mapping these phonemes to those of related languages, the origins and implications of Toda morphology have not yet been explored in detail. This work aims to reconstruct key aspects of the Pre-Toda verb in order to provide a dataset to be faithfully used in comparative Dravidian linguistics. Here, the formation of the secondary stem and the nonpast suffixes are demonstrated to show more affinity towards Old Kannada rather than Old Tamil. At the same time, the tenseless and dubitative conjugations, along with personal terminations, are found to retain archaic Dravidian suffixes.