Hebbar language

Hebbar
ಹೆಬ್ಬಾರ್
Native to India
Region Hale Mysuru region
Dravidian
Kannada script, Roman Script
Language codes
ISO 639-3 –

Hebbar (Hebbar: ಹೆಬ್ಬಾರ್ ಭಾಷೆ Hebbar Bhāshe) spoken mainly in the southern part of the Indian state of Karnataka. The native speakers of Hebbar Language are referred to as Hebbar Iyengar.

Hebbar is the primary spoken language of the Hebbar Iyengar Community in the districts of Bengaluru, Mysuru, Mandya, Tumkur, Hassan, Chikkamagaluru, Shivamogga, Chikkaballapura, Kolar and Chamarajanagar districts of Southern Karnataka. [1] [2]

Classification

Hebbar Language belongs to the southern branch of the family of Dravidian languages. It descends from Tamil and derives considerable Loan words from Kannada and Sanskrit Vocabulary. The Hebbar language originates in the southern part of Karnataka, India. [3]

Etymology

Hebbar is a Kannada word which is a combination of Hiriya Haruva meaning elderly Brahmins in Kannada. Sri Ramanuja Referred his new disciples who converted to Sri Vaishnavism as Hebbar and the language they learnt by mixing Kannada and Tamil developed in to the current Hebbar Language.

Official status

Hebbar Language is not currently an official language of India or any other country. Efforts are being made to create Dictionary and document the linguistic features of the Hebbar language by linguist Arvind S Iyengar and few others who are interested to save their distinct language to future generations and also to get official recognition to it. [4]

History

During 12th Century Sri Ramanujacharya fled Tamilnadu escaping persecution of Vaishnavas by the Chola King who wanted to kill him. He came and settled in the Hoysala Kingdom. When he was in Tondanur (Tonnur) near Melukote, a group of elderly Kannada Brahmins from Ramanathapura, Saligrama came to Tondanur and heard Sri Ramanujacharyas discourses on Srivaishnava Philosophy. Impressed by the preaching of Ramanuja they offered to convert to Srivaishnava Religion and they became followers of Ramanuja. Sri Ramanuja affectionately called this group of Elderly Brahmins who became his disciples as Hebbar. Hebbar is a Kannada word which is a combination of Hiriya Haruva, which means elderly Brahmins in Kannada. Thus the sect called Hebbar Iyengar originated in the erstwhile Hoysala Kingdom of 12th Century. Since they had to learn Alwar's Divya Prabandham as part of there new religion they started learning Tamil and a new variant influenced by Kannada orinated and became the Lingua Franca of the Hebbar Iyengar Sect whih is differnt from the other Iyengar Tamil spoken in Karnataka and Tamilnadu.

Geographic distribution

After converting elderly Kannada Brahmins to Sri Vaishnavism, Sri Ramanujacharya asked them to settle in Ashta Gramas or eight villages, namely: Bindiganavile, Kadaba, Nuggehalli, Nonavinakere, Shantigrama etc., in the Hoysala Kingdom. The Southern Karnataka region is now called Hale Mysuru. Later they spread to various places across the region. Now they are found in most districts of the Hale Mysuru region of Karnataka and also in major cities in different states of India. A significant number of the diaspora of Hebbar language speakers are found in USA, UK, Singapore, Australia and other foreign countries.

Writing system

As of now Hebbar Language doesn't have its own script but many are trying to document and standardize Hebbar Language script using the Roman Script as some of the Diaspora are not familiar with Kannada Script. The most notable work is done by Arvind Iyengar of University of New England (Australia) who has written as research paper A Phonological Overview of the Hebbar Iyengar Language [5]. Few writers resident in Karnataka are writing the language in the Kannada Script which they learn in Karnataka in their blogs and social media.

Phonology

Vowel length is phonemic in Hebbar, as is attested by the following (near) minimal pairs – /ʋid i/ ‘fate’ /ʋiːd i/ ‘street’ /kuɽʉ/ ‘give (imp.)’ /kuːɽʉ/ ‘call (imp.)’ /pennʉ/ ‘pen’ /peːn(ʉ)/ ‘louse’ /ʉ/ does not occur in the first syllable of a word. Also, an unstressed word-medial /i/ may manifest as [ɨ] or [ʉ]—depending on whether the vowels in the surrounding syllables are front or back—or even as a highly unstressed [ə], as in LT <vayiṟu> /ʋɐjirʉ/  H [ʋəj(ə)rʉ]. This is also attested by Meenakshisundaran (1965, pp. 122-124) as a systematic change in Tamil as far back as the 11th to 13th centuries. /ʊ/ only occurs word-finally, and is the only vowel that undergoes phonemic nasalisation. Although nasalised vowels may occur in borrowed Kannada colloquialisms such as /ɦ ː/ ‘yes’ and / ɦ ː/ ‘no’ (Sridhar 2007, p. 299), they are unproductive and do not Word-initial /e(ː)/ and /o(ː)/ are pronounced with a palatal and labial onset respectively – [ʲe(ː)] and [ʷo(ː)]. Vowels in brackets denote non-native vowels. The vowel /æː/ occurs only in one native Hebbar word – /pæːrʊ/ ‘grandson’ (cf. LT <peyaraṉ>). Otherwise, it occurs only in loan words.

If one goes by the Indian grammatical tradition, the vowel-semivowel combinations /əj/ and /əw/ would have to be classified as diphthongs, and formally included under vowels. However, apart from these two combinations, [ə] only occurs as a word-medial unstressed allophone of the short vowels /ɐ/, /i/ and /ʉ/.

Affricates include /ʨ/ and /ʥ/ and their aspirated counterparts /ʨʰ/ and /ʥʱ/. /w/ occurs only in the aforementioned ‘diphthong’ /əw/ and as an allophone of /ʋʉ/. [ɽ] is an intervocalic allophone of /ɖ/, while [ɽ] is an intervocalic allophone of /ɳ/. /ŋ/ occurs phonemically only in rare cases, such as in the Sanskrit-origin word /ʋɑːŋməjʊ/ ‘literature’. therwise, [ŋ] and [n ] are allophones of /n/ immediately before a velar and dental stop respectively. The palatal nasal /ɲ/, which is at least nominally a part of the Tamil, Kannada7 and Sanskrit phonemic inventories, does not occur at all in Hebbar, whether independently or in combination with other consonants. For instance, Skt. /pəɲcəmiː/ ‘fifthlunar day’ is realised as H /pɐnʨəmi/. Similarly, the Sanskrit consonant combination /ɟɲ/, such as in Skt. /ɟɲaːpəkə/ ‘remembrance’, is realised in Hebbar as /ɡj/  H /ɡjɑːpəkʊ/ (cf.ST [ɲɑːbəɡ ], K /ɡɲɑːpəkɐ/).

Hebbar’s phonemic inventory is thus identical to that of Kannada, with the exception of the vowel /ʉ/ and the palatal nasal /ɲ/. Hebbar includes aspirated stops, affricates and the fricatives /ɕ/ and /ɦ/ 8 , all of which are absent in Tamil. On the other hand, one notable Tamil phoneme absent from Hebbar is the retroflex approximant /ɻ/, which in Hebbar has merged with the retroflex lateral /ɭ/. Also, without going too much into the realm of phonetics, while many varieties of spoken Tamil tend to have the mid-low short vowels [ɛ] and [ɔ], Hebbar tends to display the higher /e/ and /o/. This is likely due to influence from Kannada, which also features such (slightly) higher vowels. In spoken Tamil, all words nominally end in a vowel (Schiffman, 1999, p. 5), even if orthographically consonant-final. This also holds true in Hebbar, including for loan words from other languages. Words in the source language that end either phonetically or orthographically in consonants (other than glides) have an epenthetic /ʉ/ suffixed to them. [6]

Written literature

TBD

Oral traditions

There are few attempts done by some Hebbar Iyengar singers to sing songs in Hebbar Language.


References

  1. ↑ http://www.hebbarsabha.org/about_us.html
  2. ↑ https://scholar.google.com/scholar?oi=bibs&cluster=15085091685449896262&btnI=1&hl=en
  3. ↑ https://scholar.google.com/scholar?oi=bibs&cluster=15085091685449896262&btnI=1&hl=en
  4. ↑ https://scholar.google.com/scholar?oi=bibs&cluster=15085091685449896262&btnI=1&hl=en
  5. ↑ https://scholar.google.com/scholar?oi=bibs&cluster=15085091685449896262&btnI=1&hl=en
  6. ↑ https://scholar.google.com/scholar?oi=bibs&cluster=15085091685449896262&btnI=1&hl=en


This article is issued from Wikipedia. The text is licensed under Creative Commons - Attribution - Sharealike. Additional terms may apply for the media files.