Kannada
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[edit] Introduction
Kannada is spoken in many dialects by about 55 million people. It is one of the most prominent languages of the southern part of India. Kannada is the official language of the state of Karnataka in India. The capital of Karnataka is Bangalore, also known as the software capital of the East. The nearby city of Mysore is as renowned for its beauty as for its rich history.
[edit] Origin and Development
Kannada is a Dravidian language, and it enjoys a common ancestry with the neighbouring Tamil, Telugu and Malayalam languages. These languages are very similar both in grammar and vocabulary, The Kannada language has very little in common with the other (non-Dravidian)languages, except for loan-words borrowed from Sanskrit that are also found in other Indian languages.
A language as ancient as Kannada cannot avoid changing over the centuries, and the history of active use of the language in every sphere of life, whether high or mundane, has preserved evidence of such development. Two stages of Kannada are easily discerned -
1. Ancient kannada (haLeGannada): Not in use any more. All old monuments will be inscribed in this language.
2. Middle and Latest (Nadu Kannada followed by Hosa Kannada). All the latest usage of Kannada is in the form of Hosa (new) Kannada.
[edit] Dialects
Several dialects of the Kannada language exist, and their equal usage in literature and theatre enriches the culture of Karnataka vastly. A major reason for the amount of dialectic diversity evident in Kannada is arguably the political fragmentation of the Kannada country in the past.
The speech of the northern areas of Karnataka features a large number of loan words derived from Marathi, Urdu and Telugu. The coastal hill districts (Malnaad) are particularly rich in dialect; Tulu and Konkani abide in this region, and the Kannada spoken in those districts features many typical words and usages native to the area, as also a lyrical accent. The district of Kodagu that adjoins Malnaad is home to Kodava, another beautiful tongue.
"Old Mysore" is the other major region in Karnataka, (apart from northern Karnataka, Malnaad and Kodagu); the speech of this area is standard Kannada. Although the Kannada country was politically fragmented for several hundred years after the decline of the Vijayanagara empire, a substantial portion of southern Karnataka was encompassed by the Kingdom of Mysore, ruled by a Kannada-speaking dynasty, the Wodeyars. Not unnaturally, the speech of this region and court came to be accepted as the standard for the language.
[edit] Script (Baraha)
The Kannada script (Kannada Baraha) is a phonetic one, similar in SYSTEM to Sanskrit and all the other languages indigenous to India. However, the letters / characters used in the Kannada script are unique. The Kannada script is amongst the most developed in the world; apart from being phonetic, it is able to uniquely represent the several vowels and consonants mentioned in the section below that even the Devanagari script cannot.
Both the spoken Kannada language and the Kannada script (Kannada Baraha) possess all the syllables, whether consonants or vowels, found in Sanskrit; they also feature some syllables that are NOT found in Sanskrit. Among consonants, the La syllable, as in BeLLi (Silver) or KoLi (Rooster) does not exist in Sanskrit. Kannada also possesses two vowels that are not found in Sanskrit; these are the short 'a' and the short 'o'. Let us use some English words as examples to demonstrate the difference: in the Kannada script, it is possible to uniquely represent the difference in pronounciation between the words Get and Gate or between Met and Mate. This is the difference between the long and short 'a', a difference that the Sanskrit script cannot represent. Similarly, Kannada speakers will be able to understand the long-short difference in ho between horage and hogu in horage hogu (go out).
[edit] External links
To learn more about the Kannada language, please visit the Wikipedia page on Kannada.
To learn more about Kannada script (also called as Kannada lipi or Kannada baraha), please visit
http://langmuir.eecs.berkeley.edu/~venkates/KanTex_1.00.html
