Munda language
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The main article in The Linguistic Survey Of India
We pass to Central India, where we find the Munda languages occupying a strong position. The principal of these, Kherwari, with numerous dialects, has its head-quarters at the north-eastern end of the plateau of Central India, but has spread into, or left survivors in, the plains at its foot. It has many dialects, of which the best known are Santali and Mundari. At the other, the north-west, end of the plateau, in the western Districts of the Central Provinces and in Mewar, we find another Munda language, Kurku,1 which is said to have two dialects, -- Muwasi and Nahali, but, as stated above (p. 28), the latter is much mixed with other forms of speech and is on the verge of disappearing altogether. The other Munda languages are less important. They are spoken in the neighbourhood of Kherwari or to its South. The principal are Kharia, Juang, Savara, and Gadaba, and they are all more or less mixed forms of speech. Kharia is mostly spoken in the Ranchi District of Chota Nagpur, and has all the characteristics of a language that is dying out and is being superseded by an Aryan form of speech. Aryan principles pervade its grammatical structure and its vocabulary, and it is no longer a typical Munda language. It has been compared to a palimpsest, the original writing on which can only with difficulty be recognized. Juang is very similar. It is spoken by the Juangs or Patuas of the States of Keonjhar and Dhenkanal in Orissa. These people are probably the lowest in the scale of civilization of all the Munda tribes. Till quite recently the women of the tribe did not even sew fig-leaves together to make themselves aprons. A bunch of leaves tied on in front and another behind was all that was claimed by the most exacting demands of fashion, and this costume was ` renewed as occasion required, when the fair wearer went to fetch cattle from the wood which provided her millinery.' Attempts have been made to introduce the wearing of loin-cloths, but I know not with what success. The most southern forms of Munda speech are those spoken by the Savaras and the Gadabas of North-East Madras. The former have been identifed. with the Suari of Pliny and the Sabarae of Ptolemy. A wild tribe of the same name is mentioned in Sanskrit literature, even so far back as late Vedic times, as inhabiting the Deccan, so that the name, at least, can boast of great antiquity. Their language, is of considerable interest, and since it was discussed in Volume IV of the Survey a series of excellent Readers in it have been prepared by Mr. Ramamurti for the Madras
The languages of the Munda Branch must once have been spoken over a much greater area of India than their present habitat. In the South, and to a certain extent in Chota Nagpur, they have been superseded by Dravidian forms of speech, and in the North by Aryan or Tibeto-Burman tongues. In each case, however, they have left their mark. As for the Dravidian languages, it is very probable that the rules for the harmonic sequence of vowels, which form so prominent a feature of Telugu are due to their influeuce,1 and, to the North of Chota Nagpur, the extraordinary complexity of the verbal conjugation of the Aryan Bihari is equally probably due to the same cause.2 Another interesting point is that Munda is numeration is vigesimal. The speakers count by twenties, not by tens as we and other Europeans do. But among the peasantry of Northern India vigesimal counting is quite usual. Instead of saying ` fifty,' they say ` two score and ten, ' instead of ` sixty ' they say ` three score,' and so on. This might be a case of mere coincidence, but that it is really an old Munda survival is shown by the fact that kuri , the word used all over Northern India for ` a score ', is almost certainly a word of Munda origin. But it is in the Himalaya that these Munda survivals are most apparent. At the present day, the Mundas have themselves survived as a recognized people only in the wild hill-country of Central India, and it is in accordance with this that they should also have survived for a longer time in the forests of the Himalaya than on the Aryanized plains of Northern India. In the Himalaya, from North-East Assam to the North-East Panjab, the great mass of the inhabitants speaks various forms of Tibeto-Burman tongues. Most of these are quite pure of their kind and possess all the peculiarities proper to that form of speech. But between Darjiling, north of Bengal, and Kanawar, north of Simla in the Panjab, there is a series of scattered tribes speaking languages called in the Survey ` Complex Pronominalized.' Most of them belong to the group called by Hodgson ` Kiranti ', but there are also others not mentioned by him. These languages are all Tibeto-Burman, or belong to some group closely allied to the Tibeto-Burman, but through them all there runs a peculiar strain which it is impossible not to recognize as Munda, once attention is drawn to it.3 These Complex Pronominalized languages are many in number, and will be further dealt with when we come to the consideration of the Tibeto-Burman languages. Suffice it here to say that the most western is probably Kanawari, spoken in the Simla Hills, though there are doubtful cases even further west.
The Munda languages were first recognized as a separate group, distinct from the Dravidian, in the year 1854 by the late Professor Max Muller in his famous ` Letter to Chevalier Bunsen on the Classification of the Turanian Languages,' and received its name ` Munda' from him4. As stated on page 14, in the comity of scholarship it has ever been an established rule that the first discoverer of any fact, whether it be a newly described flower, a newly described mineral, or a newly described group of languages, should have the right to give it its name, and that that name should be employed by other students unless and until it has been proved to be entirely false and misleading. Unfortunately this comity was not observed in the present case. Twelve years later, Sir George Campbell, no doubt unwittingly, ignored the name already given by Mix Muller, and proposed to call these languages ` Kolarian'1 because, as he imagined, the word ` Kol,' -- a common tribal name of the Munda people, -- was derived from an older form ` Kolar,' which he apparently connected with the Kolar District of Mysore in Southern India, and looked upon as identical with the Kanarese word kallar meaning ` thief.' There is absolutely no foundation for this supposition, and this name ` Kolarian ' is not only based upon a fantastic error, but is, in itself, objectionable as seeming to suggest a connexion with the word ` Aryan ' which does not exist.
Nearly every word of the above applies with equal force to the Munda languages.
Among other characteristics of the Munda languages we may mention the following. As in the Indo-Chinese languages, final consonants are often checked, or pronounced without the offglide, thus forming what is often called by Chinese scholars the ` abrupt' or ` entering tone.' Such consonants are as characteristic of Cantonese as they are of Munda, and are common, so far as I am aware in all the languages of the Mon-Khmer branch of Austro-Asiatic speech.1 Although masculine and feminine nouns are distinguished, there are only two real genders, one for all animate and the other for all inanimate objects. Nouns have three numbers, a singular, a dual, and a plural, the dual and plural numbers being indicated by suffixing the dual or plural, respectively, of the third personal pronoun to the noun. Short forms of all the personal pronouns are freely used, in each case as verbal suffixes. The dual and plural of the first personal pronoun have each two forms, one including the person addressed, and the other excluding him. If, when giving orders to your cook, you say, 'we shall dine at half past seven', you must be careful to use ale for ` we,' not abon ; or else you will invite your servant also to the meal, which might give rise to awkwardness. As in many other eastern languages, participial formations are used instead of relative pronouns. ` The deer which you bought yesterday' would be rendered ` the yesterday deer bought by you.' Roots are modified in meaning not only by suffixes, but also by infixes, as in da-pa-l mentioned above. The logical form of a Munda sentence is altogether different from that of Aryan languages, and hence it is impossible to divide it into the parts of speech with which we are familiar, say, in English. The nearest thing that it has to what we call a verb merely calls up an idea, but is unable to make any assertion. The final assertion is made by one of the most characteristic features of Munda grammar, a particle known as ` the categorical a .' By its form, the sentence first unites the represented ideas into a mental picture, and then, by a further effort, affirms its reality. In English we say " John came." A Santali would first call up a picture of John having come, and then, by adding the categorical a , would assert that this picture was a fact. Hence this a is not used in sentences that do not contain a categorical assertion, e.g. those which in English would contain a verb in the subjunctive or optative mood. Munda, with what is really better logic, relegates subjunctive and, relative to what may be called the incomplete verb in company with what are with us participles, gerunds, and infinitives, and forms the only complete and real verb by the addition of the categorical a .
As in the case of several other civilised and semi-civilised tribes, the names which we give to many Munda tribes are not those by which their members call themselves, but those which we have adopted from their Aryan-speaking neighbours. Most of the tribes simply call themselves ` men', the same word with dialectic variations, Ko1, Kora, Kur-ku (merely the plural of Kur), Har, Hara-ko(another plural), or Ho, being used nearly universally. The Indian Aryans have adopted in one case the word ` Kol ' as a sort of generic term for any of these non-Aryan tribes, and have identified the word with a similarly spelt Sanskrit term signifying ` pig,' a piece of etymology which, though hardly in accordance with the ideas of European science, is infinitely comforting to those that apply it. The Raj of these Kols is a subject of legend over large tracts of the south side of the Gangetic valley, where not one sentence of Munda origin has been heard for generations. The name is perhaps at the bottom of our word ` coolie,' and of the names of one or more important castes which would indignantly deny their Munda origin.
