Everything about Toda Language totally explained
|familycolor=Dravidian
|fam2=
Southern
|fam3=
Tamil-Kannada
|fam4=
Tamil-Kodagu
|fam5=
Toda-Kota
|iso2=dra|iso3=tcx|notice=Indic}}
Toda is a
Dravidian language well known for its many
fricatives and
trills. It is spoken by the
Toda people, a population of about one thousand who live in the
Nilgiri Hills of southern
India.
Phonemic inventory
Vowels
For a Dravidian language, Toda's sixteen vowels is an unusually large number. There are eight vowel qualities, each of which may occur long or short. There is little difference in quality between the long and short vowels, except for /e/, which occurs as [e] when short and as [æː] when long.
Consonants
Toda has an unusually large number of fricatives and trills. Its seven
places of articulation are the most for any Dravidian language. (The
apical coronals are marginally
postalveolar, and are sometimes judged to be
alveolar instead.) The voiceless
laterals are true fricatives, not voiceless
approximants; the
retroflex is highly unusual among the world's languages.
Despite the
ad hoc use of the
retroflex flap symbol <ɽ>, all
rhotics are trills, although (as in
Spanish and
Italian) they've single-contact
allophones. Indeed, /ɽ/ is the most strongly trilled of Toda's rhotics.
Toda
voiceless fricatives are
allophonically voiced intervocalically. (There are also invariably voiced fricatives, ʒ, ʐ, ɣ, though the latter is marginal.) The
nasals and /r̠, ɽ, j/ are allophonically devoiced or partially devoiced in final position or next to voiceless consonants.
All of these consonants may occur in word-medial and -final position. However, only a restricted set occur initially. These are /p, t̪, k, f, s̪, m, n̠, r̘, l̪, j, w/, in boldface above.
Apical consonants are either alveolar or postalveolar. The actual feature that distinguishes /r̘/ and /r̠/ is obscure. They have the same primary place of articulation. Spajić
et al. have found that the rhotic which may occur word initially (erroneously called "
dental" in previous literature, perhaps because Dravidian coronals tend to be dental by default) has a
secondary articulation, which they've tentatively identified as
advanced tongue root until further measurements can be made. This analysis is assumed in the transcription /r̘/.
Another difference between them is that /r̘/ is the least strongly trilled of Toda's rhotics, most often occurring with a single contact. However, unlike a
flap, multiple contacts are normal, if less common, and /r̘/ is easily distinguishable from the other trills when they're all produced with the same number of contacts.
Retroflex consonants are sub-apical.
As mentioned above, the retroflex trill is more consistently trilled than the other rhotics. However, it isn't purely retroflex. Although the tongue starts out in a
sub-apical retroflex position, trilling involves the tip of the tongue, and this causes it to move forward toward the alveolar ridge. This means that the retroflex trill gives a preceding vowel retroflex coloration the way other retroflex consonants do, but that the vibration itself isn't much different from the other trills.
Further Information
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