A Comparative Grammar of The Gondi Dialects : with Special Reference to Phonology and Morphology -Dravidian Linguistics Series- 2 (Set of 2 Volumes)

There are many published sources of Gondi dialects; only a couple of these are written by linguists; the rest by missionaries and administrators in the 19" and 20" centuries. A unique feature of this monograph is that the dialect data, though mostly drawn from published sources, are refined by the field study of Rao. He is, therefore, able to set up ten major dialect areas (pp. 9-12, also see Ch. 6) for a meaningful comparative study of phonology and morphology.

This monograph by Professor G. U. Rao ona comparative study of the Gondi dialects is his PhD dissertation of Osmania University (1987), and is certainly a ground-breaking piece of research in Dravidian comparative linguistics. The Gondi language is more geographically scattered than any other nonliterary Dravidian language, being spread over four neighboring States, Andhra Pradesh, Orissa, Madhya Pradesh and Maharashtra. Some of these dialects are no longer contiguous to one another and are on the verge of becoming independent languages.

There are many published sources of Gondi dialects; only a couple of these are written by linguists; the rest by missionaries and administrators in the 19" and 20" centuries. A unique feature of this monograph is that the dialect data, though mostly drawn from published sources, are refined by the field study of Rao. He is, therefore, able to set up ten major dialect areas (pp. 9-12, also see Ch. 6) for a meaningful comparative study of phonology and morphology.

The Proto-Gondi phonemes reconstructed by Rao show clear evidence of retention of several contrasts found. which is a pool of other mergers (see pp.76—99). The Hill Maria Gondi is the only dialect that preserves . Another important aspect of phonology is that Gondi has many sound changes in progress, showing the trail of change, also Krishnamurti . Another fascinating case is the representation of PD laryngeal *H as h- in deictic bases, (pp.71, 72; also Krishnamurti 2001:327). Gondi thus provides valuable evidence for the phonological and morphological reconstruction of SD I, besides Telugu and Konda.

There is much that is original in Rao’s reconstruction of noun and verb morphology. I have used with benefit the results of his study in several places in the preparation of my book, The Dravidian Languages (Cambridge 2003).

Professor G. Lakshminarayana, the Vice-Chancellor of the Dravidian University, 1s an administrator of vision and I congratulate him on his decision to publish this monograph. I heartily congratulate Rao on its publication and I hope he will continue to pursue Dravidian studies, despite the shift of his interest in recent years to natural language processing (NLP).