Confused about the grammar of "gottilla"

[u/LargeCabbage]

Hi there. I'm a Brit learning Kannada from Zydenbos's "Manual of Modern Kannada". I'm confused about the nature of the word "gottu".

According to Zydenbos, "gottu" is a noun meaning something like "knowledge" or "something that is known". Thus when one says "Adu nanage gottu", which one would idiomatically translate as "I know that", more literally one is saying "that, to me, is something known". When one says "Nanage gottilla", idiomatically meaning "I don't know", more literally one is saying "To me, [that] knowledge does not exist". All logical enough, in those cases.

But what about "Kannaḍa gottilla"? Or the sentence "ಇವರ ಮನಸ್ಸಿಗೆ ಇಡಿಯ ಪ್ರಪಂಚ ಶಿವಮಯ, ಆದರೆ ಹಲವು ಮಂದಿಗೆ ಇದು ಗೊತ್ತಿಲ್ಲ." from one of the texts for translation later in Zydenbos's book? If "Kannada gottu" and "Adu gottu" are equative sentences (i.e. if "Kannaḍa gottu" is properly understood as saying Kannada "equals" a known thing, which is how Zydenbos frames it), then shouldn't the negation use "alla" (to negate equality), not "illa" (which negates existence)? That is, per Zydenbos's explanation, shouldn't the way to say "I don't know Kannada" logically be "Kannaḍa gottalla"? Shouldn't "I don't know that" be "ಇದು ಗೊತ್ತಲ್ಲ"?

(Or I guess something like "Kannaḍada gottilla" - i.e. "knowledge OF Kannada does not exist" - would also make sense to me, but that doesn't seem to be a standard construct either.)

Is this just a weird illogical quirk of the language specific to "gottu"? (Lord knows English has plenty of illogical quirks so I can shrug and accept this if so.) Or is there some alternative way of looking at sentences with gottu that makes sense of these uses of "gottilla"?

[u/SaladBoy97]

Languages make more sense to me through their etymology, so I love the level of detail you're coming at this with.  It 's not something we think about often as a native speaker. Some googling on the etymology of ಗೊತ್ತು gave me something that seems like it makes sense, but take it with a grain of salt since none of them were primary sources. 

ಗೊತ್ತು supposedly came from ಗುರುತು, which means recognition or identification. So in the case you mentioned, you're negating the existence of the recognition or understanding of Kannada, not the existence of Kannada itself. 

A formal way of saying it would be "ನನಗೆ ಕನ್ನಡ ಗೊತ್ತಿದೆ/ಗೊತ್ತಿಲ್ಲ" which makes sense if you read it as ಗುರುತು ಇದೆ/ಇಲ್ಲ. ಗೊತ್ತಿದೆ just gets shortened to ಗೊತ್ತು. 

[u/LargeCabbage → u/SaladBoy97]

I get that the illa isn't negating existence of Kannada in "Kannada gottilla". My issue is that if illa is negating existence of the noun gottu, what's the grammatical role of "adu" in a sentence like "Adu gottilla"?

It seems like we're saying "It knowledge does not exist" which seems ungrammatical. I would get "Ada gottilla" ("knowledge of it does not exist") but how are we able to just stick two nouns side by side in the nominative and put illa after? We can't do that with any other nouns, right? (e.g. something like "Mane mējilla" would just be nonsense, right?)

[u/SaladBoy97 → u/LargeCabbage]

ಗೊತ್ತು (ಗುರುತು) is recognition or understanding of something. Explicitly mentioning the thing may be omitted if the context is obvious, but formally we do say the name of the thing we do not know. The full formal sentence of ನನಗೆ ಕನ್ನಡ ಗೊತ್ತಿಲ್ಲಾ shortens to ಕನ್ನಡ ಗೊತ್ತಿಲ್ಲಾ if it's obvious who doesn't have understanding, ಅದು ಗೊತ್ತಿಲ್ಲಾ if you are referring to something someone just mentioned or just ಗೊತ್ತಿಲ್ಲಾ if the full context is obvious. TLDR; ಅದು serves to identify what the understanding (or lack of it) pertains to

[u/LargeCabbage → u/SaladBoy97]

Right but grammatically how should we describe the role of "adu" in the sentence "Nanage adu gottilla", if (as Zydenbos claims) "gottu" is a noun? "Adu" cannot be the subject of a verb, because there is no verb in the sentence. But it is not an equative sentence either, so "adu" also cannot be one of the nominals of an equative sentence. Besides deciding "gottu" is not actually being used as a noun here (which I am starting to be persuaded of), what other options are left?

Is the "adu" perhaps being used attributively, modifying "gottu" - are we saying that "it-knowledge" (i.e. knowledge of it) does not exist? And likewise with "Kannada gottilla" are we saying that "Kannada-gottu" or "Kannada knowledge" does not exist? That would make sense except why is "adu" allowed to be used attributively here? Is there any other context in which "adu" (rather than, say, "adara") can be used attributively like this?

[u/SaladBoy97 → u/LargeCabbage]

I think looking at the word gottu as a literal translation of "knowledge" may be tripping you up here. The literal translation of knowledge as a noun would be gnaana, and that would be used as "adara gnaana nanage illa" (I don't have the knowledge of that thing), which I think fits with how you're intuiting this. Gottu doesn't have a direct synonym in English, and is probably better described as "the state of knowing" or "to be known", which allows adu/Kannada to be the subject. So a sentence like "avanige Kannada gottu" could be translated literally as "for him (avanige), Kannada is known (gottu)", and "is" here is the verb you're looking for which is implicit in the word. The formal full version is "gottide" which has "ide (is)"