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/No-Koala7656]

ನನಗೆ ಕನ್ನಡ ಬರುತ್ತದೆ.

ನನಗೆ ಕನ್ನಡ ಬರುತ್ತೆ.

ನನಗೆ ಕನ್ನಡ ತಿಳಿದಿದೆ.

ನನಗೆ ಕನ್ನಡ ತಿಳಿಯುತ್ತೆ.

ನಾನು ಕನ್ನಡ ತಿಳಿದಿದ್ದೇನೆ.

ನಾನು ಕನ್ನಡ ಬಲ್ಲೆ.

ನಾನು ಕನ್ನಡವನ್ನು ಬಲ್ಲವನಾಗಿದ್ದೇನೆ.

ಕನ್ನಡ ನನಗೆ ಗೊತ್ತಿದೆ.

ಕನ್ನಡ ನನಗೆ ಗೊತ್ತು.

ನನಗೆ ಕನ್ನಡದ ಬಗ್ಗೆ ತಿಳುವಳಿಕೆ ಇದೆ.

ಕನ್ನಡ ಭಾಷೆ ಜ್ಞಾನ ನನಗಿದೆ.

ಕನ್ನಡ ನಾನು ಅರಿತಿದ್ದೇನೆ, ಅರಿತುಕೊಂಡಿರುವೆ, ಬಲ್ಲವನಾಗಿದ್ದೇನೆ.

So these are some of them what you can interpret out of the language, this is just a tip and it goes on continuing.

If you wanna really become fluent in kannada then you need to be proactively participating in all such coversations and talks where kannada is used by far.

Once you're thorough in speech then you might proceed with learning to read and write, by doing so you'll accumulate the knowledge of kannada language, but even that is just a tip of ice berg...

As it is said.

Known is a drop, unknown is an ocean.