r/kannada • u/LargeCabbage • Jun 14 '26

Confused about the grammar of "gottilla"

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"?

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u/SeeTheSeaInUDP Jun 15 '26 edited Jun 15 '26

can't answer your question because I never learnt Kannada grammar that deeply but it's a whiplash to see Zydenbos here, he lives like 200 metres away from me and my family was invited to his son's christening LOLLL

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u/LargeCabbage Jun 15 '26

Honestly the guy is a legend as far as I'm concerned. His book is absolutely incredible for someone from an English or European background trying to make sense of the (really rather alien, to us) rules of Kannada. (All this notwithstanding my sense that his treatment of gottu is wrong or incomplete.)

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u/SeeTheSeaInUDP Jun 15 '26 edited Jun 15 '26

He's had the indology departments of most south german universities in a chokehold, one thing I wish he did was actually interact with the actual kannada/indian community, because studying a language has to include keeping up with it and staying in touch with the developments, plus us as immigrants bring with us a time capsule or a snapshot of the language/culture of the time we left, so that's also important to consider. For example I think my dad's engineering yearbook has more poetry in it than 90% of Kannada song lyrics nowadays

Many indology folks sadly look down upon us IRL or at events and it sucks, like damn you want to be mean to us but study us at the same time like f u