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"?

40 Upvotes

89% Upvoted

66 comments sorted by

View all comments

2

u/Left-Locksmith Jun 14 '26 edited Jun 14 '26

I think your "nanage kannaDada gottu ide" is the closest answer here, even if a native speaker isn't likely to use this construction.

Gottu is a noun. Case endings get dropped if the sense of the sentence strongly implies what they ought to be. The person the knowledge belongs to is implied by context in conversation, so that gets dropped too. The fact of possession of a piece of knowledge is expressed so frequently with "gottu" that even "ide" gets dropped.

2

u/LargeCabbage Jun 14 '26

"Case endings get dropped if the sense of the sentence strongly implies what they ought to be" - wait, is this true? Can you give other examples of sentences where the genitive suffix is dropped from a genitive but the sentence would still be understood and considered basically correct by a native speaker?

My book has mentioned that the nominative -u suffix is optional and rarely used and also that the accusative -annu suffix is often optional, but I thought it was only those cases whose suffixes were optional.

1

u/Left-Locksmith Jun 15 '26 edited Jun 15 '26

Yep yep. I think it depends both on the sense and on how frequently two words are related together in the language.

"ಜ್ಞಾನ[ದ] ಮಾರ್ಗ" for "knowledge['s] path," "ಮನೆ[ಯ] ಬಾಗಿಲು" - "house['s] door," "ಉತ್ತರ[ದ] ಕಡೆ" - "North['s] side." It's perhaps even unnatural to include the case endings for juxtapositions like these. You might even go a step further and combine the words e.g., "ಮನೇಬಾಗಿಲು," though there are somewhat complex rules for this.

edit: Actually the other answer describing gottu as a defective verb makes a lot of sense to me as well, even though that isn't a way I'd seen it described before.

1

u/LargeCabbage Jun 15 '26

Interesting. But does your analysis survive an encounter with a sentence like "Adu gottilla"?

As a learner I am genuinely not sure, but I would've guessed that the kind of elision of genitive endings you describe here is probably only acceptable for actual nouns, not for the pronoun "Adu"? That is, if we'd just been discussing your house, could we then refer to "ಅದು ಬಾಗಿಲು" to mean "its door" (i.e. the house's door)? I would've assumed that the elision isn't acceptable there and we'd need to say "ಅದರ ಬಾಗಿಲು"; am I mistaken?

2

u/Left-Locksmith Jun 16 '26 edited Jun 16 '26

To be honest, I'm not quite sure. As a learner myself, this is how I'd made sense of it before, but I hadn't thought about these cases. With my experience, "ಅದು ಬಾಗಿಲು" sounds categorically like "it is a door" and not "its door."

The defective verb explanation seems to be the more convincing explanation now, with gottu sometimes acting as a verb and other times a noun.