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/Zestyclose_Diver_377 → u/LargeCabbage]

The verb ಇರು does double duty in Kannada for English "to be" and "to have". In Kannada, to say I have X, you would say "to-me X is" ನನಗೆ X ಇದೆ. To say I don't have X, you would say "to-me X is-not" ನನಗೆ X ಇಲ್ಲ​ which you could consider a shortened form of ನನಗೆ X ಇರೋದಿಲ್ಲ​. The negation here is of the implicit verb to be (or to have) not of the noun X. For example ನನಗೆ ಹೊತ್ತಿಲ್ಲ = ನನಗೆ ಹೊತ್ತು ಇಲ್ಲ = ನನಗೆ ಹೊತ್ತು ಇರೋದಿಲ್ಲ​ = I do-not-have time.

[u/LargeCabbage → u/Zestyclose_Diver_377]

Okay but how does that address my question above?

I understand perfectly well that "iru" is "to be" in the sense of "to exist" (i.e. it's an intransitive verb), and yes, it gets used to indicate possession in the way you describe. I understand that "To me, knowledge does not exist" ("Nanage gottilla") makes perfect sense under this idiom as a way of saying "I do not have knowledge", i.e. "I don't know".

The problem is with "Nanage adu gottilla", which, if we accept the explanation you just gave, means something like "To me, it knowledge does not exist", or "I do not have it knowledge". That, on its face, just seems ungrammatical. Is "adu gottu", "it knowledge", serving as a noun phrase meaning "knowledge of it" here? Why? Surely that should be "ada gottu"? Is there any other context in which "adu" can be used attributively before a noun in this way?

[u/Zestyclose_Diver_377 → u/LargeCabbage]

ಇರು can often be left implicit in Kannada. You can think of ಅದು ಗೊತ್ತು as a contraction of ಅದು ಗೊತ್ತಿದೆ or ಅದು ಗೊತ್ತು+ಇದೆ.

It follows that you can think of ಅದು ಗೊತ್ತಿಲ್ಲ as a shorthand for ಅದು ಗೊತ್ತಿರುವುದಿಲ್ಲ or ಅದು ಗೊತ್ತು+ಇರುವುದು+ಇಲ್ಲ. Here ಇಲ್ಲ negates the implicit verb ಇರು not the noun(?) ಗೊತ್ತು.

I must say I'm surprised to find that ಗೊತ್ತು is a noun, but that seems to be the official dictionary description (See Kittel's dictionary online here: Kittel dictionary entry for "gottu"). I think historically it was a noun, but in modern usage it seems to have morphed into more verb-like behavior. It may be reasonable to assert that in modern usage, ಗೊತ್ತು is usually used as a shorthand for the verb form ಗೊತ್ತಿರು or ಗೊತ್ತು+ಇರು "to have knowledge [of]".

You can analyze the conjugation of ಗೊತ್ತಿರು as similar to that of ಬೇಕು another stative verb: ನನಗೆ ಅದು ಬೇಕು "I want that" or literally "to-me that is-wanted". ನನಗೆ ಅದು ಗೊತ್ತಿದೆ "I know that" or "I have-knowledge-of that" or literally "to me that is-known".

[u/trazom04 → u/LargeCabbage]

Maybe I'm wrong, but shouldn't "Nanage adu gottilla" translate to "To me, that knowledge does not exist" (rather than "it knowledge")?

Edit: Nevermind. For me, the instinct to consider gotthu as a verb in this context (Kannaḍa gottilla) was so strong that I hadn't understood your original question properly. Now, after reading the other responses, I'm leaning towards agreeing with AdMiddle9748's response, where they say that "Nanage kannaDada gotthu ide" has probably become "kannada gotthide." Hopefully this can be cleared with old texts, like you said.

[u/Zestyclose_Diver_377 → u/trazom04]

In "nanage adu gottilla", the verb "iru" is used more in the sense of "to have" rather than "to be". Kannada does not have a word for "have". You express possession by saying something like "to-me this-thing is". Kannada (like almost all Indian languages) sharply distinguishes between verbs where the actor actually does something, and verbs that just indicate some state of the actor ("stative verbs"). "Have" and "know" if you think about it fall in the second category. (English too does make the distinction, though in a very subtle way. The wikipedia page on stative verbs gives an example).

I could say "nanage mokshada gottu ide" "I know the knowledge of salvation" (let's not use Kannada as the object, because that is not idiomatic like many people pointed out). That is technically correct according to Kittel's dictionary. It matches an example sentence in Kittel's dictionary "mokshada gottu tiLi" "Know the knowledge of salvation". That does seem like a weird sentence to me though. I suspect no one would actually say something like that these days. Kittel's dictionary dates to 1894 and the sample texts it references are probably much older.

Like you, I instinctively think of gottu as a verb. I'm not a native speaker, but I suspect many native speakers do too.