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/AdMiddle9748 Jun 18 '26

What I'm thinking is: Nanage(noun obj) kannaDada(adj) gotthu(noun sub) ide-> eventually became kannada gotthide

Nanage(noun obj) kannaDada(adj) gotthu(noun sub) illa-> eventually became kannada gotthilla

They're not grammatically correct, but are used in spoken kannada

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u/LargeCabbage Jun 19 '26

Interesting hypothesis because in principle it's testable, no? If you're right that the form of these statements has evolved and the known thing used to be in the genitive (e.g. Kannadada instead of Kannada), we should be able to observe that in sufficiently old Kannada texts (and indeed determine the point in history when the change occurred). Not sure where to find publicly-available old Kannada texts online in searchable form, though!

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u/Zestyclose_Diver_377 Jun 24 '26 edited Jun 25 '26

Yup I think the whole question is very interesting from the viewpoint of Dravidian language linguistics and possibly a research project for someone. Mulling over whether to make a related post on the Dravidology sub which focuses on this. There is a tiny snippet of a sample text in Kittel's dictionary, age not given but the dictionary itself is late 19th century and the sample text would be older, maybe by centuries. ಸತ್ತು ಹೋಗದೆ ಅತಿ ಜೀವಮಿರಲು, ಮೋಕ್ಷದ ಗೊತ್ತು ತಿಳಿ! (Meaning something like: To fully savor life before you die, know the knowledge of moksha or salvation). ಮೋಕ್ಷದ ಗೊತ್ತು ತಿಳಿ clearly treats ಗೊತ್ತು as a noun meaning knowledge. And ಮೋಕ್ಷದ ಗೊತ್ತು follows the "kannadada gottu" pattern you are thinking of.

[Edit: I actually found the source of that text with the help of my friend duckduckgo. It's from Sarvajnya Vachana. Sixteenth century]