| C H A P T E R - I |
| |
| INTRODUCTION |
| 1.1 Methodology and the Format |
| The present study aims at a descriptive analysis of the
speech of Urali people, a hill tribe of Tamil Nadu. The approach is
data-oriented and uses in general the Neo Bloomfieldian model. |
| This monograph comprises of six chapters. |
| Chapter 1 Introduction |
| This introductory chapter is divided into
two sections. The first section gives an ethnographic account of the
moderately researched ethnic community known as `Urali’ which
includes the geographical position of the area of study, introduction
to the tribe, history and migration, livelihood, material culture,
social structure, political organization and the impact of modern
civilization. Since this monograph focusses itself on providing a
linguistic description of Urali speech, only such features that may
have a direct influence on speech and its divisions are presented
here. For an elaborate ethnographic description see Sam Mohan Lal
1991. |
| In the second section, a four-way phonological and morphological
comprative sketch of the speech of Urali with Irula, Literary Tamil,
Spoken Tamil and Kannada as well as the peculiar characteristic features
of Urali are discussed. |
| Chapter 2 Urali Phonemics |
| This chapter presents the description of various vowel and consonant
sounds of Urali speech. The chapter presents the phonemic contrasts
which include the contrast of both vowels, consonants and their distributions
with illustrations. The allophonic distribution of both vocoids and
contoids is presented separately with illustrations indicating the
occurrence of the sounds. |
| While explaining the clusters found in Urali, both initial and medial clusters are described separately. Under the medial clusters, identical and nonidentical two consonant clusters are presented separetly. The three consonant clusters identified in Urali are also listed separately. |
| Suprasegmental phonemes found in Urali are presented through a description of the types of juncture and terminals. |
| Finally, the syllabic structure of Urali is discussed under three major heads: Initial, Medial and Final syllables. In each case, illustrative examples are given with gloss to explain the openness and closeness of a particular syllable. The six types of syllabic structure identified in Urali are presented with illustrations and syllabic divisions. |
