Proto-Munda language

Syntactic shift

Although the modern Munda languages show a standard head-final subject–object–verb (SOV) order in unmarked phrases, most scholars believe that proto-Munda was head-first, VO like proto-Austroasiatic. The first linguist to noticed this peculiarity, Heinz-Jürgen Pinnow (1959, 1960), observed strong traceable evidence for a proto-Munda VO order. VO order has been found in compounds, noun incorporation verbal morphology in the Sora^[8]-Gorum languages, and to a lesser extent in Gutob, Remo, Kharia, and Juang. By any given verb conjugations, the Munda verbs (including Kherwarian (Santali, Ho,...) and Korku) always show internal head-first, V-P order, with two main overall syntactic orders of transitive verbs: A-V-P and V-P-A, corresponding to Austroasiatic clausal syntaxes SVO and VOS. Most Munda compounds are also head-first and right-branching, with new loan words from Indian languages following the Indian norm of head-final and left-branching.^[9][10]

Remo:

Sora:

Juang:

Gorum:

Winfred Lehmann (1973) reviewed,^[11]

"If we examine further evidence provided by Pinnow, we note that Munda contains VO characteristics. It has VO order in compounds (Pinnow [1960], 97); it also provides examples of NG [noun-genitive] order and of prefixes. Since the Khmer-Nicobar languages are consistently VO, I assume that it was the Munda languages which were modified syntactically... We may conclude that Proto-Austroasiatic was VO and non-agglutinative in morphological structure."

— Lehmann, 1973:57

Pinnow (1963, 1966) proposed that proto-Munda was SVO and that was the syntax of proto-Austroasiatic, which was also highly synthetic like Munda, whereas he attributed analytic and isolating typological features in modern Mon-Khmer to language contact in the Mainland Southeast Asia linguistic area.^[12] Disagreeing with Pinnow, Donegan & Stampe (1983, 2004) argued that proto-Munda was VO but non-agglutinative like its sister languages in Southeast Asia. According to Donegan & Stampe, Munda synthesis and SOV order were not stimulated by just language contact within the South Asian linguistic area, but by internal restructuring that caused the Munda word prosody to shift its rhythmic patterns from typical Austroasiatic rising, vowel reduction, iambic stressed to falling, vowel harmony, trochaic stressed profile, thus reversed the clausal syntactic structure and triggered word agglutination.^[13]

For the reason why the Munda languages keep head-first order in compounds and polysynthetic morphology, Donegan & Stampe (2002) believed that words, like the verb-noun compounds, are more resistant to internal changes of rhythms and ordering than phrases.^[14] Stanley Starosta (1967) explained that, during its early formation stage when Munda was still head-first SVO, verb-noun incorporation was facilitated as seen in modern Sora, but then it did a syntactic shift to head-final SOV and added more morphology. The polysynthetic verb phrases thus had become crystalized since that time. Sora verbs may incorporate another indirect object, but the theme argument would fall within the scope of different oblique arguments; the oblique noun is showed in thematic position. Sora also can incorporate transitive subjects and form verb serializations with incorporated nouns. Since the Sora NIs function like the mirror images of typical well-studied polysynthetic languages, it was suggested by Mark Baker that Sora simply operates the opposite way to the head movement theory proposed by the polysynthesis parameter.^[15]

Donegan & Stampe's prediction of Munda synthetic shift caused by change of rhythmic holism is contested by Horo & Anderson et al. (2017, 2020, 2022). Field acoustic researches on various Sora and Santali dialects show that both languages have consistently second-or-last-syllable prominence with clear iambic patterns (first light syllable, followed by a second heavy stressed syllable) in disyllabic and tetrasyllabic words (Horo & Anderson 2022).^[16][17]

Proto-Munda predicate

Noun incorporation

According to Anderson (2014, 2017, 2021), Munda syntactic noun incorporation is very archaic and may be the oldest feature of Austroasiatic morphology, with cognates are attested in across every subgroup,^[23] but the status of noun incorporation in proto-Munda still difficult to determine. Rau notes that "it is possible that some sort of incorporation was already present in proto-Munda and worked along the lines attested in modern Sora."^[24]