| Old Telugu | |
| Era: | evolved into Telugu ca. 1000 CE |
| Familycolor: | Dravidian |
| Fam2: | South-Central |
| Fam3: | Telugic |
| Script: | Bhattiprolu |
| Iso3: | none |
| Isoexception: | historical |
| Glotto: | oldt1249 |
| Glottorefname: | Old Telugu |
Old Telugu (Telugu: ప్రాదెనుగు|prādenugu) is the earliest attested stage of the Telugu language.[1]
Old Telugu's phonological system included a series of voiced and voiceless stops, aspirated stops, and sibilants due to Indo-Aryan influences. The language had a distinct set of vowel lengths and a unique handling of nasals and diphthongs. The phonemes /ẓ/, /ḍ/, and /r/ exhibited interesting historical developments, with certain sounds being lost or altered over time.
| Nasal | m (మ) | n (న) | ṇ (ణ) | ñ (ఞ) | ṅ (ఙ) | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Stop | Voiceless | p (ప) | t (త) | ṟ (ఱ) | ṭ (ట) | c (చ) | k (క) | ||
| Aspirated | pʰ (ఫ) | tʰ (థ) | ṭʰ (ఠ) | cʰ (ఛ) | kʰ (ఖ) | ||||
| Voiced | b (బ) | d (ద) | ḍ (డ) | j (జ) | g (గ) | ||||
| Breathy | bʰ (భ) | dʰ (ధ) | ḍʰ (ఢ) | jʰ (ఝ) | gʰ (ఘ) | ||||
| Fricative | s (స) | ṣ (ష) | ś (శ) | h (హ) | |||||
| Approximant | v (వ) | l (ల) | ḷ (ళ) | y (య) | |||||
| Rhotic | r (ర) | ḻ (ఴ) | |||||||
Old Telugu is an agglutinative language primarily utilizing suffixes to express grammatical relationships. Noun morphology included gender markers and various derivational processes, while verb morphology was highly developed with distinct markers for tense, mood, and aspect. Old Telugu exhibited flexibility in word order due to its inflectional richness.
Nouns in Old Telugu could be primary or derived, with primary nouns often being free forms and derived nouns formed through suffixation. Gender was signaled by specific suffixes and the overall morphology was influenced by both native Dravidian elements and Indo-Aryan borrowings.
Old Telugu verbs were categorized into finite and non-finite forms, with various suffixes indicating tense, mood, and agreement with subjects. The language had three primary tense paradigms: past, non-past, and negative. Additionally, Old Telugu featured several derived verb forms, including causatives and denominal verbs.
The pronominal system in Old Telugu marked person, number, and gender. Reflexive pronouns and a range of demonstratives, interrogatives, and indefinites were also used.
The structure of Old Telugu sentences typically involved nominative-accusative alignment, with case markers indicating the grammatical roles of nouns. The language employed a variety of case forms and postpositions to express detailed semantic relations.