Gorum (also Parengi) is a near-extinct minor Munda language of India, spoken by the Parenga people of Odisha state, eastern India.
The name Gorum most likely comes from an animal/people prefix go- and root -rum meaning 'people', and is possibly related to the ethnonym Remo.
"Parengi" or "Parenga" is of obscure origin.
Gorum is 60 percent endangered and may soon become extinct. Few people under the age of thirty years can understand the language, while those who do know it are likely to deny knowing it. This language seems to have been first researched in 1933. Ethnologue (2005) reports a literacy rate of just 11.5% which seemingly higher in Andhra Pradesh and lower in Odisha.
Gorum is a member of the Munda family, as shown by the glottal consonants that are used in creaky voice. However, it may have borrowed some elements from nearby Dravidian languages, such as doubly inflected AVC structures. However, aside from local Dravidian languages, Limbu, a Tibeto-Burman language in Eastern Nepal also display doubly inflected AVCs, so does Burushaski in the northern periphery of South Asia.
Gorum speakers are located in the following areas of eastern India.
Gutob is spoken to the north of Gorum, and Gta to the west of Gorum.
In Gorum, palatal stops are completely replaced by fricatives /s/ and /z/. Stop aspiration and dental-retroflex distinction are also absent.
Creaky voice in Gorum is part of the morphology, i.e. grammaticalized, to demonstrate the affectedness of the verb stems. Although it has been suggested that creaky voice is reconstructible in proto-Austroasiatic, Anderson (2007) raises possibilities of whether Gorum creaky voice is true archaicism or pseudo-archaism.
Aze (1971) described that stress in generally found in word-final position in Gorum words produced in isolated utterances, while in nominal forms, stress falls in the penultimate syllable. In the case of verbal forms, the pattern may not be determined due to morpholexical complications.
Gorum distinguishes two numbers on nominals: unmarked singular and plural -gi.
Noun phrases are marked for possession. These possessive markers occur primarily with inalienable nouns, i.e. body parts, kin terms, and some lexical terms that are socioculturally determined to be inalienable like irrigated rice fields.
Gorum has two types of nominal marking to demonstrate clausal relation: objective/oblique/recipient marker e- and locative postposition etur. The conditions of variation in both cases and whether they carry any productive meaning or not remain unclear.
Gorum, like any other Munda languages, does not have a morphological concept of gender. Word pairs that show gender distinction are usually borrowed from Indo-Aryan and Dravidian. However, there is, at least, some kinds of word class distinction based on animacy exist, but the evidence is faint or frozen in Gorum.
It has not yet fully been determined whether adjectives exist as a separate lexical category in Gorum. If it does, then the adjective class of Gorum is definitely small, consisting of a few uninflectable words such as "black", "white", "big", "small". In attributive use, adjectives precede the nouns that they modify and nearly always attach the attributive suffix -. In predicative use, adjectives are expressed with the auxiliary ' ("to be, to stay").
There seems to be numerous roots âÂÂincluding adjectives â that may be used directly as semantic heads of predicates, typically to express inchoative semantics of the lexical concept. It is unknown which nominal or adjectival roots are capable for this verbal function.
Unlike other Munda languages, Gorum expresses reflexivity by marking the suffix -ne to the relevant noun phrases. For example,
Being a severely endangered moribund spoken by a scheduled tribe which situates at the bottom of the socioeconomic hierarchical system of India, it is not surprising that Gorum vocabulary have been massively impacted by recent loans from more dominant neighbouring languages Desia and Odia. Below are Gorum native numbers attested by Anderson and Rau during their 2008 linguistic expedition in Koraput:
Although numbers greater than 7 have been replaced by Indo-Aryan, Gorum originally may have a decimal counting system, indicated by older reports:
In Gorum, there are several word derivation methods: affixation, reduplication, and compounding, etc. Monosyllabic stems can take prefixes such as pi-, bu-/bo-/ÃÂ-, u-, a- k/gV-, su-/sV-, infixes -n-, -ÃÂ-, suffixes -om, -li, partial or full reduplicate, and pair with verbs or nouns to form new words. There are verb-noun compounds, i.e. noun incorporation. Eg. zÃÂÃÂaÃÂ ('to (white) wash the walls'), composed of zÃÂd ('to wipe off') and ÃÂaÃÂ ('water'). Noun incorporation in Gorum is akin to the feature that also exists in Sora, Juray, Remo, Gutob, Kharia, GtaÃÂ, and Kherwarian languages. Similar classificatory incorporation is found in Nicobarese and Khasic as well and may be an archaic feature of Austroasiatic morphosyntax.
Two third plural subject markers -ey and =gi may co-occur on the same predicate at the same time in some contexts without any clear motives.
Possessor of a logical argument in Sora-Gorum is marked by the object type.
Version ("affectedness") is a highly marked feature in Gorum verbal morphology and is distinctive from voice markers is that it does not occupy a slot in Gorum verb structure and nor an indication of relations between verbal actants marked in the verbal complex, but to encode their status of being affected in the discourse space. As mentioned above, Gorum version is represented by creaky voice vowels. It is used optionally to denote the notions of primary affectedness, discourse salience, and discourse deictic orientation.
1. (subject affecting)
2. (passive agent/indirect experiencer subject [object-as-subject])
Gorum follows regional South Asian word order of SOV, but the positions of demonstratives, possessives, numerals in the NPs and verbal indexation show support for the evidence that a different word order was historically used predominantly in earlier Gorum syntax.
Gorum folklore: The Shrew that became a Tiger