SORA & ORIYA : A STUDY ON LOAN VOCABULARY

 SORA  &  ORIYA :   A  STUDY  ON  LOAN  VOCABULARY      

                

Of the several important tribes of  Orissa ,  Sora is one  of the  most  well known,  mainly due to its connecation with the jagannath legend . The tribe is also known by various other names  like  sabara , saura , and sora.  The mother tongue statistics for this  tribe spelied as  ‘ savara’ in the  1981 census is as follows.

            Savara – 1981, India , 5, 56, 195      Orissa – 3, 70, 060

                                                       

     Andra Pradesh    _ 82, 101

     It is clear from these figures that the main concentration of the tribe is in Orissa. However, we have reasons to believe that these census figures may not be very accurate, because a large number of sora speakers who return Oriya as their mother tongue are merged with another tribe called sabara or lodha. It is important to note that the Oriya speaking sabaras are mainly found in the coastal districts of cuttack and puri, while the sora speakers inhabit predominantly in the districts of Ganjam and koraput. It is these latter soras who are discussed in this paper. Their language sora belongs to the southem branch of the munda sub – family and genetically distict from Oriya which belongs to the Indo – Aryan sub – family. But languages which are in contact for centuries together are likely to influence each other irreapective of their genetic affiliations. Thus, we find that there are a large number of linguistic features and words which are common to Oriya and Sora. This situation immeaditely raises the question of culture contact between these languages and consequently of a loan vocabulary. Although at the moment it is not possible to identify definitely the language in terms of donor or recipient the loan vocabulary is sufficient proof to establish the depth and extent of  the conact situation. However, taking the cultural conditions of these twogroups, t is not be denied that Oriya is way a head of sora in any accornplishments and there for it is natural that Oriya in most cases will appear to be the donor and the sora recipient rather then other way round. But it is also true that sora as we understand its processes is a very conservative language and has a natural built in to recreate its own vocabulary with its own indigenous devices. As a moderately agglutinative language, it favours from new words with

                                  

indigenous material rather than by direct borrowings.  Some of the direct borrowings are like raja-king, sun-quick lime, loa-iron, mua-a sweet meat etc. but there are also a large number of common vocabulary which could not be traced to any particular source and the possibility of Oriya borrowing from sora remains quite plausible. In any case, such a study is yet more difficult particularly in the absence of a theory of loan words although no such theory is proposed here, a few guide lines might be of interest