After giving Rs. 8 lakh for the ongoing work on the Tulu Jnati Padakosha (Tulu Cognate Dictionary) during 2015-16, the Karnataka Tulu Sahitya Academy has stopped funding the project.
It was a joint initiative of the academy and Nitte University, started in 2015. According to the proposal, the academy was to fund the project for two years and Nitte University for one year. However, the academy is upset with the differences of opinion among four members of the editorial board working on the project. Subsequently, two of them quit.
“We tried to bring rapprochement among the members by holding at least three meetings. But it did not materialise,” said M. Janaki Brahmavar, president of the academy.
She said the academy has not allocated funds for the project this financial year. Now, two remaining board members are going ahead with the project under Nitte University.
The project aim is to finding out whether a word used in Tulu was being spoken in Kannada, Kodava, Malayalam, Tamil and Telugu. If so, the work involved framing cognate words for those languages belonging to one family. It took Tulu words as keywords and Malayalam, Tamil, Telugu, Kannada and Kodava as the cognate languages.
