The curious case of Kannada ‘maaDu’

Kannada is one of the major languages of India. It is one of the four major languages of the Dravidian family, the other three being Tamil, Telugu and Malayalam. Kannada belongs to the Southern branch of the Dravidian family (Burrow and Emeneau, 1984) and is spoken primarily in the state of Karnataka (formerly Mysore), South India. It is the official language of the state and one of the 22 languages listed in the Eighth Schedule of the Indian Constitution. It is one of the six classical languages of India. Kannada has a rich, continuous literary tradition and a fine grammatical tradition. In this paper, we discuss the curious and odd case of the Kannada verb ‘maaDu’, address the problems it poses to Natural Language Processing (NLP) and Machine Translation (MT) systems and offer possible solutions.