Dravidian languages

“ Consonants.—As the question of Dravidian influence is being considered all along, I should add here a few remarks regarding the Dravidian alphabet system. In the Tamil script, we get only ক to represent all the consonants of ক-বর্গ and this ক is uttered with slight variations to pronounce খ, গ and ঘ. The usual Tamil sound of ক is almost খ to our ears. Similarly there are only ট, ত and প for all the letters of their বর্গ or class. There is only one letter to represent চ and শ and the sound of চ is peculiarly sibilant in all the Dravidian languages. ”

“ Farther to the north we find Dravidian dialects spoken by small tribes in the Central Provinces and Chota Nagpur, and even up to the banks of the Ganges in the Rajmahal hills. A Dravidian dialect is, finally, spoken by the Brāhūīs of Baluchistan in the far north-west. The various Dravidian languages, with the number of speakers returned at the census of 1901, are as follows:—
Of these Tamil and Malayālam can be considered as two dialects of one and the same language, which is, in its turn, closely related to Kanarese. ”

“ Society,” 1863. W. W. S.
[67]
Dravidian, Dravirian, or Tamulic.
A family of languages, agglutinative in character, vernacular in the S. Peninsula of British India, and classed as Sub-Turanian. It includes Canarese, Malayalim, Tamil, Telugu, and Tulu. The term is derived from “Dravira,” a Sanskrit name for the Coromandel Coast. It is also called Nishada. See Caldwell: “Comparative Grammar of the Dravidian Languages,” 8vo, 1861. ☞
Drewin.
African: a dialect of Grebo, allied to Bassa, spoken at Cape Palmas, Ivory-Coast, Guinea, W. Africa. ”

“ According to a theory which is very widely accepted, the Dravidian languages exerted a different influence on the Aryan languages when the Aryans first set foot on Indian soil, in making them adopt the ‘cacuminal’ (or ‘inverted’) sounds ḍ, ṭ, ṇ with ḍh and ṭh, which were not found in primitive Aryan. But even this theory does not seem to be quite proof against objections. It is easy to admit that natives accustomed to one place of articulation of their d, t, n will unconsciously produce the d, t, n of a new language they are learning in the same place; but then they will do it everywhere. ”

“ The Dravidian languages, Gondi, Kurukh and Khond, are of one family with Tamil, Telugu, Malayalam and Canarese, and their home is the south of India. The word Dravida comes from an older form Damila or Dramila, and was used in ancient Pali and Jain literature as a name for the people of the Tamil country.75 Afterwards it came to signify generally the people of southern India as opposed to Gaur or northern India. ”

“ It has become a fashion for some time past and especially among writers in South India to attribute everything to a Tamilian origin. The investigations into the Tamil language by early Missionaries like Pope, Winslow, Rottler and others, and the one-sided conclusions of Caldwell with regard to the antiquity of the Dravidian languages and culture have emboldened others to pursue the theme to the entire exclusion of other and more important factors that ought to enter into any impartial account of the development of any culture. ”

“ Finnish, Hungarian, Turkish, and the Dravidian languages belong in the main to the combinatory stratum; but having received a considerable amount of literary cultivation, they all alike exhibit forms which in every sense of the word are inflectional. If in Finnish, for instance, we find käsi, in the singular, hand, and kädet, in the plural, hands, we see that phonetic corruption has clearly reached the very core of the noun, and given rise to a plural more decidedly inflectional than the Greek χεῖρ-ες, or the English hand-s. ”

“ Relations with other Indo-Aryan Languages.—Marathi has to its north, in order from west to east, Gujarati, Rajasthani, Western Hindi and Eastern Hindi. To its east and south it has the Dravidian languages, Gondi, Telugu and Kanarese. Elsewhere in India Aryan languages gradually fade away into each other, so that it is impossible to fix any definite boundary line between them. But this is not the case with Marathi. ”

“ J. Ramayya Pantulu’s amendment was lost showed that the sense of the Committee was against the exclusion of all polite forms, which did not conform to the grammar of the literary dialect or the usage of the poets.
5. As Prof. M. Ranga Chariar explained to the committee, the Syndicate felt that the literary dialect in each of the principal Dravidian Languages had diverged too far from polite speech and thought it desirable to bring them closer together by ‘fixing if possible a standard of colloquiality’ in vernacular composition. Committees were constituted to carry out this object. ”

“ Grammar of the Dravidian Languages, 1st ed.
1869.—"The people themselves arrange their countrymen under two heads; five termed Panch-gaura, belonging to the Hindi, {327a}or as it is now generally called, the Aryan group, and the remaining five, or Panch-Dravida, to the Tamil type."—Sir W. Elliot, in J. Ethn. ”

“ By adding pronouns, or the terminations of pronouns, to such forms, nouns are derived which denote the person who performs the action. Thus from Telugu koṭṭē and vāḍu, “he,” is formed koṭṭē-vāḍu, “one who usually strikes.” Such forms are used as ordinary verbs, and the usual verbal forms of Dravidian languages can broadly be described as such nouns of agency. ”

“ It is tolerably certain that the Dravidian races had attained to some degree of civilization before the Aryans appeared in their country, and, with a system of castes, introduced the worship of Vishnu and Siva. One evidence of the ancient civilization of the Dravidians is that they possessed a system of numerals up to 1000, essentially the same in all the four languages; though in counting above 1000 they make use of Sanscrit numerals. ”

“ When travelling in India he recognized the true position of Zend, about which previous scholars had held the most erroneous views, and his survey of the languages of India and Persia was thought valuable enough in 1863 to be printed from his manuscript, forty years after it was written. He was also the first to see that the Dravidian (by him called Malabaric) languages were totally different from Sanskrit. ”

“ Till it has been more closely tested we must therefore consider the Dravidian family as an isolated group of languages, with several characteristic features of its own.
The pronunciation is described as soft and mellifluous. Abruptness and hard combinations of sounds are avoided. There is, for example, a distinct tendency to avoid pronouncing a short consonant at the end of a word, a very short vowel being often added after it. Thus the pronoun of the third person singular, which is avan, “he,” in Tamil, is pronounced avanu in Kanarese ”

“ At an early period, before the dawn of history, these races appear to have accepted some form of the Brahmanical or Buddhist faiths. Many storms of conquest have since swept over the land, and colonies of Mogul and Mahratta origin are to be found here and there. But the evidence of language proves that the ethnical character of the population has remained stable under all these influences, and that the Madras Hindu, Mahommedan, Jain and Christian are of the same stock. Of the five Dravidian languages in British territory Telugu is spoken by over 14,000,000 persons ”

“ But they do indicate the existence, in varying degrees of purity, of five different origins, of which the Dravidian and Mundā alone can be said to be purely indigenous and confined to the Indian peninsula. Nowhere is it more easy than in India to see how languages spread from race to race, from tribe to tribe, with a sort of linguistic contagion; the stronger, more supple, more copious, more cultivated languages replacing and gradually destroying weaker forms of speech. ”

“ In the south are a still darker population almost wholly Dravidian. It is in the most ancient part of India, in the high plateau of the Deccan, that there still dwell the peoples who are probably the aborigines of the land and use the most purely Indian languages, the various Dravidian dialects. The geologically recent valleys of the Indus and Ganges are the home of races, mingled with aboriginal peoples, whose language and physical features show that in them is a strong strain of immigrant blood. ”

“ Even this very crude summary, it is true, shows at least three great groups of languages, Dravidian in the south, Indo-European in the west and north-west, Tibeto-Burman in the north and the north-east. There are in fact five separate families of human speech which have their homes in India; the Aryan, the Dravidian, the Mundā, the Mon-Khmer, and the Tibeto-Chinese. The lateral spread of these is, of course, no real indication of the present habitat of five different races of men. ”

“ Inhab. 25 seq., and Dravira, in a quotation from Al-biruni under MALABAR.] It may be suggested as possible that the Tropina of Pliny is also the same (see below) . Dr. Caldwell proposed Dravidian as a convenient name for the S. Indian languages which belong to the Tamil family, and the cultivated members of which are Tamil, Malayālam, Canarese, Tulu, Kuḍagu (or Coorg) , and Telegu; the uncultivated Tuḍa, Kōta, Gōṇḍ, Khonḍ, Orāon, Rājmahāli. [It has also been adopted as an ethnological term to designate the non-Aryan races of India (see Risley, Tribes and Castes of Bengal, i. Intro. xxxi.) .] ”

“ The presumption is that the advance of the Aryans or Hindus drove the Mundas from the open country to the seclusion of the hills and forests. The Munda and Dravidian languages are shown by Sir G. Grierson to be distinct groups without any real connection.
Drawing water from the village well
Though the physical characteristics of the two sets of tribes display no marked points of difference, the opinion has been generally held by ethnologists who know them that they represent two distinct waves of immigration, and the absence of connection between their languages bears out this view. ”

“ Huxley concluded, from descriptions, that “the Deccan tribes are indistinguishable from the Australian races.” Sir W.W. Hunter states that the Dravidian tribes were driven southwards in Hindustan, and that the grammatical relations of their dialects are “expressed by suffixes,” which is true as to the Australian languages. He states that Bishop Caldwell,4 whom he calls “the great missionary scholar of the Dravidian tongue,” showed that the south and western Australian tribes use almost the same words for “I, thou, he, we, you, as the Dravidian fishermen on the Madras coast.” ”

“ The Munda or Kolarian family, which is now distinguished from the Dravidian, is almost confined to Chota Nagpur, its best-known tribe being the Santals. The Dravidian family includes the four literary languages of the south, as well as many dialects spoken by hill tribes in central India, and also the isolated Brahui in Baluchistan. Of the Indo-European family, the Iranian branch inhabits Persia, Afghanistan and Baluchistan; while the Indo-Aryan branch is spoken by the great mass of the people of northern India. ”

“ An analysis of the character of our vocalic and consonantal sounds can only lead us to form a definite idea regarding our provincial accent system. As such, a comparative study of Bengali phonology should be carefully pursued, though this sort of study involves a detailed consideration of the phonology of not only the ancient Vedic and the post-Vedic languages, but also of the Dravidian accent system. ”

“ There are especially two groups of Asiatic languages, which have been confidently claimed, and with some show of reason, to belong to the Scythian family. Of these, the first is that occupying the southern portion of the peninsula of India, and commonly called the Tamulian or Dravidian group or family. We have already seen (in the fifth and sixth lectures) that the Sanskrit speaking tribes, of Indo-European race, forced their way into India through the passes on its north-western frontier, almost within the historic period ”

“ Here we may lump them together not so much as a family as a miscellany. [85] There is one great group of languages in Africa, from a little way north of the equator to its southern extremity, the Bantu, and in addition a complex of other languages across the centre of the continent about which we will not trouble here. [86] There are also two probably separate groups, the Dravidian in South India, and the Malay-Polynesian stretched over Polynesia, and also now including Indian tongues. ”

“ About a third of humanity to-day speaks some form of Indo-European. A quarter talks some dialect of Sinitic stock. Semitic, Dravidian, Ural-Altaic, Japanese, Malayo-Polynesian, Bantu have each from about fifty to a hundred million speakers. The languages included in these eight families form the speech of approximately ninety per cent of living human beings. ”

“ On the other hand, it has been greatly depreciated and even brought into contempt by the vagaries of certain etymologists, who discover affinities where there is nothing but the vaguest verbal resemblance. [1] Science has demonstrated beyond all cavil that, while differing widely among themselves, the American languages not only betray no affinity to any other tongues, but belong to an absolutely distinct order of speech. They are neither isolating or monosyllabic like the Indo-Chinese group, agglutinating like the Ural-Altaic, Bantu, or Dravidian, nor inflexional like the Semitic and Aryan. ”

“ But, as compared with its literary sister languages, it has preserved its Dravidian character singularly free from foreign influence. Of Tamil words which have found a permanent home in English may be mentioned curry, (kaṛi) , mulligatawny (milagu, pepper, and taṇṇîr, cool water) , cheroot (suruttu) , pariah (paṛeiyan) .
The laws of euphony (avoiding of hiatus, softening of initial consonants, contact of final with initial consonants) are far more complicated in Tamil than in Sanskrit. ”