may be recognized from occasional dialectisms and colloquialisms in the literary as well as epigraphical monuments. A new splitting into regional dialects as well as the preservation of old dialectal variations may be observed at the same time, and is responsible for such developments as the origin of Malayalam. The separation of Tamil and Malayalam was brought to an end by the 13th-14th Century A.D. and that event, too, was canonized in grammars-in Nannūl and Līlātilakam for Tamil and Malayalam respectively.2 II. Linguistic Prehistory Murray B. Emeneau and Thomas Burrow are two Sanskrit scholars who have written about the influence of Dravidian on Indo-Aryan, and of Indo-Aryan on Dravidian. They have collaborated in the publication of A Dravidian Etymological Dictionary, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1961. In the following extract from a paper read before the American Philosophical Society, Professor EMENEAU states some of the reasons for the comparatively less research undertaken in the field of Dravidian Linguistics, Linguistic Pre-history of India, reprinted in Tamil Culture, Vol. V, 1956, pages 35 to 39. WHENEVER TWO LANGUAGE communities come in contact and remain in contact for any appreciably long period, the languages have some effect upon each other's structure. Borrowing of words in one or the other direction or in both is the most obvious effect. But there may also be a shift of sound systems, borrowing of derivational or inflectional morphemes, or borrowing of syntactical traits. Sanskrit scholarship in the West soon saw that some of the non-Indo-European features of Sanskrit were Dravidian (or possibly Munda) in type. The retroflex (domal or cerebral) consonants in ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ 2 As to the chronology of the disintegration of PDr and the successive stages of Dravidian, cf. an interesting article by M. Andronov, Lexicostatistic Analysis of the Chronology of Disintegration of Proto-Dravidian, IIJ VII. 1964, 2/3, pp. 170-186. According to Andronov, the beginnings of the disintegration of PDr are to be sought in the separation of Brahui which seems to have taken place "in the very beginning of the 4th Millenium B.C.". The SDr unity broke according to him between the 10th-9th Century B.C. into Telugu (-Tuḷu and Kannada-Tamil. But the latter group was "remarkably long-lived and disintegrated only in the beginning of the Christian era (3r4 Century A.D.)". With regard to lexicostatistic methods as such cf. a very sound criticism offered by Karl V. Teeter, Lexicostatistics and Genetic Relationship, Lg. 39, 4, 1963. p. 638 ff. |