urbanized bearers of a high civilization destined in its later phases to conquer all Europe and then a great part of the earth-rather than to recognize them for what they doubtless were-nomadic, barbarous looters and cattle-rustlers whose fate it was through the centuries to disrupt older civilizations but to be civilized by them. This was in all probability the event in India as it was in Greece or in the late Roman Empire.³

This assumption led in the long run to another block-the methodological tendency of the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth century to attempt to find Indo-European etymologies for the greatest possible portion of the vocabularies of the Indo-European languages (see also note 3), even though the object could only be achieved by flighṭs of phonological and semantic fancy. Latin perhaps was the greatest sufferer from this urge,⁴ but none of the languages was exempt, and Sanskrit was no exception. It was the less pardonable in dealing with a language spoken and written in India, where even casual inspection of the Dravidian languages would have suggested some borrowings, at least, from Dravidian into Sanskrit.⁵

The third blocking factor has been for long the general ignorance of and indifference to the Dravidian languages, even among professed Indological linguistic scholars. They must not, of course, be judged too harshly. The Dravidian languages are not easy, most of them are languages spoken by backwoods "primitives" and are badly reported, the four literary languages have enormous literatures; ars (et scientia) longa, vita brevis.

Finally, a fourth blocking factor has been the general caution of Indo-European scholars when confronted with a substratum situation

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³ Mingled with this essentially Europe-centered attitude was that other strand in late, eighteenth century thinking, the "romantic'' one stressed by Mayrhofer, Manfred, Saeculum 2: 54 ff., 1951. It led to Sanskrit being regarded (to use Mayrhofer's phrase) as "die ur-ste aller Ursprachen," as an exemplar of purity and freedom from all non-Indo-European influence. The Indo-European savages, in short, were the noblest of all noble savages. But this, of course, is ethnocentrism all over again.

⁴Cf. Lane, George S., Lang. 25: 335-337, 1949.

⁵ The borrowings from the vernacular Middle Indo-Aryan into Sanskrit, when the latter became, as it early did, a hieratic and then a dead language in which speakers of Middle Indo-Aryan languages composed freely, form another portion of the Sanskrit lexicon which must be identified and not subjected to fantastic Indo-European etymologizing. Paul Tedesco has made many notable contributions here, but he also is willing to operate with a methodology in which the Dravidian languages do not exist except as borrowers from Indo-Aryan. One example of this is his treatment of words for "belly, stomach" in Sanskrit piṭaka-"basket," Archaeologica orientalia in memoriam Ernst Herzfeld 218, Locust Valley, N.Y., 1952. Whatever may be the etymology of Br. Piḍ.