to set up methodological principles and suggested Dravidian sources for some five hundred Sanskrit words. Collaborative work by Burrow and myself on a Dravidian etymological dictionary will add more items. The Sanskrit etymological dictionary that Manfred Mayrhofer has just begun to publish in Germany (1953)13 takes account of this recent work. III. Dravidian Words in Sanskrit Dravidian loan words in Sanskrit, as well as the influence of Dravidian on Indo-Aryan is a specialised field of language research. Prof. THOMAS BURROW, Boden Professor of Sanskrit at the University of Oxford, in his book, The Sanskrit Language, Faber and Faber, London, 1959, has an interesting chapter entitled Non-Aryan influence on Sanskrit. In the following reading which is taken from one of his public lectures published in Indo Asian Culture, Professor Burrow fixes the periods when the Sanskrit speakers were subject to Dravidian influence. Indo-Asian Culture, April, 1960, pages 336 to 341. THE RELATIVE IMPORTANCE of various pre-Aryan peoples vis-á-vis the Indo-Aryans may be expected to be reflected in the degree of influence exercised on the Indo-Aryan language. From this point of view, it can be stated with little hesitation that Dravidian rates very high in this respect. The number of loan-words in classical Sanskrit from this source is very considerable. In comparison, the demonstrable influence of the Austro-Asiatic Kol or Munda languages seems to be comparatively small. There is a difficulty in this matter consisting in the fact that only a small number of languages belonging to the latter group have been investigated, and that their serious comparative study has not yet begun, as it cannot until adequate material is available. Nevertheless, even when allowance is made for this, it seems quite impossible that these languages can have exercised anything like the same degree of influence on Sanskrit as Dravidian. This, being the case, one would be inclined to believe that in the North Indian areas occupied by Indo-Aryan the Dravidian had formed a more prominent part of the population than the Mundas. Another important matter to be considered is the period at which ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ 13 Mayrhofer, Manfred, Kurzgefasstes etymologisches Worterbuch des Altin-dischen, 1 und 2. Lieferung, Heidelberg, Carl Winter, 1953, 1954. |