seven methodological steps formulated by Emeneau and Burrow. But this has been silently passed over by Thieme for obvious reasons. Regarding the alternate derivations all except one are fanciful. Thieme says 'ulukhal=mortar' is taken from the language of women. Except for its use by women and a clear determination on the part of Thieme to say somehow that that word is not of Dravidian origin, there is no evidence shown by him for such a statement. He has no parallels to strengthen his argument. 'Khala=thrashing' floor is derived by Thieme from 'akhara=hole’, Neither the significance of the prefix 'a' nor how it has been dropped in 'khala' is explained by him. We are not in the days of Voltaire. 'Mayil=peacock' if Dravidian, then Thieme says that "that language should have an early form 'mayura' or the like to explain the Sanskrit form." Another objection raised by him is the absence of a suffix 'ura' in Tamil. First, he has wrongly assumed that the etymon should have a close phonological resemblance with original form. This need not be and the instances to support my stand are too well known in languages to be mentioned here. The second mistake Thieme has committed is in considering 'ura' as a suffix in Tamil. The borrowed word might have been in its original form a compound, 'mayil-uur'-peacock village. The village in which the peacock was seen would have been the base for 'mayura'. Further, the home of this bird is said to be India and Thieme is bound to explain this factor also when he refutes Burrow's derivation. 'Mukta=pearl' is also refuted by Thieme on two grounds: (1) Prakrit has no form like 'mukka' to correspond to Sanskrit 'mukta'. (2) The meaning 'loosened one' is hardly a denomination that would bring out a characteristic feature of the pearl or its origin. To some extent, Burrow is the cause of this misunderstanding. 'Muttu' in Tamil means 'to ripen', the ripening of water particle. The other Prakrit form 'muttu' fits well with this Tamil form. Thieme's derivation of 'Sava' from 'Sa' meaning swelling on the basis of a statement of the novelist Ernest Hemingway is entertaining. 'Sa' when it takes past tense in Tamil is 'settan' but when it takes the future it is 'saavaan and not 'sappaan as the other verbs in Tamil which take-tt-for past do. On the basis of this pattern deviation, 'saa can be considered as a borrowing in Dravidian rather than the other way round.2 ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ 2 See my review of M. Raghava Iyengar's 'Vinaittiripu Vilakkam', in The Hindu, November 30, 1958f. |