Asoka. These dialects, as well as the so-called Gaudian dialects
now spoken in North India, from Panjabi down to Orisa, agree in
grammatical structure with the so-called Dravidian dialects of South
India. The family relationships of languages can best be
ascertained not so much by similarities of their vocables but by an
examination of the essential structure of the languages, by their
schemes of accidence, of gender, number and cases of nouns and
adjectives, of voice, mood, number, gender, tenses and of other
inflections of verbs, and of their essential syntactical structure-such
as the order of words in sentences and the methods of formation
of idioms. A comparative study of modern North Indian and South
Indian dialects reveals the fact that their fundamental grammatical
structure is so very much the same that is possible to translate
from one of these languages into any other by the simple process
of the substitution of one word for another - a procedure
absolutely impossible when translating from Sanskrit or English into
any of the spoken dialects of ancient or modern India. English and
Persian are dialects of the Indo-Germanic family of languages in
the analytic stage, but are essentially similar to the South Indian
languages in their grammatical frame-work. It is a well known
conclusion of comparative philology that it is possible for a language
to borrow almost all its vocabulary from another
language, but its grammatical frame-work, dependent on the
particular bent of mind of its speakers cannot be altered by the
influence of a foreign language; and the grammatical frame-work of
all the spoken languages of India from Asokan days to our own
has been the same. I hold therefore that all the spoken languages
of India (perhaps including the Nishada dialects, too) are dialects of
one family of languages-not the Indo-Germanic family-which may be
called Pan-Indian and that they are desi in essential structure and
therefore evolved in India in neolithic times, if not earlier.”

     Though there are thousands of Tamil words in Sanskrit they are
never admitted by the Sanskritists to be such Tendentious
etymology and obstinate denial are the two expedients resorted to
by the Sanskritists, in order to show that all words contained in
Sanskrit are its own property.