point, at which the course of intelligible linguistic corruption, from the Tamilian point of view, reaches the highest degree.

     The rendering of the English sentence ‘My father lives in that small house’ is ‘kanƒbƒvah ham„ chuna urƒ-—i t‡lik.’ in Brahui, and ‘eŒg abbath ƒjoka adano d†kih’ in Malto, and indicates the highest degree of unintelligibility the two languages have attained.

     Some linguists, especially foreigners, labour under the illusion that all minor languages and dialects of the Dravidian family spoken by hill-tribes are primitive in character. The absurdity of this maxim becomes clear, when we subject those linguistic forms to etymological investigation. Almost all the words contained in them are corruptions and not primitive forms. For instance the Brahui word ‘bƒk’ (mouths) and the Toda word ‘nint’ (thine) are true corruptions of the Tamil words ‘vƒyka˜’ and ‘ninadu’ respectively. The age, when the language of the mountaineers was in the primitive condition of the Tamilican Speech was over long long ago, long before the establishment of the first Academy. The present hill tribes, all over India, are the descendants of those who took to mountain life in the distant past, in order to escape the oft-recurring tribal and political wars, authorized and unauthorized cattle-raids and periodical plunder by predatory chiefs, which were the order of the day. Tolkƒppiyam clearly describes the conventional commencement or declaration of ancient wars by capture of cows belonging to the enemy country.

     Unprimitiveness of the Tamilican Hill-tribes Western philologists, in general, having no idea of the Lemurian origin of the Tamilican race, its racial unity throughout the several stages of cultural evolution and linguistic development, and its subsequent breaking-up into several nations, erroneously regard all the Tamilican hill-tribes as primitive peoples living in isolation from primeval times, and still preserving their languages in their primitive condition. Historical and philological investigations