studies entirely on Sanskrit which represents the posterior end of the ancient Indo-European line of speech in contradistinction to Tamil which represents its anterior end have met with a blind alley and arrived at several unscientific and illogical conclusion, in their extreme frustration and despair. The Israelites, though they wandered in the wilderness for forty years, at last found out the right path. But the western linguists who are wandering in the wilderness of Sanskrit, will never be able to find out the right path even after forty aeons. This is a blessing in disguise to the obscurantists, to whom historical treatment of languages leading to enlightenment of humanity is a bete noire and bugbear. This was why Descriptive Linguistics was readily accepted by the Sanskritists with great enthusiasm, and is being diligently propagated throughout India.

    The historical treatment of words and languages, as conceived by the expounders of Descriptive Linguistics, consists in taking the order in which words and their meanings occur in the existing literature, for their original one. This may be true in the case of a new or recent language, but not in that of an old language like Tamil, whose ancient literature has become extinct and in whose extant literature words and meanings occur according to the requirements of the context, and not in the order of their formation or origination. For instance, the word ‘pa˜˜i’. which has about twenty meanings, occurs in Tolkƒppiyam, the oldest lierary work extant in Tamil only in its latest sense, viz., ‘place’. As all the pre-Tolkƒppiyam works have gone into oblivion, it is impossible for us to find out the original order in which words and their meanings have come into existence. The only order in which we can arrange them at present; so as to approximate to the original one, is the logical order.

      “Total loss of morphemes is an inevitable feature of linguistic change. There is evidence that this loss proceeds at about the same average rate for all languages. A number of calculations have indicated that this rate is about 19 percent per thousand years for the most basic vocabulary. Suppose two languages separate completely so that their subsequent histories are independent, and