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number
and variety of the grammatical forms of Shen-Tamil. The Shen-Tamil grammar
is a crowded museum of obsolete forms, cast-off inflexions, and curious
anamolies... Nothing strikes a Tamil scholar more, on examining the dictionaries
of the other Dravidian dialects, than the pausity of their lists of synonyms
in comparison with those of Tamil. The Tamil vocabulary contains not only
those words which may be regarded as appropriate to the language, in as
much as they are used by Tamil alone, but also those which may be considered
as the property of Telugu, Canarese, &c. Thus, the word used for ‘house’in
ordinary Tamil is vidu; but the vocabulary contains also, and occasionally
uses, the word appropriate to Telugu, il (Tel. illu); and the distinctive
Canarese word, manai (Can. mane); besides another synonym, kudi which
it has in common with Sanskrit and the whole of the Finnish languages.
The grammar and vocabulary of Tamil are thus to a considerable extent
the common repository of Dravidian forms and roots. We may conclude, therefore,
that the literary cultivation of Tamil dates from a period prior to that
of the other idioms, and not long subsequent to the final breaking up
of the language of the ancient Dravidians into dialects.”1
(iv) Independence of the Tamil language and literature
“The orientalists who supposed the Dravidian
languages to be derived from Sanskrit were not aware of the existence
of uncultivated languages of the Dravidian family, in which Sanskrit words
were not at all, or but very rarely, employed; they were also not aware
that some of the Dravidian languages which make use of Sanskrit derivatives,
are able to dispense with those derivatives altogether, such derivatives
being considered rather as luxuries or articles of finery than as necessaries.
It is true it would now be difficult for Telugu to dispense with its Sanskrit;
more so for Canarese; and most of all for Malayalam. Those languages having
borrowed from Sanskrit so largely, and being so habituated to loop up
to it for help, that it would be scarcely possible for them now to asset
their independence. Tamil however, the
1.D.C.G.Introduction,p.82.
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