Caldwell's observations on the High Antiquity of the Tamilican Form of Speech

     Passages from Caldwell's Dravidian Comparative Grammar affording glimpses of the primordeal nature of Tamil:

     “Does there not seem to be reason for regarding the Dravidian family of languages, not only as a link of connection between the Indo-European and Scythian groups but - in some particulars, especially in relation to the pronouns - as the best surviving representative of a period in the history of human speech older than the Indo-European stage, older than the Scythian, and older than the separation of the one from the other”¹

     “It is a different question whether some of the Dravidian forms and roots may not have formed a portion of the linguistic inheritance which appears to have descended to the earliest Dravidians from the fathers of the human race. I should be inclined, however to seek for traces of that inheritance only in the narrow area of the simplest and most necessary, and therefore probably the most primitive, elements of speech”²

     The hypothesis of the existence of a remote original affinity between the Dravidian languages and Sanskrit, or rather between those languages and the Indo-European family of tongues, inclusive of Sanskrit, of such a nature as to allow us to give the Dravidian languages a place in the Indo-European group, is altogether different from the notion of the direct derivation of those languages from Sanskrit. The hypothesis of a remote original affinity is favoured by some interesting analogies both in the grammar and in the vocabulary, which will be noticed in their place. Some of those analogies are best accounted for by the supposition of the retention by the Dravidian family, as by Finnish and Turkish, of certain number of roots and forms belonging to the prae-Aryan period, the period which preceded the final separation of the Indo-European group of tongues from the Scythian.”³