“Much light is thrown by the pronouns on the relationship of languages and families of languages; for the personal pronouns, and especially those of the first and second persons singular, evince more of the quality of permanence than any other parts of speech, and are generally found to change but little in the lapse of ages. They are more permanent even than the numerals, the signs of case, and the verbal inflexions; and though, like everything else, they are liable to change, yet their connections and ramifications may be traced amongst nearly all the languages of mankind, how widely so ever sundered by time or place. In some instances the personal pronouns constitute the only appreciable point of contact or feature of relationship between languages which appear to have belonged originally to one and the same family but which, in the lapse of time and through the progress of mutation, have become generically different. This remark especially applies to the pronouns of the first person, which of all parts of speech appears to be the most persistent.”¹

     ‘I need not call attention to the beautiful and philosophical regularity of this quadruple set of remote, proximate, and intermediate demonstratives and interrogatives. In no other language or family of languages in the world shall we find its equal, or even its second. In addition to which, the circumstance that the demonstrative vowels are not only used in these languages with an invariable and exact discrimination of meaning which is not found in the Indo-European tongues (with the solitary and partial exception of the New PersiaŒ, but are also associated with a corresponding interrogative vowel of which the Indo-European tongues are totally ignorant, tends to confirm the supposition which I have already expressed, that the Dravidian family has retained some prae-Sanskrit elements of immense antiquity; and in particular, that its demonstratives, instead of being borrowed from Sanskrit, represent those old Japhetic bases from which the domontratives of Sanskrit itself, as well as of various other members of the Indo-European family, were derived.”²