‘Budhan’ and ‘Sani respectively, and this made the learned Dravidian philologist to attribute ignorance of the two planets, after which two of the week-days are named, to the ancient Tamilians.

     He says, “Sanskrit, though it is improbable that it ever was the vernacular language of any district or country, whether in the north or in the south, is in every southern district read, and to some extent understood, by the Brahmans the descendants of those Brahmanical colonists of early times to whom the Dravidians appear to have been indebted to some extent for the higher arts of life and a considerable position of their literary culture.¹

     “This civilization was probably indigenous in its origin, but it seems to have been indebted for its rapid development at so early ƒ) period to the influence of a succession of small colonies of Aryans, chiefly Brahmans, from Upper India, who were probably attracted to the south by the report of the fertility of the rich alluvial plains watered by the Kƒv„ri, the Tƒmrapar-i, and other peninsular rivers.”²

     He supposed the Tamil Alphabet to have been derived from the D„va-nƒgari.

     He says, “the three Dravidian alphabets which have been mentioned above, viz., the Tamil, the Malayalam, and the Telugu-Canarese, together with their but now obsolete shapes and the Grantha, or character in which Sanskrit is written in the Tamil country, have all been derived, it is supposed, from the early D„va-nƒgari, or rather from the still earlier characters contained in Asoka's inscriptions - characters which have been altered and disguised by natural and local influences, and especially by the custom, universal in the Dekhan, of writing on the leaf of the palmyra palm with an iron stylus.”

     The Tamil alphabet is verily the earliest framed by man. It contains thirty simple sounds, twelve vowels and eighteen consonants two of which, viz., Š and ‹ are the latest and hence placed at the end. Of the twelve vowels, two, viz., ai and au are