Page:A comparative grammar of the Dravidian or South-Indian family of languages by Caldwell, Robert.djvu/11

PREFACE. Vll

desideratum at present seems to be a Comparative Vocabulary of the Dravidian Languages, distinguishing the roots found, say, in the four most distinctive languages — Tamil, Telugu, Canarese, and Malay- Mam — from those found only in three, only in two, or only in one. An excellent illustration of what may be done in this direction has been furnished by Dr Gundert, whose truly scientific " Dictionary of Malayalam " has given a fresh stimulus to Dravidian philology. An- other thing which has long appeared to me to be a desideratum is a more thorough examination of all the South Indian alphabets, ancient and modern,, with a careful comparison of them, letter by letter, not only with the alphabets of Northern India, ancient and modern, but also, and especially, with the characters found in ancient inscriptions in Ceylon, Java, and other places in the further East. It has been announced that a work on this subject, by Dr Burnell, M.C.S., entitled " South-Indian Palaeography," is about to be published in Madras, but I regret that a copy of it has not yet arrived.

It has been my chief object throughout this work to promote a more systematic and scientific study of the Dravidian languages themselves — for their own sake, irrespective of theories respecting their relationship to other languages — by means of a careful inter-comparison of their grammars. Whilst I have never ceased to regard this as my chief object, I have at the same time considered it desirable to notice, as opportunity occurred, such principles, forms, and roots as appeared to bear any affinity to those of any other language or family of languages, in the hope of contributing thereby to the solution of the question of their ultimate relationship. That question has never yet been scientifically solved, though one must hope that it will be solved some day. It has not yet got beyond the region of theories, more or less plausible. My own theory is that the Dravidian languages occupy a position of their own between the languages of the Indo-European family and those of the Turanian or Scythian group — not quite a midway position, but one considerably nearer the latter than the former. The particulars in which they seem to me to accord with the Indo-European languages are numerous and remarkable, and some of them, it will be seen, are of such a nature that it is impossible, I think, to suppose that they have been accidental ; but the relationship to which they testify — in so far as they do testify to any real relationship — appears to me to be very indefinite, as well as very remote. On the other hand the particulars in which they seem to me to accord with most of the so-called Scythian languages are not only so numerous, but are so distinctive and of so essential a nature that they appear to me to amount to what is called a family likeness, and therefore naturally to suggest the idea