Page:An introduction to Dravidian philology.djvu/190

Rh the syntactic arrangement of their words, everything, in short, which constitutes the living spirit of a language were originally and radically different from Sanskrit.

This is too sweeping a statement It has been pointed out above how the nominal inflection of the Dravidian is in perfect accord with the Prakrits and how the verbal inflection of Sanskrit had crumbled down and been levelled, with its ten conjugations reduced to but one, with the distinction between the Atmanepada and Parasmaipada gone, with the tense prefixes lost or fused into the roots proper, the whole conjugation taking a new basis of participial forms, and new auxiliary verbs taking the place of the old verbal suffixes. It is no wonder, then, that the Dravidian languages, along with the Noun- Indian vernaculars, should present a shape far different from that of Sanskrit, obscured by changes brought