Page:An introduction to Dravidian philology.djvu/95

Rh why once more in  'podarillu'  and  'balentara,la', a 'r' should come in, Do these consonants serve any function, grammatical or otherwise ? Did they exist there incipiently before and become manifest in combination ? Such and similar problems have to be tackled philologically and explained in a rational manner

Again, the speech habits of a people have to be studied. This forms the basis for all dialectial studies. For example, a certain group of people throw the accent on the first syllable of a word, others carry it forward. The partial or total loss of accent on certain syllables brings about such wide and far - reaching changes in words that it gives rise to dialectal variations whose resemblances are obscured from the surface, Sometimes to explain two different forms of the same word, we have to postulate certain intermediate bypothetical forms, which according to the