Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 12.djvu/802

778 778 INDIA [HISTORY. passes. They dwell chiefly in the north, and along the north-eastern edge of the three-sided table-land which covers the southern half of India. Some of the Dravidians, or third stock, appear, on the other hand, to have found their way into the Punjab by the north-western passes. They now inhabit the southern part of the three-sided table-land, as far down as Cape Comorin, the southernmost part of India. It appears as if the two streams of the Kolarian tribes from the north-east and the Dravidians from the north-west had converged and crossed each other in Central India. The Dravidians proved the stronger, broke up the Kolarians, thrust aside their fragments to east and west, and then rushed forward in a mighty body to the south. It thus happened that, while the Dravidians formed a vast mass in southern India, the Kolarians survived only as isolated tribes, scattered so far apart as soon to forget their common origin. One of the largest of the Kolarian races, the Santals, dwells on the extreme eastern edge of the three-sided table-land of Central India, where it slopes down into the Gangetic valley of Lower Bengal. The Kurkus, a broken Kolarian tribe, inhabit a patch of country about 400 miles to the west, and have for perhaps thousands of years been cut off from the Santals by moun tains and pathless forests, and by intervening races of the Dravidian and Aryan stocks. The Kurkus and Santals Lavs no tradition of a common origin; yet at this day the Kurkus speak a language which is little else than a dialect of Santali. The Savars, once a great Kolarian tribe, mentioned by Pliny and Ptolemy, are now a poor wan dering race of woodcutters of northern Madras and Orissa. Yet fragments of them have lately been found deep in Central India, and as far west as Rajputana on the other side. The nine principal languages of the Kolarian group are (1) Santali, (2) Mundari, (3) Ho, (4) Bhumij, (5) Korwa, (6) Kharria, (7) Juang, (8) Kurku, and perhaps (9) Savar. Some of them are separated only by dialectical differences. &quot;The Kolarian group of languages,&quot; writes Mr Brandreth, &quot;has Loth the cerebral and dental row of letters, and also aspirated forms, which last, according to Caldwell, did not belong to early Dravidian. There is also a set of four sounds, which are perhaps peculiar to Sautali, called by Skrefsrud semi-consonants, and which, when fol lowed by a vowel, are changed respectively into g, j, d, and b. Gender of nouns is animate and inanimate, and is distinguished by difference of pronouns, by difference of suffix of a qualifying noun iu. the genitive relation, and by the gender being denoted by the verb. As instances of the genitive suffix, we have in Santali in- rcn hopon, my son, but in-ak orak, my house. There is no dis tinction of sex in the pronouns, but of th-3 animate and inanimate gender. The dialects generally agree in using a short form of the third personal pronoun suffixed to denote the number, dual and plural, of the noun, and short forms of all the personal pronouns are added to the verb in certain positions to express both number and person, both as regards the subject and object, if of the animate gender, the inanimate gender being indicated by the omission of these suffixes. No other group of languages, apparently, has such a logical classification of its nouns as that shown by the genders of both the South-Indian groups. The genitive in the Kolarian group of the full personal pronouns is used for the possessive pronoun, which again takes all the post-positions, the genitive relation being thus indicated by the genitive suffix twice repeated. The Kolarian languages generally express grammatical relations by suffixes, and a&amp;lt;3i the post-positions directly to the root, without the intervention of an oblique form or genitive or other suffix. They agree with the Dravidian in having inclusive and exclusive forms for the plural of the first personal pronoun, in using a relative participle instead of a relative pronoun, in the position of the governing word, and in the possession of a true causal form of the verb. They have a dual, which the Dravidians have not, but they have no negative voice. Counting is by twenties instead of by tens, as in the Dravidian. The Santali verb, according to Skrefsrud, has twenty-three tenses, and for every tense two forms of the participle and a gerund.&quot; The compact Dravidians in the south, although in after- days subdued by the higher civilization of the Aryan race whi^h pressed in among them, were never thus broken into fragments. Their pure descendants consist, indeed, of small and scattered tribes ; but they have given their languages to 46 millions of people in southern India. That some of the islands in the distant Pacific Ocean were peopled either from the Dravidian settlements in India, or from an earlier common source, remains a conjectural induction of philologers, rather than an established ethno logical fact. 1 The aboriginal tribes in southern and western Australia use almost the same words for /, thoic, he, we, you, &c., as the fishermen on the Madras coast, and resemble in many other ways the Madras hill tribes, as in the use of their national weapon the boomerang. Bishop Caldwell recognizes twelve distinct Dravidian lan guages:^) Tamil, (2) Malayalim, (3) Telugu, (4) Kanarese, (5) Tulu, (6) Kudugu, (7) Toda, (8) Kota, (9) Gond, (10) Khond, (11) Uraon, (12) Rajmahal. &quot;In the Dravidian group,&quot; writes Mr Brandreth, &quot;there is a rational and an irrational gender of the nouns, which is distin guished in the plural of the nouns, and sometimes in the singular also, by affixes which appear to be fragmentary pronouns, by corre sponding pronouns, and by the agreement of the verb with the noun, the gender of the verb being expressed by the pronominal suffixes. To give an instance of verbal gender, we have in Tamil, from the root sey, to do, seycl-dn, he (rational) did ; sryd-dl, she (rational) did ; scyd-adu, it (irrational) did ; scyd-dr, they (the rationals) did ; seyd-a, they (the irrationals) did ; the full pronouns being avan, he ; aval, she ; udu, it ; avar, they ; avei, they. This distinction of gender, though it exists in most of the Dravidian languages, is not always carried out to the extent that it is in Tamil. In Telugu, Gond, and Khond it is preserved in the plural, but in the singular the feminine rational is merged in the irrational gender. In Gond the gender is further marked by the noun in the genitive relation taking a different suffix, according to the number and gender of the noun on which it depends. In Uraon the feminine rational is entirely merged in the irrational gender, with the exception of the pronoun, which preserves the distinction between rationals and irrationals in the plural ; as as, he, referring to a god or a man ; dd, she, or it, referring to a woman or an irrational object ; but dr, they, applies to both men and women ; abrd, they, to irrationals only. The rational gen der, besides human beings, includes the celestial and infernal deities ; and it is further subdivided in some of the languages, but in the singular only, into masculine and feminine. An instance of this subdivision in the Tamil verb was given above. &quot; The grammatical relations in the Dravidian are generally ex pressed l&amp;gt;y suffixes. Many nouns have an oblique form, which is a remarkable characteristic of the Dravidian group ; still, with the majority of nouns, the post- positions are added directly to the nomi native form. Other features of this group are the frequent use of formatives to specialize the meaning of the root ; the absence of relative pronouns, and the use instead of a relative participle, which is usually formed from the ordinary participle by the same suffix as that which Dr Caldwell considers as the oldest sign of the genitive relation ; the adjective succeeding the substantive ; of two substan tives, the determining preceding the determined; and the verb being the last member of the sentence. There is no true dual in the Dra vidian languages. In the Dravidian languages there are two forms of the plural of the pronoun of the first person, one including, the other excluding, the person addressed. As regards the verbs, there is a negative voice, but no passive voice, and there is a causal form. &quot; We discern, therefore, long before the dawn of history, masses of men moving uneasily over India, and violently pushing in among still earlier tribes. They crossed the snows of the Himalayas, and plunged into the tropical forests in search of new homes. Of these ancient races fragments now exist in almost exactly the same stage of human progress as they were when described by Veclic poets over three thousand years ago. Some are dying out, such as the Andaman islanders, among whom only one family in 1869 had so many as three children. Others are increasing, like the Santals, who have doubled them selves under British rule. Taken as a whole, and including certain half-Hinduized branches, they number 17,716,825, or say 18 millions, equal to three-quarters of the population of England and Wales. But while the bolder or more 1 See the authorities in Bishop Caldwell s Comparative Grammar oj the Dravidian Languages, pp. 78-80, &c. (ed. 1857).