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 associations. In this way it may happen that the same phrase at different periods of a language may be literary or vulgar not because it is inherently so, but because its rank is determined by the company it keeps and the place where it was born. (Lectures on the Study of Language, Oertel, pp. 89-91)

THE MODERN SCHOOL

186. The modern school is very much misrepresented by Mr. J. Ramayya Pantulu and his school. It is credited with a desire to “abolish by a single stroke of the pen the current literary language which is the result of the growth of centuries and to install in its place numerous colloquial dialects” (page 10 of the Defence). Nothing can be farther from truth. The modern school advocates the teaching of polite spoken Telugu in schools, especially elementary schools, and its employment for literary purposes, especially for the creation of a Modern Prose. We take the Telugu of the Godavary and Krishna Districts as the standard. Local variations of other districts need not be neglected. They will secure affiliation when good writers of those districts use them. Such a process is already in operation.

187. The merits of Modern Telugu (by which I mean, the polite speech of Godavary and Krishna) as a literary instrument are great.

1) Intelligibility — Intelligibility which the old school claim as the saving merit of the Neo-Kavya school is best secured by the employment of Modern Telugu in literature. Local variations are slight; and even if they were considerable, they could not prove a bar to intelligibility, as the countless variations from standard speech which the poetic dialect presents. In his Defence, Mr. J. Ramayya Pantulu mentions that Chinnaya Sun gives no less than 16 forms of g (one man) and no less than 29 forms of its plural! “We have no less than sixteen forms of this single word 5? (that is, or that is to say), all of which are met with in poetry” (pages 40 & 41)