Page:On the Non-Aryan Languages of India.djvu/11

Rh 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. Grammatical categories and relations are sometimes expressed by a modification of the root, instead of by affixes; for instance, in Tamil, as pointed out by Caldwell, the final sonant is changed into a surd, and doubled, to convert an intransitive into a transitive verb, to form the preterite tense, to form derivative nouns from verbal themes, and to change a substantive into an adjective. Similar changes also take place in the other languages, though not quite to the same extent. Then there are changes of the initial consonant of the second of two nouns in juxtaposition, showing their relations, some of which resemble the mutation of consonants in Keltic grammar. Thus, in Canarese and Telugu, as in Welsh, an initial surd is changed into a sonant to show that the preceding noun is in the genitive relation; as in Telugu poetry, puli doka 'a tiger's tail,' which translated literally into Welsh would be teigr-gynffon; the radical forms being toka and cynffon, both signifying 'a tail.' Nor are root-vowels unchangeable. There are instances of the lengthening of the root-vowel to convert a verb into a noun, without any extraneous addition; of the shortening of the root-vowels of the pronouns of the first and second person in the oblique form; and there is the Tamil and Canarese shortening of the root- vowel in the preterite tense.

Next to the Dravidian, and also south of the Vindhya, we have the Kolarian, a much smaller group, which probably does not include more than two millions of people, though ethnologically the group is very much larger. The principal members of this group appear to be the Santáli, Mundári, Ho, Bhumij, Korwa, Kharria, Juang, Kurku, and probably Savara; some of these are not distinguished from each other by more than dialectal differences. The Juangs are isolated amidst an Uriya-speaking Aryan population; they disclaim all connexion with the Hos or other Kolarians; and yet they have preserved a remarkable number of common words. The Kurkus of the Central Provinces are separated by a distance