Alphabet Key To History Of Mankind

Author(s): David Diringer
Publisher: Hutchinsons Scientific and Technical Publications

Page 380

INDIAN BRANCH
379
a linguistic term. Bishop Caldwell distinguished twelve Dravidian dialects, six cultivated (Tamil, Telugu, Kanarese, Malayalam, Tulu, and Kudagu or Coorg), and six uncultivated. Many other dialects and sub-dialects exist, but the main languages are four: (1) Tamil, which possesses the earliest Dravidian literature and is spoken nowadays by about 18 million people in southern India and in Ceylon; (2) Telugu, spoken by the largest number of people, about 22 million, in the central and eastern part of South India; (3) Malayalam, closely akin to Tamil, but more influenced by Sanskrit, spoken by about 5 million; and (4) Kanarese, more akin to Telugu than to Tamil, spoken by about 8 million people. It may be roughly said that the north-eastern portion of South Indiastretching roughly north from Madras to the borders of Orissa and far inland into the Deccan-is the Teluguland, or Telingana; the north-western portion. including Mysore and Kanara, is Kanarese; the south-eastern portion is the Tamil country, comprising the great plain of the Carnatic, from Madras to Cape Comorin, South Travancore, and northern Ceylon; whilst the south-western part of South India-principally the country on the western side of the Ghats, from Mangalore to Trivandrum-is Malayalam. The total number of speakers of all the Dravidian dialects and sub-dialects is nearly So million. The group of the Dravidian languages is nowadays usually considered as an isolated family, that is with no affinities whatever to any other form of speech, although recently the theory of its affiliation with Finno-Ugrian has been revived.
The Indo-Aryan languages spoken in South India are Marathi in the Deccan, Saurashtri in Madras, and Hindustani, which is spoken by the Moslem population of the Deccan and in some other parts of the country. The Indo-Aryan languages have also greatly influenced the main Dravidian forms of speech, but their influence was just enough to enrich and not sufficient to extirpate the Dravidian languages. On the whole it may be said that the Dravidians accepted the culture and religion of the Indo-Aryans-whilst Dravidian elements were also consciously or unconsciously borrowed by the Aryans-but linguistically they did not lose their individuality.
The earliest history of the Dravidian languages is obscure. There are apparently no records extant in any of the Dravidian dialects belonging to the pre-Christian era. The Asoka inscriptions so far discovered and all the other documents in Brahmi characters, some of which were brought to light in 1912, as far south as the ancient Pandya country (see below), are all in Prakrit. There are also some early Sanskrit records, but no Dravidian certainly datable. See, however, pp. 341 and 385.
DEVELOPMENT OF SOUTH INDIAN CHARACTERS
The South Indian characters were generally used since the middle of the fourth century A.D. throughout the country and some of them still survive in the modern characters of the Dravidian languages.
These characters can be divided, according to Buehler into the following varieties:
Western Variety
The Western variety was the ruling script between ca. A.D. 400 and 900 in Kathiawar, Gujarat, the western portion of the Maratha districts, partly in Hyderabad and in Konkan. Northern scripts were used