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INTRODUCTION
xvii to this theory," he writes, “the grammatical structure of the spoken idioms of Northern India was from the first and always continued to be, in the main, Scythian ; and a change which took place when Sanskrit acquired the predominance as the Aryans gradually extended their conquests and their colonies, was rather a change of vocabulary than of grammar,-a change not so much in the arrangement and vital spirit as in the material of the language.” 1
Rev. Caldwell not only considers the morphology of the Northern Indian Vernaculars as of Non-Aryan origin but he discovers many Dravidian words even in Sanskrit Vocabulary. He gives a list of thirty-seven Sanskrit words which he regards as certainly borrowed from the Dravidian tongues. Of these 'atavi' (forest), ambā (mother) 'kalā' (fine art),
sava' (corpse), 'nānā' (several), 'nīra' (water), "bhaj' (to share) and mina' (fish) may be mentioned as examples. Whether such words were naturalised in Sanskrit from the Dravidian tongues or borrowed from Sanskrit by those languages remains an open question. That these words are a property of Sanskrit may be proved by literary evidence of more than two thousand years but we possess no literary evidence of their existence in any of the Dravidian tongues even approaching the earlier centuries of the Christian era.:
To meet this extreme view it is but enough to refer to the Comparative Grammar of the Modern Aryan Languages of India by Mr. J. Beames (1872), the three volumes of which work are a reasoned refutation of the view of the Dravidian Origin of the Northern Indian Vernaculars held by Rev. Caldwell and his followers. Mr. Beames shows that this
1 Comparative Grammar of the Dravidian Languages, p. 37. 2 Ibid., pp. 439-48.
