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INTRODUCTION
sought outside the mouth of the speakers as the influence of the Dravidians who now reside far away from the limits of Northern India could not be thought of forty years ago, when the Wilson Philological Lectures were delivered. In fact the Dravidians could once be the neighbours of the Aryans in the Northern country did not suggest to the scholars. I have mentioned before that according to the Dravidian traditions, all the dominant tribes of South India migrated from Northern Provinces to Peninsular India. It is a distinct and a definite characteristic of essential nature, in the Tamil language, that an initial of a word can never be formed of double consonants and compound letters formed of consonants of different varga can occur nowhere in a word. If we refer the change under consideration to essential peculiarities of the Tamil Speech, our problem is secured. Compounding of r with m as in dharma and l with p as in Samkalpa cannot be tolerated according to this rule, and to maintion the long sounds of the compound letters in question, the very letters have to be doubled..........
When by about 1865 Bishop Caldwell suggested that the Tamil 'F' as dative denoting suffix was identical with Oriya 'F', Bengali' ' and Hindi 'cpl' denoting exactly the dative case, a host of critics rose up to throw away the right suggestion of the Bishop."1 .
The fault of such arguments is that they prove too much. If the Dravidian people could influence the speakers of the Aryan speeches in 'dim past: to such an extent why do we not find its trace in Vedic language when they first came in contact with the Aryans in Northern India and why the letter changes, borrowings of vocables and the analytical phenomena first appear in the Prakrits—and more conspi
1 B. C. Majumdar, History of the Bengali Language pp. 58-59.
