________________
458
THE INDIAN ANTIQUARY.
[DECEMBER, 1903.
including, the other excluding, the party addressed; (4) the use of post-positions, instead of prepositions; (5) the formation of verbal tenses by means of participles; (6) the situation of the relative sentence before the indicative; (7) the situation of the governing word after the word governed. In the particulars above mentioned, the grammar of the North-Indian idioms undoubtedly resembles that of the Dravidian family: but the argument founded upon this general agreement is to a considerable extent neutralised by the circumstance that those idioms accord in the same particu lars, and to the same extent, with several other families of the Scythian group."
I think Bishop Caldwell was quite right in not concluding that all such points of agreement are due to Dravidian influence on the Indo-Aryan vernaculars. And, more especially, it may reasonably be doubted whether the use of two different forms of the plural of the personal pronoun of the first person is an originally Dravidian feature. We do not find it in Kanarese, Gôndi, Brâhûî, and several minor dialects. And the other dialects use quite different sets of forms. Compare the table which follows:
Tamil.
Malayalam.
...
nańňa!
nám
...
ém
...
Kurukh.
We; exclusive... nangal
We, inclusive... nám, yam
The table shows that the inclusive plural yám, nám, in Tamil and Malayalam, corresponds to the exclusive plural amu in Kui and mému (old ému) in Telugu. The two different forms of the pronoun must therefore have been independently developed in the various languages of the Dravidian family. This seems to point to the conclusion that the old language from which all the Dravidian forms of speech have been derived, did not originally possess more than one form for we.' It almost seems as if the tendency to distinguish between a 'we' which includes, and another which excludes, the party addressed, has been introduced into the Dravidian languages from without. It may be due to the influence of the Kol languages; and it would not be safe to attach any importance to this point.
nám
...
ámu
www
Kui.
áju
Telugu.
mému
manamu
I hope, however, to have shown that there remain several features in which we are apparently obliged to assume an influence on the Aryan vernaculars exercised by the Dravidian family. I therefore fully agree with Bishop Caldwell when he says (l. c. p. 57):
"As the præ-Aryan tribes, who were probably more numerous than the Aryans, were not annihilated, but only reduced to a dependent position, and eventually, in most instances, incorporated in the Aryan community, it would seem almost necessarily to follow that they would modify, whilst they adopted, the language of their conquerors, and that this modification would consist, partly in the addition of new words, and partly also in the introduction of a new spirit and tendency."
2 The name Scythian should not any more be used to denote a family of languages. It was introduced by the eminent Danish philologist Rask as a general denomination of almost all those languages of Europe and Asia which de not belong to the Indo-European or Semitic families. We now know that those languages belong to widely different families, and that they cannot be olassed together. Moreover, the few Scythian words which have been preserved by Greek writers are distinctly Iranian, f.e. they belong to the Indo-European family. - 8. K.
