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MAY, 1904.]
MUNDAS AND DRAVIDAS.
125
families, that cannot prove much. The same peculiarity is found in many other languages. The forms in actual use among Mund as and Dravidas are, moreover, quite different. Mr. Hahn, it is true, compares Kurukh én, oblique eng with Mundari in, I; Kurukh éku, with Mandari oko, who? He forgets, however, that a comparison of other dialects shows that the Dravidian base of the pronoun "I" is é or né, while the characteristic element of the Munda form is ; the base of the Dravidian interrogative pronoun is ya or é, but the corresponding Mundà form is åka.
No sane philologist would, of course, draw any conclusion from the fact that the Munda languages, like the Dravidian ones, have no relative pronoun. The same is the case in so many quite different families of languages that it can almost be represented as the rule, the development of a real relative pronoun being considered as the exception.
Verbs. Every traco of analogy between the Mundâ and Dravidian families disappears when we proceed to consider the verbs. Mr. Hahn, it is true, compares quite a series of suffixes in Mun târi and Kurukh. It is not, however, necessary to show in detail all the mistakes he has made in those comparisons. None of them would havo been possible if he had really known Mundari. I shall take two typical examples.
The suffix of the present tense in Kurukh is da; thus, én es-da-n, I break. The final n of erda-n is the pronominal suffix of the first person singular. Mr. Hahn, however, does not hesitate to compare dan, the tense suffix plus the personal termination, with the Mundári copula tan, which corresponds to Santali kan, and is used to form a present, not, however, as a tense suffix but as an auxiliary.
Mr. Habn further compares what he calls the perfect soffixes Mundari jan-d, Kurukh jan. Maņdari jan-d contains the tense suffix jan and the so-called categoricnl a. We need only consider the former. Jan corresponds to Santali en and is the suffix of the simple past passive. The final - is kept through all persons and numbers. Kurukh jan is the suffix of the first person singular feminine of the past tense. It is apparently only used in such verbs as end in . The initial; bas developed from a ch, and the final n is the personal termination.
I hope that it is not necessary to show in detail that Mr. Hahn's remaining comparisons are just as superficial.
On the other hand, the whole conjugational system is quite different in the Dravidian and Mundá languages. The Dravidian system, is very simple, only comprising two or three tenses; in Mundâ, on the other hand, we find an almost bewildering muster of conjugational forms. The Dravidian verb can be characterised as a noun of agency; the Mundâ verb and its various tense bases are indefinite forms which can be used as nouns, adjectives, and verbs. The most characteristic features of the Mandå verb, the categorical a and the incorporation of the direct and indirect object in the verb, are in entire disagreement with Dravidian principles. The Muņda languages, on the other hand, do not possess anything to correspond to the Dravidian negative conjugation.
I hope that the preceding remarks will have shown that Mr. Hahn's arguments for the hypothesis of a common origin of the Mundâ and Dravidian families are quite insufficient. The analogies which can be said to exist between both families are of a general kind, and such as can be traced between most languages of the earth,
Mr. Hahn is of opinion that there can be no doubt about the classing of Mundári as belonging to the Dravidian family. I think it would be easy to show, with just as good arguments, that Mandari is a Negro language, or a Indo-Chinese form of speech, or what not. It is time to protest energetically against the tendency, which appears to be gaining ascendancy, of combining different languages on the score of accidental similarity in unessential features.
