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JUNE, 1909.]
A PRIMER OF DRAVIDIAN PHONOLOGY.
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(2). Change in quantity.
(a) By the loss of nasals, h or g, v or even y ( Pr. Drav. g or g') the vowels a, i, e, were often lengthened.
Tam. ahappai ladle' is ape and hape in Can. Tu.
Tam. ivan 'this man' is Tel. vidu.
Note. This change is often attended with metathesis in Telugu.
(b) These vowels, if long, became short when they were used as part of inflexional particles, e. g., nân or nên 'I' became en in inflexions.
III.The Great Accent change.
Before proceeding to a detailed treatment of the vowel changes in the various separate Dravidian languages, I shall give here an account of the Great Accent Change in Primitive Dravidian, which plays so important a part in the explanation of the difficult forms that most of the words of Telugu, Gondi and the other North Dravidian languages have assumed.
In Early Primitive Dravidian, as it is even now in Tamil, Malayalam and Canarese, the accent rested on the root or stem syllable, which is almost always the first syllable.
But later on, in late Primitive Dravidian, before the great Tamil works, viz., Kural and Dzivakasintamani were written, perhaps about the beginning of the first century A. D., the accent showed a tendency to shift to the last syllable. As a result of this tendency, the final consonants of words began to be pronounced with distinct stress and with an enunciative half-pronounced u. The consonants that were thus affected in all the languages were g, á, d3, d, d, b and r.
But with this only result, the tendency was more or less completely stopped in the Central and the South Dravidian dialects. Kumarila Bhatta, who was the great controversial writer of the seventh century, uses "tfôr," "pump," "ál," and "vayir," which are exactly the Tamil words tfôru, pampu, á and vayir, showing thereby that the tendency for the accent change had not developed till the close of the 6th century,
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The tendency seems to have completely died out in the South Dravidian languages. For Malayalam, which branched off from Tamil as a separate language at the commencement of the 7th century A. D., began to develop a reaction against this tendency: so much so that at the present day all the inflexions are lost in the verbal forms in New Malayalam, the accent strongly resting on the root syllable. In Tamil, the tendency stopped at affecting only the consonants mentioned above.
In the Central-Dravidian languages, the tendency did not die out, but was only checked for a time. Dr. Kittel says that even in ancient literature there was a tendency to add a final u to consonants and sometimes also i ( Kittel's Kannada Grammar, article 54 ).
All this while, from the 1st to the 7th century, great changes were taking place in the North Dravidian languages. The accent had shifted to the last syllable: the initial and the medial syllables had become contracted; all the final consonants had taken an enunciative u which was no more pronounced only half, but with full and clear stress. The final vowels in the extreme North dialects had become lengthened, where short originally..
The Central Dravidian was once more affected by its nearness to the North Dravidian languages. Canarese and Tulu, the chief languages of this family, added a final u to all words ending in any consonant, and this final u began to affect the vowels of the preceding syllables as in the North Dravidian languages. But with these results the tendency had stopped in them.
