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242
THE INDIAN ANTIQUARY
[SEPTEMBER, 1911.
The á of ar was often rounded to ô; and thus er became ôr. This form is common in Tamil and Malayalam.
In the vocative plurals and the second personal pronominal plurals the a of ar has become i through the influence of the front vowel in ni. Thus we have the vocative and second person plural suffixes ir and ir. These were also extended, though only in a few cases, to other nouns :-.g., pendir, women'; and magalir, men'. These words are found only in Tamil, Malayalam and Canarese.
Már, which is found in Tamil and Malayalam as a rational plural suffix, is a compound word. It consists of má, big'; and ar persons'. Thus it means big persons'. And we actually find that már is used in Tamil and Malayalam as a plural suffix of honour of words denoting parents',
priests', kings', etc. In Malayalam, it is used with a wider range of application than in Tamil, and in cases in which an honorific meaning cannot be intended-e. 9., kallanmår, 'thieves'. It is likely also that the honorific significance may here satirically be intended. Thus mar was considered in early Dravidian as a plural suffix like ar; and Satram 209 Tholkappiam confounds the future plural termination of verbs par mér with the above honorific mdr, and thinks that the two are identical. Dr. Gundert, too, makes the same mistake. The verbal plural suffix par is used only in the fatare tense, and by the side of a nasal becomes mar as in enmandr, they will say'; unmar,
they will eat it.' etc. Thus the future plural verbal suffix már and the nominal honorific plural word már are entirely distinct. Dr. Caldwell's identification of this mar with the Irish mdr is, of course, based on an erroneous notion that the Dravidian and the Aryan languages are somehow connected.
Var and bar are given as epioene plural suffixes by Dr. Kittel in article 119 of his Kannada grammar. But these are not suffixes different from ar; var is simply ar with the bomo-organic consonant. Take the example given by him: ivar, these men, ivar is i, these, and ar, men; and v is the homo-organic consonant developed before a in Sandhi. This v naturally becomes in most words of Canarese 6 (see my phonology). Thus we have bar. The Canarese anibar, 'many men', is the same as Tamil anaivar.
Mbar is also one of the plural suffixes given by Dr. Kittel. Mbar is bar with m. This m is merely optional, see Sutram 99 of Sabdamanidarpaņa. Further it is found only in the plural forms of neuter nouns generally denoting number or quality : 1.9., kelambar, few men'; palambar,
many men'; posambar, new men. Perhaps this nasal m is due to the influence of Sanskrit neuters and some Dravidian neuters like maram, tree', which end in m.
Again the Canarese plural suffix ndir, given also by Dr. Kittel, is a double suffix. It is composed of and and ir and means in Telaga where it is anta and antu,' whole'. Hence it is itself a plaral word, and andir or ndir is a double plural suffix. Apandir.those menetc., are due to the influence of Telugu.
Arir is no doubt a double plural being equal to ar plus ir.
Thus var, bar, mbar, ndir, arir, of Canarese, are all reduced to the Primitive Dravidian ar, and we have also shown that már is a compound of md and dr.
To sam up, the Primitive Dravidian r is found in the epicene plurals of Tamil, Malayalam, Canarese, Telaga, Talu, Malto, Kai, and Gôndi; the suffix ar is found in Tamil, Malayalam, Canarese, and Kurakh ; ôr is found in Tamil, Malayalam, Canarese and Naiki.
7. We shall now take each language separately and illustrate the use of the epicene plural suffix in it:
Tamil. In Tamil ar, år, or, and már are the rational plaral suffixes. We may add to these the rare ir, ir. Nannúl sums up all these in Satram 278 under r.
