Madhuvidya

Author(s): S D Laddu, T N Dharmadhikari, Madhvi Kolhatkar, Pratibha Pingle
Publisher: L D Indology Ahmedabad

Page 280

SOME REMARKS ON LANGUAGE OF ORIGINAL BUDDHIST CANON
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Dravidian Languages by J. BLOCH which very clearly brings out the chief characteristics of this group of languages. N. LAHOVARY'S Substrat Linguistique Méditerranéen, Basque et Dravidien brings out the affini. ties between these two families of languages and seeks to establish that Dravidian was originally a speech of the big mediterranean family of languages. With regard to the studies of the individual languages I may mention R. P. Sethu PILLAI's Words and their Significance: A Study in Tamil Linguistics (1952), C. R. SANKARAN'S Some Problems in Kannada Linguistics (1954), and A. C. SEKHAR's Evolution of Malayalam (1953). Murray FOWLER's phonemic analysis of the Sanskritized literary Tamil spoken in Madras is presented in the article 'The Segmental Phonemes of Sanskritized Tamil, Language, 30.360-367 (1954). T. BURROW and S. BHATTACHARYA in their book on Parji Language (1953) establish that it is an independent language and not a dialect of Gondi. Of great interest is the English version of 17th century Dutch Grammar of Tamil by J. A. B. van BUITENEN and P. C. GANESHSUNDARAM in the Bull. DCRI, Vol. 14. 168-182 (1952). The Jules Bloch Memorial Volume as well as the Chatterji Jubilee Volume of Indian Linguistics (Vol. 14, 1954 and Vol. 16, 1955) contain many important articles on Dravidian linguistics. I may also mention here the article on Dravidian kinship terms by M. B. EMENEAU in Language 29. 339-353 (1953). A. D. TASKAR was recently awarded Ph.D. by the Poona University for his work on 'Intonational Patterns in Indo-Aryan and Dravidian' which he completed under the guidance of C. R.. SANKARAN. A new approach to the typology of phoneme and morpheme distributions as well as a semanto-phonetic study of Dravidian morphemes is being carried on by P. C. GANESHSUNDARAM under the guidance of C. R. SANKARAN. Chaitanya Deva's work on the Tonal Structure of Tambura, which he completed under the guidance of C. R. SANKARAN, awaits publication.
C. R. SANKARAN takes his departure from the usual and timehonoured approaches towards the problem of speech-structure by considering the between' (which 'non-temporal-wedge' he calls alphaphoneme) in any consonant vowel configuration as the starting point of his investigations. This departure from the conventional outlook in Phonetics at all levels has led him to a unification of different levels of experience like the articulatory (or auditory-i.e. neuro-physiological) and the physical (the acoustical). Such a study of the 'inter-phenomenon' (or 'the between') to which he was led by consideration of such phenomena as marginal speech-sounds, glides, or more particularly the so-called äytam in old Tamil which has served as a pointer in all his investigations, has taken C. R. SANKARAN far beyond to abstract and symbolic levels of thinking as reflected in many of his latest writings
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