Reviews Of Different Books

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REVIEWS 289 amount of morphological and lexical evidence to show that there are good chances of some original relationship having existed between these two families." Although the exact purport of these words is not quite clear, since he here confounds Uralian, Altaic and Ural-Altaic, one may readily agree that, if it will be possible to demonstrate any relationship with another family, this will indeed most likely be with Uralian. [Incidentally, if a relationship can be proved, this is a relationship tout court, not an original one which has existed.) Attempts to connect Dravidian with Caucasian, Korean, Egyptian or Sumerian are rightly passed by in silence (p. 329). The chapter on "The non-literary Dravidian languages" by Murray B. Emeneau (pp. 334-342) will remain of lasting historical interest because it describes in detail the various stages of a fascinating period in the development of Dravidian studies by a scholar who has himself taken a prominent part in the process of detecting and describing the so-called 'tribal languages'. Although the collection of data began as early as 1789 (for Malto), the epic period of exploration is exactly the one covered by this book, that is, the twenty years from 1947 onwards. As Emeneau points out, "The American blank period in which descriptive workers were ideologically opposed to comparative work, does not have its counterpart in Dravidian studies." So most of the recent work has been both descriptive and comparative. The full account of the effort to identify languages which were often known by more than one name is fascinating. A well-known instance is the Gadba tribe, the central section of which speaks the Munda language Gutob (= Gadaba in Grierson's Linguistic Survey), while the marginal section speaks a Dravidian language, now called Gadba (with the dialect Ollari). The story of the disentanglement of the intricate problem of Naiki (= Naiki, LSI.) and Naiksi (= "Bhili of Basim", LSI.) is told on p. 340 (see also Krishnamurti, p. 309 n. 1). At the end Emeneau considers the question whether all the languages of South Dravidian have been discovered. Gerard Diffloth strikes Irula from the list, but thinks that the Betta Kurumba may possibly speak an independent language. (On the other hand Kamil Zvelebil has since claimed for Irula the status of a separate language.) Emeneau further points to D. N. Shankara Bhatt who, in the Emeneau-Festschrift, describes Koraga as "a new Dravidian language" (See also the same, Linguistic Survey Bulletin, 7, 8, 9]. It may be a long time yet before a general agreement on the exact number of Dravidian languages has been reached. Emeneau enumerates twenty-one as belonging "with certainty" to this family (p. 334) but more fieldwork is needed before in all cases the question "independent language or dialect?" will have been answered. The first of the chapters on separate literary languages, naturally dedicated to Tamil, has been written by Kamil Zvelebil (pp. 343-371, including a bibliography of eight pages). He characterizes the years between 1946 and 1966 as "the era of Vorarbeiten" (p. 344 f.). In this connection it may be observed that among the universities where attention is being paid to Tamil (pp. 344, 362) the Dutch ones might have been mentioned along with the German, Japanese and Polish ones. The phonemic inventory appears to range in the various descriptions from 11 to 44 consonant phonemes. Incidentally, in the diagram of Bright and Ramanujan's inventory (p. 349 n. 9) S and s have obviously changed places. In the survey of synchronic and diachronic studies Zvelebil suggests a new explanation for the still enigmatic present tense morpheme kinr(p. 354 n. 24), viz. connection with kil- 'to be able'. The older theories are passed by in silence. Dialectology, Sociolinguistics, Syntax, Lexicology and Applied Linguistics are discussed under separate headings. In Vadasery I. Subramoniam's account of Malayalam (pp. 372-381) the achievements (since 1947) in the field of lexicography are stressed. Work on the history of Malayalam has been dominated by the question as to whether Malayalam is a dialect of Tamil or an independent offshoot of proto-Dravidian - a question that could only be raised by non-linguists. Much important work on the dialects is buried in unpublished theses of Kerala University. On p. 377 Subramoniam states that "Malayalam is a collection