Reviews Of Different Books

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76 REVIEWS complementation with *n-> Br. n-: the former occurs before front vowels, the latter before non-front vowels. Thus these developments represent a split of the PDr. *n-into d- and n- in CD in Brahui. According to Krishnamurti, the exception to the above - the 2nd pers.sg.pron. ni: - may be probably explained as *di: > ni: by analogical restoration. PDr *n-> Br.n-, and, possibly, PDr. *m-[front vowel > Br. b-, *m-[nonfront vowel > Br. m-. This second part of Krishnamurti's paper is rather tentative, but the hypothesis is attractive. The other very important phonological paper is N. Kumaraswami Raja's "PostNasal Voiceless Plosives in Telugu" (pp. 75-84), which developed later into his extremely interesting monograph Post-Nasal Voiceless Plosives in Dravidian (Annamalainagar, 1969), and which contains his formula *NPP developing into NP in Tamil, Malayalam, and NB in Telugu, Kannada. Ta.-Ma. "drop the nasal before the plosive", while Te. and Ka. "simplify the geminate plosive as a single voiceless plosive". Though the formula as such is very tempting, I would - like P. S. Subrahmanyam - strongly object to the phonological pattern of the reconstructed sequence *NPP, and the whole seems to me to be too 'neat' and regular - rather a device to oblige than the reflection of the actual state of affairs. On pp. 187-204, G. Srinivasavarma gives a brief account of the phonology of Yerukalas, the basket weaving Koravas of Andhra, and P. Kothandaraman deals with Kodagu vowels, specifically with the opposition centralized: non-centralized vowels (pp. 233-247). It is interesting to compare this good account of Kodagu vowels with a more detailed and sophisticated treatment by Emeneau (JAOS, 90, 1, 1970, 145-158), and with a treatment of a similar feature in the Irula language by the present reviewer (IIJ, XIII-2, 113-122). While both above-mentioned authors agree that there are two centralized vowels, I and e, both short and long, in Kodagu, there seem to be four centralized vowel-phonemes, viz. I u e o, in Irula. M. Kandappa Chetty traces the developments of PDr *nr in Telugu to nd, nd, ndr and r>rin a very accomplished and solid paper, giving both rich synchronic data and historical insights. S. Agesthialingom approaches the passive in Dravidian from the positions of the "classical" Chomskian transformational grammar, explaining the relation between active and passive sentences. I believe that the contention of TG that active and passive. have the same "meaning" and can be derived from the same underlying sentence is valid not for the analysis of grammar, but only for the analysis of the extralinguistic, objective reality; there, indeed, agens and patiens have the same "meaning", but this "sameness" exists only outside language proper, it is extragrammatical, "pre-linguistic". It depends on the attitude of the speaker (and this belongs to the sphere of language) whether the outcome is an active or a passive construction; some language may prefer passive to active, and there may be languages which "permit" only "passive" (Basque?). However, apart from this criticism of the basic theoretical assumptions, I quite agree with the conclusion of the author of this paper that there is a basic difference between patitta patam which is not passive, and patikkappatta patam, which is passive. Not even in terms of TG could these two be considered the same, as the author has demonstrated. I would say that in the phrase patitta patam 'the lesson which (someone) read', the logical and the grammatical object are the same, while in the phrase patikkappatta patam 'the lesson that was read (by someone)', the attitude of the speaker may be expressed by 'patiens - agens', that is, the logical (pre-grammatical", "prelinguistic") object is conceived as the grammatical subject. This may be demonstrated also by the grammatical agreement valid for the "underlying" sentences which according to Agesthialingom are different: : Cf. E. Coseriu, Einfuhrung in die Transformationelle Grammatik (Tubingen, 1970).