Reviews Of Different Books

Page 35

REVIEWS 77 'agreement (1) (yaro) pafattaip patittarkal - patitta patam agens patiens action ("logical" level) Subject Object Verb.Pred. (grammatical" level) 'agreement (2) (yaralo) patam patikkappattatu - patikkappatta patam agens patiens action ("logical" level) {agens] Subject Verb.Pred. ("grammatical" level) It is of course another matter that both phrases can become grammatical subjects if embedded in a higher structure. What is important is the relevance for the translation of such constructions (cf. the excellent Note 13 in the reviewed paper). While e.g. nan patitta patam should be translated "correctly" as 'the lesson which I read', ennal patikkappatta patam should be translated "passively", i.e. 'the lesson read by me'. S. V. Shanmugam's "Inflectional increments in Dravidian" is a good inventory, well documented, one of the first solid studies in Dravidian derivational morphology. What we miss is a general summary discussion of the whole problem of "inflectional increments" ("empty morphs", the cariyai of native Tamil grammars). According to the author, it is necessary to reconstruct, for PDr, the 'augments' *-an-, *-1-, *-in-, .*-a- and *-It-. The other grammatical papers deal with "evidence for a locative case in Telugu" (Andree Sjoberg), adjectives in Kurukh (G. Vijayavenugopal), gender in Dravidian (A. S. Kedilaya), the classification of Tamil and Malayalam verb (R. E. Asher) and Dravidian numeral constructions (G. K. Panikkar). Panikkar's paper does not aim at a reconstruction of Proto-Dravidian numerals, but investigates the underlying structure of numeral phrases. The paper is interesting, though I fail to see a number of points; why, e.g., bring the Soviet linguist Marr into the discussion (totally irrelevant). Asher deals very carefully and most ably with the intricate problem of Tamil and Malayalam verb-classification. The paper has, indeed, broader significance - the relationship between formal and informal Tamil and Malayalam is discussed. If sufficiently complex rules are accepted, the verbal roots of formal Tamil can be reduced to three groups (Lisker, 1951), and those of certain types of colloquial Tamil to two (Asher, 1966). It is interesting that A. K. Ramanujan and E. Annamalai have reached an analogical conclusion, eliminating "middle" verbs and setting up two classes of "weak" and "strong" verbs for colloquial Tamil (personal communication). I have not found H. Schiffman's short paper on "Language Change and Language Distance" very satisfactory. Most of it seems to me to be just a matter of using fashionable jargon for obvious truths (like the fact that Tamil and Malayalam are closer than Tamil and Kannada); and I find the last statement of the paper not only arrogant but untrue ("The task facing comparative Dravidianists is now to write generative grammars of the various languages, and compare them according to the above-mentioned criteria. All other methods of comparison are doomed to failure"). Generative grammars, i.e. transformational linguistics, has until now been far from demonstrating its usefulness in comparative and historical studies. On the contrary, all other methods of comparison (historical and genetic, typological) have at least produced some results. I do not think we are "doomed to fail" if we do not accept Schiffman's criteria. S. Bhattacharya deals somewhat vaguely and in very general terms with "new Dravidian languages" (pp. 139-161), i.e. newly "discovered" uncultivated Dravidian speeches. And T. M. Kameswari gives a lexicostatistic strategy for the chronology of Dravidian languages. One can hardly agree with some of the results: e.g. the approximate period of divergence of Tamil and Kannada must have been much earlier than 400-1000 A.D.