Reviews Of Different Books

Page 36

78 REVIEWS One of the most important papers in the whole lot is P. S. Subrahmanyam's "The Central Dravidian Languages", published simultaneously in JAOS, 89, 4 (1969), 739-750. The JAOS version is slightly more careful and detailed. Subrahmanyam comes to a very convincing conclusion setting up two major Central Dravidian groups, Proto-Telugu-Kui and Proto-Kolami-Parji, with a different and "higher" node assigned to Gondi than in Krishnamurti's Central Dravidian family tree diagram (in Current Trends in Linguistics, 5, 1969, p. 327). Telugu, according to Subrahmanyam, split off first from the proto-stage of the seven languages (Telugu, Gondi, Konda, Kui, Kuvi, Pengo, Manda), and the other six remained together for a considerable period of time. Telugu and Gondi share an important and exclusive innovation; this Subrahmanyam explains as a result of the operation of the "wave process" after the separation of Telugu and Gondi (the two languages being still geographically contiguous even after their separation). As a whole the volume is a very valuable contribution to Dravidian linguistics and manifests the lively activities of the Centre of Advanced Study in Linguistics at the Annamalai University. We do hope that this volume will soon be followed by another, which will contain the proceedings of the second seminar on Dravidian linguistics, held at Annamalai in 1969. K. Zvelebil International Journal of Dravidian Linguistics (IJDL), Vol. 1, Number 1, January 1972. Edited and published by V. I. Subramoniam, Department of Linguistics, University of Kerala, Trivandrum. Pp. iii + 195. Single number $3.00, annual subscription $5.00. In the First All India Conference of Dravidian linguists (University of Kerala, June, 1971) the need for an international journal for Dravidian linguistics was emphatically expressed, and less than a year afterwards, such journal actually appeared, a biannual expected to be published in January and June of each year. The present reviewer had been among those who, as far back as in 1957, 1958, again in 1964, and in the subsequent years, raised their voice to express the need for a journal of this kind, for they rightly foresaw an unprecedented bloom of Dravidian studies in the second half of this century. It is therefore with great satisfaction that the first issue of this journal is reviewed, and in the hope that the energetic personality of the editor, with the support of an international editorial board and of the syndicate of Kerala University will guarantee smooth and regular publication of the journal and high quality of the contributions. The first issue is promising enough. Apart from S. K. Chatterji's "Address to the Dravidian Linguists" (1-17), wise and rich in thought, there are nine research papers, two notes, and one review. The research papers deal with various aspects of linguistics, not only Dravidian. In fact, two of the papers have nothing at all to do with Dravidian directly: J. D. Singh's "Panini's Theory of Language" (80-96), a paper which, I am afraid, does not belong to the best among the lot and contains a few doubtful statements (e.g. p. 84 bottom), and Ray S. Jackendorff's interesting "Speculations on Presentences and Determiners" (112-36), which attempts to explore the parallelisms between noun phrases and sentences. Zvelebil's paper (97-111) inspired by W. L. Chafe's semantic model, and Pike's and Gordon's paper developing further the tagme theory (56-79) are both theoretical papers but, unlike Singh and Jackendorff, the authors exemplify their statements with illustrations from Dravidian languages. For comparative Dravidianists, the most thrilling statement of Pike and Gordon is the one in footnote 1, p. 78: "Dhangar is a Dravidian language, and is a dialect of the Kudux