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102! ANDHRÁ KARNATA VAINISM. Nannaya in the Wengi Kingdom, and in adopting it as a vehicle of literary expression, Nannaya was perhaps attempting to combat the Jainas of the Andhra 'mandala with one of their own weapons. In Pampa Bhārata, done in the Kannada before his time and celebrated in the Vengi country, Nannaya and · Narayanabhatta, had before them a Jaina presentation of the Bhāratri story in the Champu method. In presenting their Bralımanic representation of the same story, and anticipating even a greater 'celebrity for it, they seem to have chosen wisely in accepting the very kavya anethod by which the Jainas made their ideas 'popular. An elaboration, in some detail, of the Kannada influence on the Telugu literary dialect of Nannaya may be in point in this context.
Traces of Canarese influence in Nannaya's
Telugu Literary Dialect. One of the most fascinating problems of Dravidian philology is “ the rise of the literary dialects” in the various cultivated Dravidian”. languages. No doubt, the relative antíqnity.of Tamil or Karnāta can in a way be established, as has been attempted to be done, by the discovery of words from these languages in foreign records the antiquity of which has been fairly settled. But such discovery relates mostly to the spoken variety of these languages, unless it be that such words can be shown to
