sign in sign up
<<
Home , Malayalam, Tamil language

LEXICOSTATISTIC ANALYSIS OF THE CHRONOLOGY OF DISINTEGRATION OF PROTO-DRAVIDIAN

by M. ANDRONOV

Moscow

At present linguists have studied and described and vocabu- laries of nineteen Dravidian which include Tamil, , Kota, Toda, , Kodagu, Tulu, Telugu, Kolami, Naiki, Parji, Gadaba, Gondi, Konda, Kui, Kuvi, Kurukh, Malto, and Brahui. 1 Genetic interrelations of all these languages may be represented in the following way:

I I I I I I II II II I ,I

~" O" ~ 0r

As is shown, all the are divided into three groups: Southern (Tamil to Telugu), Central (Kolami to Kuvi), and Northern (Kurukh to Brahui). Their geographical distribution generally reflects the degree of relationship between separate languages which extend from Ceylon and Southern (Tamil, Malayalam, Kannada) across the Eastern part of the Deccan (Telugu) to the borders of Bengal (Kurukh,

1 A number of Dravidian languages still remain almost unknown or are known only by their names. These are Erukala and Kaikadi (close to Tamil), Badaga (close to Kannada), Savara (a Dravidian closelyrelated to Telugu and to be disting- uished from a Munda language bearing the same name), Pengo, , and Dorli (all belongingto the Central group). This fact, however, does not affectthe results of the present study. DISINTEGRATION OF PROTO-DRAVIDIAN 171

Malto), on one hand, and to and Afghanistan (Brahui), on the other. Most Dravidian languages have no . The only exception is the Southern group where Tamil, Malayalam, Kannada, and Telugu have a long literary tradition. Thus, e.g., the earliest Tamil poems date from approximately the 2nd or 3rd century A.D., ~ though the oldest written monuments in this language appear a few centuries later (in the 7th or even 8th century). The earliest inscription in Kannada belongs to the middle of the 5th century and that in Telugu - to 633 A.D. Malayalam can be traced epigraphically to the 10th century, s At least two attempts have been hitherto made to determine the age of the main literary Dravidian languages. Thus, S. . Chatterji, for example, believes that the disintegration of the Proto-Dravidian language had taken place nearly three and a half thousand years ago in the 15th century B.C. The South Dravidian language which developed out of it existed as such till the beginning of the 7th century B.C. (~ 600 B.C.) when Ancient Tamil emerged in its turn. The latter after a few centuries of a transi- tional period (400-600 A. D.) turned into which we know from literature. 4 Three years later a similar attempt was made by another author, who wrote: "The beginnings of Tamil as a separate independent language of the Dravidian family are not yet elucidated and the exact limits are most difficult to ascertain. It seems to be clear that we may presume a hypothetical stage which might be called Proto-Tamil (several centuries B.C.) and which, in its turn, has developed out of a hypothetical unity of Tamil and Kannada (and possibly some other territorial ) which might be termed Proto-South-Dravidian...-5 It is evident from the above table that in the history of the Southern group of the Dravidian languages (which includes four literary languages) several stages should be distinguished. Firstly, there ought to be a stage of the Tamil-Malayalam unity at which Tamil and Malayalam could not be considered two separate languages (at that period such languages as Kota and Toda most probably did not exist also and fell up with the common Tamil-Malayalam language as its dialects). It seems that the later limit of this period cannot be assigned earlier than to the 10th century A.D., that is earlier than the first appearance of inscriptions in Cf. s. Vaiyapuri , History of and literature (Madras, 1956). s A.C. Sekhar, Evolution ofMalayalam (Poona, 1953). 4 S. K. Chatterji, "Old Tamil, Ancient Tamil and Primitive Dravidian", Indian Linguistics, 14 (Calcutta, 1954). 5 K. Zvelebil, "Tentative periodization of the development of Tamil", , 6 (Madras, 1957), p. 50.