DRAVIDIAN-INDO ARYAN COGNATES IN TOLKAPPIYAM

COURTESY:  Paper published in Language Vitality in South Asia

(Edited by Ali.R.Fatihi, Department of Linguistics, Aligarh Muslim University

Aligarh, India)

DRAVIDIAN-INDO ARYAN COGNATES IN TOLKAPPIYAM

Dr. A. Kamatchi

Assistant Professor

CAS in Linguistics

Annamalai University

INTRODUCTION

Tolkappiyam is the earliest grammatical written records not only for Tamil but also for other Dravidian languages.  Dravidian and Indo-Aryan are, as we all know, the separate families of languages.  Of course, cognates mean the forms, which indicate the same meaning with shape similarity and are available in the daughter languages of the same language family.  The reason for calling them as cognates here is that they could be treated cognates in terms of the rules applying to the methods in the comparative linguistics. 

This study is, of course, not ready to argue that no borrowings had been taken place in Dravidian languages from Indo-Aryan.  But it is evidenced there are a number of items borrowed from Indo-Aryan right from the post Sangam period to the early 20^th century A.D.  But the so-called statement of borrowings in Sangam Tamil from Indo-Aryan seems to be disputable and questionable from the view point of comparative linguistics.  In the same way, while observing the so-called borrowings in Tolkappiyam, applying the rules to Dravidian linguistics is different from the rules applying to the so-called borrowings in Tolkappiyam.  One can feasibly know the fact that there could be no different of opinion in the application of the rules in the languages because there is a possibility for the linguists to treat the so-called borrowings in Tolkappiyam cognates.  That is, when the system of comparative methods such as metathesis, loss, change of one phoneme to other etc. within the languages of same family should be applied to the so-called borrowings of Tolkappiyam and Sanskrit forms, one can realize the fact that these are actually not borrowings but the cognates.   Thus, the study envisages the possibility to treat them as cognates from the various viewpoints of the comparative linguistics.

Undoubtful Cognates

            It is claimed that the following forms are undoubtedly cognates.  Of course, none of the scholar of comparative linguistics can argue that they are not cognates of the both language families.

Tol. Words	Sutra No.	Sanskrit Words	Page No.	Meaning
antam	1096	anta	37	end, termination
antaram	1096	antara	37	sky, open space
amar	1010	camara	318	war
amarar	1031	amara	60	God
amiltam	1096	amrita	61	*ambrosia, nectar
arai	11	arddha	71	half
alal	1029	anala	27	fire
aaram	1586	haara	973	garland
pala	487	pelu, ‘much’		many
kaNavar		kaNa(pporuttam)		husband
karakam		karaka		waterpot
kaakam		kaaka	205	crow
karumam		karuma karuman	197 198	action
kaamam		kaama	210	love
kaaraNam	505	kaaraNa	213	cause
kaalai kaalam	22  991	kaala	216	time
kuncaram	1521	kunjara	225	elephant
kuTi	652	kuTi	226	*hut, house
kuNam	899	guNa	291	quality
kuravai	1026	kura	232	sound, roar
kulai	1590	gulujcha	294	*cluster
kuLan	1141	kula	239	pond, tank
kai	1096	kara	283	hand
kutirai	1161	ghooTaka	311	horse
caakkaaTu	1049	jyaa	355	death
caati	1545	jaati	347	caste
cuuttiram	1427	sutra	940	sutra
taN(mai)	1339	taNDa		water (cooling)
ticai	432	dis	410	direction
teyvam	488	daiva	425	God  (divine)
teeem  teeyam	1017   990	deesa	424	country, nation
naaTakam	1003	naaTya		drama, dance
naali	241	nadi		mareal, eight part of a marakkaal or kuRuNi
pakuti	501	prakruti	557	part
pakkam	991	pakSa	490	side
palam	1592	phala		fruit
puu	968	puSpa	546	flower
peem	849	bheema	621	*fear
maa	1010	mahat		great
maa(maram)	232	maakanda	654	*mango
vaNNam	563	varNa	737	colour
vali	850	vala	741	strenth / power

Metatheses Words

            These are the forms which are treated cognates based on the metathesis method of comparative linguistics.  The process of metathesis is very common in Telugu-Kuwi group (i.e. Telugu, Gondi, Konda, Pengo, Manda, Kui and Kuwi) among the Dravidian languages.  Here also, it quite possible to consider the following forms as cognates which are attested in both Dravidian and Indo-Aryan. 

Tol. Words

Sutra No.

Sanskrit Words

Page No.

Meaning

*aracu aracan	1585 1025	raajya raajan	703 701	kingdom king
*aravam	833	rava aarava	697 119	sound, *roar
*iravu	228	raa		night
*urupu *uru uruvu	141   14   17	ruupa		form
ulaku *ulakam	1064   542	loogaa		world

m-ending Words

            It is the common phenomenon that the m-ending forms in Dravidian are attested in Sanskrit without this consonant ending.  The reason is obvious.  The Sanskrit language system does not have consonant ending in the words.  Considering the m-ending forms available in Proto Dravidian, those forms may be treated as the proto forms for Dravidian and Indo-Aryan.  The reason is obvious.  A loss of phoneme in a form is very common phenomenon in the comparative linguistics and therefore the m-ending forms are taken as proto forms here.

Tol. Words	Sutra No.	Sanskrit Words	Page No.	Meaning
*antam	1096	anta	37	end, termination
*antaram	1096	antara	37	sky, open space
*karakam		karaka		waterpot
*kaakam		kaaka	205	crow
*karumam		karuma karuman	197 198	action
*kaamam		kaama	210	love
*kaaraNam	505	kaaraNa	213	cause
kaalai *kaalam	22  991	kaala	216	time
*kuncaram	1521	kunjara	225	elephant
*cuuttiram	1427	sutra	940	sutra
*teyvam	488	daiva	425	God  (divine)
teeem  *teeyam	1017   990	deesa	424	country, nation
*naaTakam	1003	naaTya/ naaTaka		dance,drama
*pakkam	991	pakSa	490	side
*palam	1592	phala		fruit
vaNNam	563	*varNa	737	colour

Voiceless Initial becomes voiced

            There is no voiced characteristic nature of plosive in proto Dravidian.  So it evident to treat the following forms cognates.  Voiceless plosive becomes voiced one in Sanskrit. 

Tol. Words	Sutra No.		Sanskrit Words		Page No.		Meaning
*teyvam	488		daiva		425		God  (divine)
*teeem  *teeyam	1017   990		deesa		424		country, nation
*ticai	432		dis		410		direction
*caati	1545	jaati		347		caste
*caakkaaTu	1049	jyaa		355		death
*kutirai	1161	ghooTaka		311		horse
*kulai	1590	gulujcha		294		*cluster
*kuNam	899	guNa		291		quality
*peem	849	bheema		621		*fear

Initial ‘c-‘ Loss

            It is the very common nature in Dravidian that the initial *c- of proto Dravidian forms is loss in south Dravidian languages, but while the same nature prevails in the so-called borrowings in Old Tamil, the comparative linguists treat it as a borrowing in comparison with the languages of Dravidian and the languages of Indo-Aryan.  In the same way, in some other languages, initial *c- becomes s- in other languages.  One can observe the same nature in these two language group of families. 

Tol. Words	Sutra No.	Sanskrit Words	Page No.	Meaning
amar	1010	*camara	318	war

*c- becomes ‘s-‘

Tol. Words	Sutra No.	Sanskrit Words	Page No.	Meaning
*cuuttiram	1427	sutra	940	sutra

Initial ‘h-‘ Loss

            There is no velar fricative of h in proto Dravidian.  So it can be possible to claim the forms such as haara ‘garland’ may be proto language forms.

Tol. Words	Sutra No.	Sanskrit Words	Page No.	Meaning
aaram	1586	*haara	973	garland

Ininitial *k- becomes c-

            Proto Dravidian initial *k- is palatalized to c- before the front vowels.  The following forms are examples for this category. 

Tol. Words	Sutra No.	Sanskrit Words	Page No.	Meaning
ciirtti	1040	*kiirtti	224	fame

Some other forms may also be treated as cognates on the ground that there is no aspirated nature in Dravidian and no consonant cluster of phonemes in the initial position of the Dravidian words if the following forms are taken into consideration. 

‘ph-’ < > ‘p-‘

Tol. Words	Sutra No.	Sanskrit Words	Page No.	Meaning
palam	1592	phala		fruit

‘pr-‘ > ‘p-‘

Tol. Words	Sutra No.	Sanskrit Words	Page No.	Meaning
pakuti	501	*prakruti	557	part

‘-rN-‘ > ‘-NN-‘

Tol. Words	Sutra No.	Sanskrit Words	Page No.	Meaning
vaNNam	563	*varNa	737	colour

Dravidian with Scythic Language  

It is understood that the chief language families in India are Indo-Aryan, Dravidian, Austro-Asiatic, and Tibeto-Burman.  Since the cultivated Dravidian languages abound in Sanskrit words many, many scholars, before Caldwell, once entertained the opinion that Dravidian languages, spoken in the southern part of India, were descended from Sanskrit like the modern Indo-Aryan languages, spoken in the Northern part of India.  While acknowledging the existence of a very large percentage of Sanskrit and Indo-Aryan words in the Dravidian vocabularies, Caldwell (1856) came to conclude that the Dravidian languages had no structural relationship with Sanskrit and attempted to prove that the grammatical affinities of these languages were mainly Scythic-Turanian. 

Others’ View

            Among those who accepted his theories in their entirety special mention must be made of Dr. H.Gundert, a profound scholar of the Malayalam language and literature, and Dr. F. Kittel, a eminent scholar of the Kannada language and literature.  However, Dr. G.U. Pope, a distinguished scholar in Tamil language and literature, was reluctant to accept Caldwell’s theories; and in a series of articles in the Indian Antiquity. He carefully mentions (1) that “between the languages of southern India and those of the Aryan family there may be deeply seated and radical affinities; (2) that the differences between the Dravidian tongues and the Aryan are not so great as between the Celtic (for instance) and the Sanskrit; (3) that, by consequence, the doctrine that the place of the Dravidian dialects is rather with the Aryan than with Turanian family of languages is still capable of defense”.

            Caldwell (1856), of course, accepted the existence of the plenty of Sanskrit words in Dravidian.  However, only on the ground that there is no structural relationship between these two language families, he rejects the earlier theory that Dravidian descended from Sanskrit.  On the contrary, considering the Sanskritic theory that Indo-European, one can notice that the theory established by Sir William Jones in 1896 was mainly developed by the common vocabularies, i.e. treated as cognates, available in Sanskrit and the European languages such as German, Latin, Greek etc.   Here it is an important point to be noted that the gap between the Caldwell’s period and the Sir William Jones period is nearly forty years. 

            There should not be two opinions in adopting the rules and regulations followed in the comparative linguistics.  But it is kept in mind that in both the cases the same rules should have been followed in grouping the language families.  The contrast between these two theories that the former theory developed on the basis of vocabularies was accepted by the scholars working in the field of comparative linguistics whereas the latter theory come out before 4 four decades was summarily rejected.  What is the reason behind that, we don’t know. That is, it is peculiar to say that whereas grouping of Sanskrit under Indo-European is based on the vocabularies, the Dravidian theory fails to agree the same formulae, though the Dravidian and Sanskrit have plenty of common vocabularies, which are cognates alike.
Wherefrom Dravidian Comes  

            The editors of the series of the Linguistic Survey of India remark that “with regard to the Drāvidas, some authorities believe that they arrived in India from the South, while others suppose them to have entered from the North-West where a Dravidian language is still spoken by the Brāhūīs of Baluchistan (Linguistic Survey of India, Vol.IV, p.5).  According to Zvelebil (1990), “that the speakers of Dravidian languages moved from west or Central West Asia to the South Asian sub-continent seems to be indisputable”.  He (1972) earlier proposes a hypothesis that Dravidian marched from the mountains of eastern Iran to South India and Sri Lanka, ‘dropping off’ groups along the way rather like a bus depositing passengers.  He (1972:57) further writes: “the Dravidians were a highlander folk, sitting, sometimes around 4000 B.C. in the rugged mountainous area of North-eastern Iran (where they came into extended contact with the speakers of Uralian / Altaic languages), whence, round about 3500 B.C., they became a South-eastern movement into the Indian subcontinent which went on for about two and a half millennia”.

Speakers of Dravidian and Indo-Aryan

            As Southworth (1976) puts it, “there is nothing against the assumption that the Indus Valley was the area where Dravidian speakers first made their appearance in the subcontinent, after their presumed departure from West Asia”.  According to Emeneau, Zvelebil, Southworth and so on, the speakers of Dravidian language family might have moved from central west Asia to India.  Suppose that the so-called Sanskrit words in Tolkappiyam are treated cognates of Indo-Aryan and Dravidian, there is a possibility to believe that both the speakers of Dravidian and the Indo-Aryan jointly as one family without two groups might have moved together from Central West Asia towards Indian subcontinent. 

            Some other theories say that showing the existence of Dravidian language, Brahui in Baluchistan, the well settled Dravidian speakers in the Sindhu Valley might have been driven away to southern part of India by the Aryan people.  In other way round, it can be presumed that the period at which the Dravidians fled from this valley, is assumed to have separated from each other only after they had lived together in the valley.  In that period itself, both the languages of Dravidian and Indo-Aryan are presumed to have been a single language family of Indo-Dravidic Aryan.

No Short Vowels e and o in Toda

Emaneau further mentions that “proto Dravidian *o represents a correspondence in which all the languages have o,  except that  Toda often has wa, wï, or ï, Gondi in some dialects has a  and Brahui has either ō, u, or a”.  (Emaneau 1970 : 25).

(Ta)              (To)

cevi    ‘ear’   kїfy

eli        ‘rat’   isy

nencu  ‘heart’  nїz

“PDr.  *e represents a correspondence in which all the languages have e, except that Toda often has ö, Parji sometimes has a, Gondi in some dialect, has a,  and some of the other languages sometimes have a;   Brahui has either i or a,”   (Emaneau 1970 : 21).

(Ta)                                           (To)

oTunku  ‘become reduce’         wїDg-

oTi          ‘to break’                    war-

kolu         ‘fat, prosporous’         kwalp-

koy          ‘to pluck’                   kwїy-

            Out of 380 entries with e in DED in total, only 4 occurrences of near cognates have attested in Malto whereas merely 6 occurrences of near cognates out of 374 entries with o in DED, exist in Malto.  In the same way, only 7 occurrences out of 380 DED entries with o and merely 3 occurrences out of 374 with the short o in DED have been recorded in Kurukh, one of the north Dravidian languages.  So, due to this meager percentage of occurrences with e and o available in Malto and Kurukh of the north Dravidian languages, Kamatchi (2006) (SALA-26) claims that there had been no short vowels of e and o in proto Dravidian.

No short Vowels e and o in Dravidian

A close watch on the vowel symbols employed in the early Dravidian records of early Tamil-Brahmi, belonging to 3^rd century B.C. to 1^st century A.D., evidently shows that there was no distinction between short and long vowel of e and ee and o and oo as available in Sanskrit.  That is, as in the vowel system of Indo-Aryan, no symbol for either short e or o has been recorded in the early Dravidian records.  They were actually not developed to graphemic status in the early period, as far as the paleographic status is concerned.  Suppose that Dravidian had e and o in her phonemic system, why didn’t it have the symbols for e and o in the early records.  So, one can strongly claim that no earlier Dravidian records show the symbols for the short vowels e and o.  What it means is that there might have been no phonemic status for these vowels.  So there is reason to belief that proto Dravidian had no short e and o in its phonemic system.  Therefore, it is assumed that in the later period only, these might have been developed to phonemic status in the languages. 

Comparing this system with the loss of e and o in Brahui, Kamatchi (2005), in his paper on “Are the short vowels of e and o loss in Brahui?”, presented in the SAP-National Seminar on Tribal studies in Dravidian languages, posits that the theory of loss of e and o in Brahui should be reconsidered and further claims that the Dravidian vowel system did not seem to have e and o. 

Dravidian Borrowings in early Sanskrit

            Burrow had found some twenty words in the earliest Sanskrit recorded, the Rgveda, which he considers to be of Dravidian origin.  A number of them have been accepted by Emeneau; among the most important and most interesting are Skt. khála- ‘threshing floor’, ‘open place’, ‘battle field’ etc.;  Skt. phála- fruit:  Tamil…Malto, palam ‘fruit’, palu ‘to ripen’ etc. and so on.  As Emeneau says, “if the Rig-Vedic examples, or any of them, are accepted, this is evidence for the presence of Dravidian speakers as far toward the northwest as the Panjab, i.e. the Upper Indus Valley, in the first centuries (it is uncertain how many) of the presence of Sanskrit-speakers on Indian soil”.  Though the scholars treat these forms as borrowings, this study, based on the comparative linguistic methods, claims that these forms are purely cognates for these language families.

Conclusion

Linguists all over the world are viable to the rules and regulations in approaching the languages due to the fact that linguistics is scientific study of languages.  But, as we have noted earlier, in comparative Dravidian linguistics, it seems that they fail to follow the very common phenomenea such as metathesis, loss and so on.  In addition, there are a number of forms like these available in Sangam literature to substantiate this study.  Of course, this is the preliminary study.  We are in the computer world. Using the computer, we can collect more evidences thorough internet and e-mail from the scholars belonging to other languages families in the world. If the study goes on this way of hypothesis, we are able to prove that the Dravidian and Indo-Aryan are under the same umbrella.

References

Burrow, T. (1968)  ‘The Loss of Initial *c/s in South Dravidian’. In Collected        Papers on Dravidian Linguistics. Annamalai University : Annamalai nagar.

Caldwell, Robert (1856) A Comparative Grammar of the Dravidian or South         Indian Family of Languages (3^rd edition, London, 1913, reprinted: Madras,     1956.

Emeneau, M. B. (1954) ‘Linguistic Prehistory of India’, PAPS-98, p.282-92.

Southworth, Franklin C.  (1976) ‘On Subgroups in Dravidian’, IJDL-5, p.114-37.

Subrahmanyam, P.S. (1983) Dravidian Comparative Phonology. Annamalai University : Annamalai nagar. 

Zvelebil, Kamil (1972) ‘The Descent of the Dravidians’, IJDL, pp57-63.