Page:A Brief Account of Malayalam Phonetics - L V Ramaswami Aiyar.pdf/8

 

districts of the East Coast. The language spoken in Malabar, therefore, must even at a very early time have developed the tendency to disintegration from the Tamil branch of main Dravidian stock to which it belongs. There is excellent evidence to show that this tendency very rapidly matured about the ninth century A.D., and culminated in the formation of a language which, though it bore a great relationship to the Tamil, became sufficiently altered to deserve the name of an independent language. The Tamil language that was used and spoken in those days had two forms, of which one was called the [vʌrʌmoɹ̣i] or written language used in books, and the other [vɑ:moɹ̣i] or the colloquial employed in ordinary use. It was from this [vɑ:moɹ̣i], or [koḍɯntʌmiɹ̣ɯ] as it was also called, that the Malayalam language developed. The basic structure of the new language that thus grew up in the West Coast remained essentially Dravidian, but at the same time the influence of Sanskrit and of Aryan civilisation as introduced by the Nambudiri colonists enriched the language with fresh Aryan ideas and, what was more, with a copious Sanskrit vocabulary. There are not wanting reasons for us to think that the Aryans largely colonised the West Coast even before they settled in large numbers in the Tamil districts. Sanskrit learning and literature took firm root in Malabar from the earliest times, and as centuries passed, its influence increased to the point of complete dominance. While infant Malayalam with no literature and ideals of her own thus allowed herself to be dominated by Sanskrit, her elder sister Tamil with her vast literary treasures and intellectual ideas was able successfully to resist the advances and the inroads of Sanskrit to a greater degree. The phenomenal popularity of Sanskrit in Malabar about 1000 A. D. infatuated the pedants even to the ridiculous extent of leading them to Sanskritise the grammatical forms of Malayalam, and to invent an artificial language called [mʌṇiprʌʋɑˑḷəm]—an incongruous jumble of Malayalam roots and Sanskrit inflexional endings. This aberration, like many another linguistic artificiality and Schwarmerei, had only an impermanent existence and soon died a natural death. Only the book-language or the [grənthəbɦɑˑʃ̣ɑˑ] was influenced by this new innovation, while the spoken language or the [nɑ:ṭoˑti bɦɑ:ʃ̣a] completely escaped the undesirable domination of this glorified pedantry. Thereafter, however great might have been the influence of Sanskrit over Malayalam, especially in the direction of enriching its vocabulary, the fundamental structure of the language as evidenced by the grammatical forms and endings remained essentially Dravidian. With the appearance in Malabar of a great literary genius, Thunchath Ezhuthachan [tunc͡ʃʌttə eɹ̣uttʌc͡ʃən], there arose