Page:An introduction to Dravidian philology.djvu/81

not be that Tamil being the most advanced and the most ancient of the Dravidian languages, it is the most corrupt, corrupt in the philological sense that it has been subjected to the widest phonetic decay, so that its affixes and prefixes, its declensional and conjugational forms, in fact, its whole structure had undergone such great changes that it would be difficult to arive at the proto-Dravidian language by beginning with Tamil? May it not be more useful to start the enquiry from the standpoint of Telugu, Canarese, Malayalam or Tulu? May it not then result in the finding out of a relationship of the Dravidian with the recognised modern Aryan languages of India, claiming their descent from the ancient Prakrits? In Caldwell's time the Prakrit languages were not studied, at least they did not receive that wide attention which they have been subjected to in later times. May it not be that Caldwell himself,