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laws of phonetic change ought to have existed and which may have been either lost or on investigation may be found in the speech of a limitted class of people, or in a particular dialect. For example, we have in Telugu the word (
Telugu characters) (paluca) meaning
'thin' ; we have a shrewd suspicion that it must somehow be connected with the Sanskrit word '(Telugu characters) (svalpa)'; but to account for (Telugu characters) (paluca) from (Telugu characters) (svalpa) we expect an intermediate form (Telugu characters) (salupa) or (Telugu characters) (calupa); this word on investigation is actually found in usage in the Ceded Districts and in Mysore Kannada is found as (Telugu characters)(salupa), a tadbhava word.
It was believed by a former generation of philologists, under the influence of the Darwinian theory of evolution and the biological fact of the ontogeny of the human race being repeated with some breaks in the phylogenetic development of the human child within the womb, passing through
