Page:Castes and Tribes of Southern India, Volume 4.djvu/48

understand the Kois who come from the plateau in Bustar. A few years ago, when Colonel Haig travelled as far as Jagdalpuram, the Kois from the neighbourhood of Dummagudem who accompanied him were frequently-unable to carry on any conversation with many of the Kois on this plateau. There are often slight differences in the phraseology of the inhabitants of two villages within a mile of each other. When two of my teachers, living not more than a mile apart, were collecting vocabularies in the villages in which they lived, they complained that their vocabularies often differed in points where they expected to find no variety whatever." A partial vocabulary of the Koyi language is given by the Rev. J. Cain, who notes that all the words borrowed from Telugu take purely Koi terminations in the plural. "Its connection," he writes, "with the Gond language is very apparent, and also the influence of its neighbour Telugu. This latter will account for many of the irregularities, which would probably disappear in the language spoken by the Kois living further away from the Telugu country." Mr. G. F. Paddison informs me that all the Gonds whom he met with in the Vizagapatam district were bholo loko (good caste), and would not touch pork or mutton, whereas the Koyi shares with the Dombs the distinction of eating anything he can get in the way of meat, from a rat to a cow. It is noted by Mr. H. A. Stuart*^[1] that "the Khonds call themselves Kui, a name identical with Koi or Koya." And, in 1853, an introduction to the grammar of the Kui or Kandh language was produced by Lingum Letchmajee.†^[2]

1. • Madras Census Report, 1891.
2. † Calcutta Christian Observer, May and June, 1853, Second Edition, by the Rev. J. M. Descombes and J. A. Grierson, Calcutta, 1900.