to publish, Mr. J. Ramayya Pantulu suggested the exclusion of quotations from Modern Literature from the dictionary. He remarks, “It will, perhaps, be desirable to fix a time-limit and rule that no book written after that limit should be quoted from. This will shutout almost the whole of prose literature which is quite recent and cannot lay much claim to authority.’ (Vide page 3). This is a scathing condemnation by the President of the Senate of the Telugu Academy of a Prose literature whose praises Mr. K.V. Lakshman Row sings in the report of the majority of the SubCommittee. This scholar to whom archaism in language is sacred, and current usage is repugnant, undertakes to settle the lines for the Composition of candidates at the Intermediate examination!
82. In the columns of the ‘Madras Mail” of the 6tI Instant a correspondent takes great pains to defend the misuse of the term ‘grammar’ by writers of the Old school. I notice his letter because it bears internal evidence of the authority of the old school. For misuse of terms, mis-statements of facts and for confusion of thought, the letter is remarkable even for a writer of the Old school; to its stock phrases, “traditional grammar,” “accepted grammar” and “existing grammar”, the writer adds two more, namely, “grammar in the wider sense and grammar in the narrow sense of the pedagogue and the school time-table.” If I may venture an interpretation of the letter, I suppose the writer seeks to draw a distinction between descriptive and historic grammar on the one hand and normative or didactic grammar on the other. But modern scholarship does not recognise the authority of normative grammar except within very narrow limits and the modern world refuses to acknowledge its authority when it seeks to “measure the correctness of current speech by the standard of a more or less arbitrarily chosen past period often termed classical”. The nearest analogy in European history to the pretensions of the Telugu poetic dialect was the “humanistic apotheosis of the Ciceronian latinity and the
