Page:Origin and spread of the Tamils.djvu/74

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NOTES TO LECTURE I 63 place. Their line of argument is a little difficult to follow, English would be none the less Teutonic were its vocabulary twice as latinized. And, if by some freak, Brahui divested itself of all suffixas inherited from the Dravidian mother-stock and adopted Iranian or Indian devices for the declension of its nouns and pronouns and for the conjugation of its verbs ; if it substituted for its organic negative conjugation, so characteristically Dravidian, the ordinary mechanical device of using a negative adverb, and purged its grammatical structure of such last remnants of its Dravidian, as its personal, reflexive, interrogative and demonstrative pronouns, it is hard to see how it could be said to be member of the Dravidian language-group any longer, even though its vocabulary became as heavily interlarded with Dravidian words as' it now is with words borrowed from Indian and Iranian languages. None the less, the secondary evidence afforded by affinities in the vocabulary is striking enough, True, the words inherited from the original Dravidian stock form a very small minority. But it is a minority of stalwarts. It is composed almost entirely of words to express the most fundamental and elementary concepts of life :-substantives like mouth, ear, eye, brain, blood, sleep, top, bottom; adjectives like big, small, new, old, sweet, bitter, dry, hot, red; the numerals one, two, three ; pronouns like I, thou, he, we, you, they, self, who ? what? how many ? other; verbs like to be, become, come, give, eat, speak, hear, see, understand, take, strike, fear, die ; adverbs like before, after, formerly, yet, today. (The Brahui Language, Part II, p. 16). 15. See G. R. Hunter-The script of Harappa and Mohenjo Daro and its connection with other scripts : In the seals discovered in this region are seen inscriptions in a pictographic character. Similar forms of writing are met with in