the situation or the relative sentence before the indicative ; the situation of the governing word after the governed ; the use of l, ள; and the preference of cerebrals to dentals.
Affiliation of Tamil : It is superfluous to mention here that Tamil is the oldest member of the Dravidian group of languages. No scholar has yet attempted to construct the primitive Dravidian language from which the modern Tamil, Telugu, Kanarese and other dialects have sprung. A comparison of this hypothetical language with the other groups of the agglutinative family might yield satisfactory facts for establishing its affiliation. But in the absence of such data we must take the aid of ethnology and such linguistic resources as may at present be available.
In the chapter on the origin of the Tamil people we have said that the original Dravidians came to India from Western Asia through the North-Western passes on the Himalayas, and that they mingled with the aboriginal races of Nagas and the Negrito people alter they had settled in the extreme south of the Indian Peninsula. Hence the language of the Dravidians inust have undergone changes as a result of the influence of the crude Australia: dialects spoken by the Naga and Negrito autochthones. As however, the modern Dravidian languages have not yet been completely analysed, it is not possible at present to separate the Dravidian from the aboriginal linguistic elements. But this much seems to
