DISCOVERY OF DRAVIDIAN

AS THE COMMON SOURCE OF

INDO-EUROPEAN

A Linguistic Monograph

V. Keerthi Kumar

Copyright © by V. Keerthi Kumar 1999.

All rights including International Copyrights reserved.
No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in
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(E-mail: v.k.kumar@excite.com)

To:

Jana K. Kumar
and our children:
Shauna Luree, Deena Shakila, Ravi Vasanthraj Kumar.

*****

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 DISCOVERY OF DRAVIDIAN
AS THE COMMON SOURCE OF
INDO-EUROPEAN

CHAPTER I

DRAVIDIAN BIRTHMARKS ON INDO-EUROPEAN

Dravidian is a family of Indian languages of great antiquity, endurance, and
importance, but it has been hardly explored and exposed in its genetic relationship
with other languages of the world, especially Indo-European. It is neither due to
obscurity, for millions of Indians speak Dravidian, nor due to lack of evidence, for
there is proof in abundance as we shall witness in this work, but due to factors such
as ignoring it that the scholars have failed to bring it to light as the common source
of Indo-European.

As a consequence of this situation, a number of theories which are nothing but

conjectures have been widely circulating for a long time; the two main ones being
that Dravidian is an isolated language family with no relationship to any other
language or language family in the world. Even though recently Dravidian is being
increasingly compared with families of languages that are also proposed as related
to Indo-European, the old assumption that Dravidian is an unrelated and isolated
language family still persists. Secondly, the concerned scholars are under the
impression that the identity of the common source of Indo-European is still a
"mystery". However, the fact is that Dravidian could have been suspected as the
common source of Indo-European as long ago as 1786, and with less effort,
discovered as such as soon as the Indo-European root-words were recognized or
reconstructed several scores of years ago.

It was in 1786, that Sir William Jones, an English judge of Supreme Court in
Calcutta who is more famous as the founder of Comparative Philology, pronounced
a statement in his address to the Royal Asiatic Society of Bengal, which
subsequently proved to be a milestone in the history of the Indo-European
languages. Sir Jones stated: "The Sanskrit language, whatever be its antiquity, is of
a wonderful structure; more perfect than Greek, more copious than Latin, and more
exquisitely refined than either; yet bearing to both of them a stronger affinity both
in the roots of verbs and in the forms of grammar, than could possibly have been
produced by accident; so strong indeed that no philologer could examine them all
three, without believing them to have sprung from some common source, which
perhaps, no longer exists. There is a similar reason though not quite so forcible, for
supposing that both the Gothick and the Celtick, though blended with a different
idiom, had the same origin with the Sanskrit; and the old Persian might be added
to the family."

It should be pointed out that many other scholars of his century had conceived
similar ideas concerning Indo-European languages, but it was Sir Jones who
distinctly departed from their main thinking that Greek and Latin were derived from
Sanskrit. He emphatically stated that all three: Sanskrit, Greek, and Latin were
derived from a common source. Thus, Sir Jones was the first one to fully and
cogently articulate the testimony for the common source, the ancient parent
language of Sanskrit, Greek, Latin, and other languages which were mentioned by
him in his above noted statement, and to the short list of which more than a
hundred Indo-European languages spoken by more than half the total population of
the world have been subsequently added by other scholars. It should also be
pointed out that this realization of the common source of Indo-European
inaugurated a period during which a number of eminent European scholars
advocated an Asiatic origin of the Indo-European languages, even though they did
not look for its seat of concentration as far down south as southern India where not
less than twenty-seven Dravidian languages are spoken in their purest available
form today.