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sives and palatals of the same order (this is a general rule). In Tamil and Malayâla the dentals have an increasing tendency towards the English th, hard or soft. In Telinga tch and dj often pass into tz and z, a phenomenon very common in Italian giorno, Venetian zorno, Neapolitan yorno. Vinson gives kevi, ear, in Kanara, tchevi in Telinga, cevi in Tamil.

The derivation is clearly agglutinative, and need not delay us except to note a few new facts. Every declension, and that which the grammarians wrongly term conjugation and voice, is effected by suffixes. accumulated and interlaced. There are not, properly speaking, any verbs, but derivatives indicating state, action, frequency, causation, negation, &c., actuality, distance in the past or future. One peculiarity I think we have not yet encountered-the declension of forms already furnished with verbal suffixes. In old Tamil poems, says Vinson, we find forms such as çarndayak ku: çar, to reach; n, euphonic; d, sign of the past tense; ay, thou; kku, a sign of the dative to thee who hast drawn near. It is the absence of the relative pronoun which entails such constructions. One more example: tevar-ir signifies god-you, you are god, but also, you who are god, and is thus susceptible of all suffixes of declension, possessives, locatives, &c. The radical tevar is already declined (plural of majesty), and in such compounds remains invariable.

The distinction of the genders is not common in the agglutinative class, and it seems to have been originally unknown to the Dravidian languages; even now it only applies to adult human beings. Women have a right to the feminine gender only in the plural; in the singular their name is neuter, like that of children. In Tamil there are really only two genders,

the noble gender and the inferior gender. For the rest, the intellectual evolution of the primitive Dravidians does not appear to have been very advanced, for their proper vocabulary does not contain the words which may be translated by to be, to have, soul, will, God, priest, book, writing, grammar; but by borrowing the conceptions, the ideas, and the terms which they lacked, they have acquired a very rich idiom, capable of lending itself to the subtleties of religious philosophy and to the fantasies of a brilliant poetry.

The Kanara, Tulu, and Telinga alphabets are derived from the Sanscrit character employed, in the third century before our era, in the inscriptions of the Buddhist King Açoka. Malayâla has similarly adapted to its own use an old Sanscrit alphabet called Grantha. Tamil seems to have received its alphabet from the Phoenician and Arab merchants. The most ancient inscriptions (ninth century of our era) exhibit these different types.

> Dravidian literature is later than the Aryan influence. The principal dialects have been cultivated, but the palm belongs to Tamil both for age and merit. Literary Tamil, which differs considerably from the spoken language, and is much purer, possesses mystic poems composed by Jaina, Sivaïst, and Buddhist sectaries, and epic poems encumbered with metaphor, among which is a long history of Joseph, written by the Jesuit Beschi in the last century. There are also collections of maxims, modern lyrics, solemn and very monotonous hymns, and licentious tales; treatises on astrology, divination, and medicine belong to modern times.

> Vinson believes that all the Dravidian dialects of the south will become absorbed in Tamil, and those of

the north in Telinga, the one the best preserved, the other the most changed of this interesting and vigorous family.

Tamil, as we have said, thanks to the energy and initiative of the people of the south of the Dekkan, is spoken in the northern half of Ceylon. The south of that great island is the home of another agglutinative language, Cingalese or Elou, which contains a great number of Tamil and Pâli words more modern than the rest of the vocabulary. It is not yet known whether Cingalese should be considered as a branch very early separated from the Dravidian stem.

Before quitting the Asiatic continent, let us cast a glance over the road we have travelled. From the Caucasus to the southern extremity of the Peninsula of Hindustan we have found (omitting the Semites and the Aryans) four groups or types of the agglutinative class: the very various dialects of the Caucasus, which have been classed, with more or less certainty or probability, in two families which are related to each other, the northern or Tcherkess family, and the southern or Kartvelian family; they belong to races driven into the mountains, on the one side by the Altaïcs and the Slavs, on the other by the ancient Assyrians and Iranians. It seems that, under the name of Urarti, people of Ararat, the Kartvelians formerly occupied Armenia, and were the near neighbours of the ancient inhabitants of Lower Mesopotamia and Chaldea, the Accads and the Shumirs. We have seen how skilfully modern research has reconstructed the civilisation and the language of these peoples, the inventors of the cuneiform character. Crossing the Indus, we have found in India, early conquered and organised by Aryans, two strata of agglutinative idioms,

the one destined to disappear, in spite of a relatively advanced development, the Kol-Aryan group; the other, the Dravidian group, vigorous and capable of holding its own among the numerous dialects of Sanscrit origin.

Separated by vocabulary, by the physical and intellectual diversity of the races which have used them or who still speak them, these four expressions of human thought are united by two features only which are common to both; they belong to the same linguistic class, and to nations which occupied the soil of Asia before the arrival of the Semites and Aryansthat is to say, of inflected languages.

CHAPTER IV.

THE MALAYO-POLYNESIAN LANGUAGES.

Ethnographic theories of the peoples between Madagascar and the Paschal Islands: Negritos, Papuans, Australians, Indonesians, Polynesians, Malays - The spread of the Malays on the IndoChinese coasts and in the Indian Archipelago Softness and simplicity of the Malay dialects (Eastern group: Tagala, with which is connected Hova, Bisaya, Formosan; Western group, Malayo-Javanese)-Character, manners, and literature of the Malays The Polynesians: physical indolence; effacement of consonants; poetical and mythical tendencies.

In the whole of the vast Malayo-Polynesian domain, extending from Madagascar to the Sandwich Islands in one direction, and in another to New Zealand, passing by the Sunda Islands, a common speech reigns, of which the groups and sub-groups not only belong to the same class, but possess the elements of the same vocabulary. Only three languages or families of languages are foreign to it, and these, moreover, are too little known for philologists to pronounce upon their origins and affinities. How did the dominant idiom come to extend over so

vast a space? Did it appear first at some central point? Was it imported from Asia or Polynesia? from the north or from the east? Is it the language of a conquered race which has absorbed that of the conquerors, as Anglo-Saxon imposed itself upon the Normans? Or the language of invaders, of emigrating tribes, like the languages of the Indo-Europeans?

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