Comparative Dravidian Linguistics: Current Perspectives (review)

This impressive volume by Krishnamurti, one of the leading scholars in Dravidian historical linguistics, consists of a preface, acknowledgments, a note on transliteration and symbols, a list of abbreviations, 21 articles on comparative Dravidian linguistics written by K at the different stages of his long and fruitful career, a bibliography, and a detailed index.

Overall the book is a pleasure to read, and it will certainly be useful for generations of scholars doing comparative Dravidian linguistics or historical linguists who are involved in the study of other language families but who are interested in general issues of historical linguistics and applications of the comparative method. I, nevertheless, feel obliged to start with two general negative comments. First, the choice of title is misleading. One would expect (as I did, and undoubtedly many others who obtained the book will too) this to be a monograph comprising relevant chapters on reconstruction of phonology, morphology, lexicon, and syntax of proto-Dravidian. Instead, we have a collection of articles by K with only very loose connections or none at all among them. If there is a second edition, the book certainly should be renamed something like Studies in comparative Dravidian linguistics. Second, the subtitle, ‘Current perspectives’, does not reflect the contents of the book. Twenty of the 21 articles are reprints from journals or edited books. Three articles go back to the 1950s, three are from the 1960s, and five are from the 1970s. I wonder whether they all really reflect ‘current’ perspectives in the field. For example, Ch. 5, originally published in 1969, had to be supplemented with Ch. 14, published in 1985, since Dravidian comparative linguistics definitely made progress over these years.

To turn now from criticism to praise, K is to be commended for his remarkable resolve to stay within the limits of comparative Dravidian itself. He discusses only the issues relevant to the reconstruction of proto-Dravidian and does not go on a wild goose chase to discover the ‘distant relatives’ of proto-Dravidian or to ‘decipher’ proto-Indic script through the prism of Dravidian. Both such trends have become very fashionable, but they are worthy of the attention of journalists, not of serious linguists.

It is impossible to comment on all the chapters of this work in a short review, so I confine myself to just a few of them. In light of what is said above, I concentrate on the last chapters in the book that are K’s most current contributions.

The last chapter in the book, ‘Landmarks in comparative Dravidian studies in the twentieth century’, is the only one that has not been reprinted from somewhere else; therefore, it deserves special attention. It is a survey article, complementing two other earlier survey articles (Chs. 5 and 14, mentioned above). It is a wonderful outline of the history of Dravidian comparative studies in the last century, containing important information on the work accomplished by the major linguists in the field of comparative Dravidian. Anyone who wants to be engaged in research in this field should take advantage of this wonderful bibliographical guide. The chapter ends with a conclusion which is more like a guide for the next generation of scholars, directing them to yet unknown or insufficiently researched areas of Dravidian linguistics that are essential for a comparative work. A very useful appendix in this chapter provides information on the numbers of speakers of different Dravidian languages as well as their localities, along with a revised family tree.

Ch. 18, ‘Patterns of sound change in Dravidian’, looks like a very controversial paper; here, K claims that areal changes in phonology (‘typological changes’ in K’s terminology) are more regular than diachronic changes (‘historical changes’ in K’s terminology). I am not fully convinced by his conclusions. First, the justification provided for the greater regularity of areal changes is too sketchy (no actual examples from Indo-Aryan languages are provided, and no rules are supplied). Second, Indo-Aryan influence is...