The Dravidian languages are spoken by nearly 200 million people in South Asia and in diaspora communities around the world. They include Tamil, Malayalam, Kannada and Telugu, as well as over 20 non-literary languages. Bhadriraju Krishnamurti, one of the most eminent Dravidianists of our time, provides a linguistic overview of the Dravidian language family. He describes its history and writing system, discusses its structure and typology, and considers its lexicon. Distant and more recent contacts between Dravidian and other language groups are also covered.
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Book Description
Editorial Reviews
Review
"The state of the art in historical Dravidian studies. Krishnamurti's careful scholarship, detailed analysis, and even-handedness in dealing with different views make this a landmark volume that will serve as a touchstone for future generations of Dravidologists." Anthropological Linguistics
"This volume deserves to be on the bookshelf of every Dravidianist, and will serve as a distinguished source book for material on historical and comparative Dravidian linguistics for some time to come" - Sanford B. Steever, new Canaan, CT
"This volume deserves to be on the bookshelf of every Dravidianist, and will serve as a distinguished source book for material on historical and comparative Dravidian linguistics for some time to come" - Sanford B. Steever, new Canaan, CT
Book Description
The Dravidian languages are spoken by nearly 200 million people in South Asia and in diaspora communities around the world; they include Tamil, Malayalam, Kannada and Telugu, as well as over 20 non-literary languages. In this book, Bhadriraju Krishnamurti, one of the most eminent Dravidianists of our time, provides a linguistic overview of the Dravidian language family. He describes its history and writing system, discusses its structure and typology, and considers its lexicon. Distant and more recent contacts between Dravidian and other language groups are also discussed.
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This review is from: The Dravidian Languages (Cambridge Language Surveys) (Paperback)
As far as Cambridge Language Surveys go, this is one of the best! Krishnamurti's overview of the Dravidian languages does an excellent job of describing all of the known languages in this family and not just the better known ones such as Tamil or Telugu. He starts with a great section on convergent evolution of Dravidian and Indo-Aryan and how they've been mutually influential on each other over the millenia. There is a great overview of the Proto-Dravidian lexicon and shows the reconstructed forms for words dealing with Proto-D culture such as family, food, flora and fauna, etc.
Krishnamurti then reviews the phonology of each language and proceeds to reconstruct the Proto-Dravidian sound system and then looks at Proto-D morphology for noun cases and verbs. This includes samples of conjugated verb charts for many members of this language family. I personally would have liked to have seen more specific information regarding language history and lexicon for the individual languages with a text sample, but this omission in no way detracts from the usefulness of this book.
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Inside This Book
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First Sentence:
Robert Caldwell (1856, 3rd edn, repr. 1956: 3-6) was the first to use 'Dravidian' as a generic name of the major language family, next to Indo-Aryan (a branch of Indo-European), spoken in the Indian subcontinent. Read the first page Key Phrases - Statistically Improbable Phrases (SIPs): (learn more)
past relative participle, third neuter singular, undivided stage, voicing index, enunciative vowel, reflexive auxiliary, pronominalized nouns, formative vowel, interrogative bases, neg adj, deictic bases, perfective participle, formative syllable, sandhi variants, primary consonants, concessive forms, reduplicated ones, centralized vowels, relative participles, deictic roots, other literary languages, past stem, basic adverbs, interrogative roots, major literary languages Key Phrases - Capitalized Phrases (CAPs): (learn more)
South Dravidian, North Dravidian, Old Telugu, Old Kannada, Modern Kannada, Ramachandra Rao, Andhra Pradesh, Classical Tamil, Middle Tamil, Jules Bloch, Ramaswami Aiyar, Middle Indic, Alu Kurumba, Plural Nom, South Asia, Kumaraswami Raja, Madhya Pradesh, New Indo-Aryan, Naiki of Chanda, Pampa Bhárata, Singular Nom, Tamil Lexicon, The Tulu, Early Kannada, Kondekor Gadaba New!
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Front Cover | Table of Contents | First Pages | Index | Back Cover | Surprise Me!
Robert Caldwell (1856, 3rd edn, repr. 1956: 3-6) was the first to use 'Dravidian' as a generic name of the major language family, next to Indo-Aryan (a branch of Indo-European), spoken in the Indian subcontinent. Read the first page Key Phrases - Statistically Improbable Phrases (SIPs): (learn more)
past relative participle, third neuter singular, undivided stage, voicing index, enunciative vowel, reflexive auxiliary, pronominalized nouns, formative vowel, interrogative bases, neg adj, deictic bases, perfective participle, formative syllable, sandhi variants, primary consonants, concessive forms, reduplicated ones, centralized vowels, relative participles, deictic roots, other literary languages, past stem, basic adverbs, interrogative roots, major literary languages Key Phrases - Capitalized Phrases (CAPs): (learn more)
South Dravidian, North Dravidian, Old Telugu, Old Kannada, Modern Kannada, Ramachandra Rao, Andhra Pradesh, Classical Tamil, Middle Tamil, Jules Bloch, Ramaswami Aiyar, Middle Indic, Alu Kurumba, Plural Nom, South Asia, Kumaraswami Raja, Madhya Pradesh, New Indo-Aryan, Naiki of Chanda, Pampa Bhárata, Singular Nom, Tamil Lexicon, The Tulu, Early Kannada, Kondekor Gadaba New!
Books on Related Topics | Concordance | Text Stats Browse Sample Pages:
Front Cover | Table of Contents | First Pages | Index | Back Cover | Surprise Me!
Citations (learn more)
This book cites 53
books:
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13
books
cite this book:
See all 13 books citing this book
- A Dravidian Etymological Dictionary by T. Burrow on 5 pages
- The Dravidian Languages (Routledge Language Family Series) by Sanford B. Steever on 5 pages
- A Comparative Dictionary of the Indo-Aryan Languages IV: Volume 4: Addenda and Corrigenda by R. L. Turner on 4 pages
- Linguistic Survey of India in 11 Volumes (19 Parts) by G.A. Grierson on 4 pages
- A Grammar of Modern Telugu by B. Krishnamurti in Front Matter, and Back Matter
See all 53 books this book cites
- The Dravidian Languages (Routledge Language Family Series) by Sanford B. Steever on 6 pages
- Studies On Reduplication (Empirical Approaches to Language Typology) by Bernhard Hurch on page 258, and page 471
- The Yearbook Of South Asian Languages And Linguistics 2003 by Rajendra Singh on page 178, and page 194
- Lesser-Known Languages of South Asia: Status and Policies, Case Studies and Applications of Information Technology (Trends in Linguistics. Studies and Monographs 175) by Anju Saxena on page 55, and page 57
- Introduction to Typology: The Unity and Diversity of Language by Lindsay J. Whaley in Back Matter
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