5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Excellent and Accessible Book, June 8, 2007
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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