10 



ON THE ORIGIN OF 



Before entering into direct proof, it may be here convenient to no- 

 tice the lexical analogies of the Dravidian and the Sinhalese, to which 

 Dr. Stevenson of Bombay refers in an article ' on the language of 

 the aboriginal Hindus'.* If his conjecture be correct, we 

 might, as justly remarked by Caldwell, reasonably expect to find 

 in their vocabularies a few primary Dravidian roots,— -such as the 

 words for 'head,' 4 hand/ 4 foot/ 4 eye', 4 ear/ &c; but we have not 

 been able to discover any reliable analogy in - words belonging to 

 this class. But Dr. Stevenson pro/esses to give us a compara- 

 tive list of 44 forty-one primitive words, all expressive (as he says) 

 of such ideas as men must use in the infancy of society :"' let us 

 examine them. 



Referring the reader to that list 7 1 shall confine my observations 

 to the Sinhalese and the Tamil, which are put down in the South- 

 ern class. At the outset the reader will observe, that of forty-one 

 words given of the Hindi, in order to show their agreement in 

 sound with the words of the Bengali, Guzarati, Marathi, Telagui, 

 Karnatika, Tamil, and Sinhalese, the learned Doctor has signally 

 failed to show the Sinhalese for seventeen. 



L Of the remaining twenty four, 4 appan, TamU,=appa, Sinha- 

 lese,' appears first. This is not an ancient Sinhalese word ; nor does 

 it occur in our books, which give us piya and bap. But the word 

 which denotes 'father/ it would seem, is the same in nearly all lan- 

 guages. In the Indo-European and the Semetic families the base 

 is a p or b, the difference being that in the former the word com- 

 mences with the consonant above given, e. g., pater; whilst in the 

 latter, as in the Hebrew ab, the vowel a is prefixed to that consonant. 

 In this respect the Dravidian follows the Semetic. Whether tins 

 vowel is added or not,, it is quite clear that the origin of the word 

 is the same, and that the one-ness of language in a few words, as in 

 the instance before us, proves the one-ness of origin. — 4 the one 

 language and one speech of the whole earth before the dispersion of 

 mankind. 'I 



* Bombay A. S. Journal for 1842 r p. 103. 



f See further remarks hereon under the table of names,— iVra. 



