Professor Buhler on the Sanscrit Unguals. 119 



Irish, etc., have lost their mother-tongues, are, as nations, 

 unable to adopt with the words and grammatical laws, also 

 the pronunciation of the foreign language. They adapt its 

 sounds to their own phonetic system, and their peculiarities 

 are recognisable even after the lapse of centuries. 



As to the second point, it is certainly not sufficient 

 simply to state, that the Unguals were borrowed by the 

 Aryans from the Dravidian tongues. It ought to have been 

 proved that those conditions, under which alone the intro- 

 duction of a foreign sound into a language is imaginable, 

 really existed in Sanskrit. These conditions are, that 

 a great number of foreign words containing the particular 

 letter should first be borrowed, and that the sound should 

 thus become perfectly familiar to the people. It ought 

 therefore to have been proved that the Sanskrit al- 

 ready in the earliest times, possessed a large number 

 of Dravidian loan-words containing Unguals. But such 

 an attempt has never been made, and it would, I fear, 

 be quite fruitless. Dr. Caldwell enumerates in his list 

 of Sanskrit words, which he supposes to have been 

 borrowed from the Dravidians, only sixteen nouns which 

 contain Unguals, atavi, ani or ani, katu and its deri- 

 vative katuka, kuti and its kindred kutira. kutera, kutum- 

 ba, kuni or kuni, kota or kotta, khatva and patta or 

 pattana.* Two of these only, ani and katuka, are found in 

 the Rigveda, which is generally acknowledged to be the 

 most ancient literary production of the eastern Aryans, and 

 the Dravidian origin even of these two is very doubtful. 

 For ani, * the pin of the axle of a cart', can accord- 

 ing to the analogy of pani 1 hand'=parni from the 

 root pri, and others,*!" be very well supposed to be derived 

 from the root ' ar' which, as its causal arpayati and the cor- 



* Comp. Gram. p. i'39, ff. 

 f Seo below. 



