VI. A CRITICAL AND COMPARATIVE STUDY OF THE ONE-LETTERED WORDS IN THE DRAVIDIAN LANGUAGES AND SANSKRIT WITH SPECIAL REFERENCE TO TAMIL H In his monumental work, “A Comparative Grammar of the Dravidian or South-Indian Family of Languages” Bishop Caldwell referred to the fact that ‘whatever the length and complication of Dravidian words, they may invariably be traced up to monosyllabic roots, by a careful removal of successive accretions’.” This statement of the great authority on ‘Dravidian comparative grammar” is proved better by ‘a critical and comparative study of the one-lettered words in the Dravidian Languages’ in which we find a large number of words which are not only mono-syllabic but one-lettered only. We have clear references to these one-lettered words in Tołkāppiam, ‘the earliest extant Tamil grammar.” While dealing with Molimarapu (wordology) in the second chapter of his work, Tolkāppiar devotes three Sūtras to explain the nature of onelettered words. They are as follows: (1) Nettelut těļē yörelut torumolio The seven long vowels alone can stand as single-lettered words. (2) Kurrelut taintu moļinirai Pilavē° No one of the five short vowels can stand as a word by itself.
