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a small tract of land that was suitable for its living and each separting from the other by distance and difficulties of communication, the more was the original form of their speech neglected and left to undergo considerable change in course of time. And as if to com- plete the change and to mark them off as languages distinct from Tamil, the Aryans came into India and imposed on them their lan- guage manners, customs and religious beliefs. As these Tamils who marched to the north had been less civilized than those whom they left in the south, they readily yielded to the influence exerted by the cunning Aryans priests and have continued to remain in its grip ever since. Why Telugu, Canarese and Malayalam are loaded with such a large number of Sanscit words, phrases, and myths that there is scarcely to be found in them a single literary composition which is entirely free from them, cannot be explained on any other ground that that which is furnished by the above mentioned facts. But not so is the old Tamil literature; it is rich in grammar and rhetoric, rich in lyrics, idylls, epics and didactics, rich in exquistic poetic prose, and commentaries - all produced quite independently of any foreign influence. It was this high degree of culture, to which the ancient Tamilians had attained, that saved their language from death and decay. Prof. A.H. Sayce has truly observed: “The natu- ral condition of language is diversity and change, and it is only un- der the artificial influences of civilisation and culture that a lan- guage becomes uniform and stationary. Destroy literature and fa- cility of intercommunication and the languages of England and America would soon be as different as those of France and Italy.
Besides civilisation, the very nature of the sounds of which the Tamil words are composed, helpts the people to pronounce them with least effort, and thus prevents Tamil from being corrupted into dialects. In Tamil no consonanat can come at the beginning of a word without combining with a vowel; nor can any of the hard consonants k, ch, t, t, p and r, stand singly either in the middle or at the end of a word; while the sibilants and the aspirate s, sh, c, h are totally abesent from it. For instance, the word 'chrome' cannot be pronounced in Tamil as it is; in accordance with its strict phonetic law it should be pronounced as 'kurome' by adding a vowel ‘u' to
