3
PREFACE
“Tamil can readily dispense with the greater part or whole of Sanscrit, and by dispensing with it rises to a purer and more refined style, where as English cannot abandon its Latin without abandoning perspicuity.:" -Dr. Caldwell in his "Comparative Grammar of the Dravidian Languages," 3rd edition, P.47.
This great truth discriminatively perceived and impartially proclaimed by Dr. Caldwell the greatest Dravidian philologist, concerning the richness of the Tamil language and the poverty of the other, it is regrettable even Tamil scholars of the land have not sufficiently recognised. How rich, pure and elegant in words and phrases the ancient Tamil literature had been, how simple, yet how lovely, original, edifying and true to nature had the conceptions of its poets and prose writers shone, but to what a poor, mixed, inelegant and low style has the language of its modern literatue fallen, and to what an artificial, ugly, slavish, corrupted and false mode of strain the thoughts and ideas of its authors are fettered, a slight comparison of the two literatures will easily disclose. As has been truly observed by J.A. Symonds, "The genius of a language is the genius of the race which made it." This significant fact as applying to Tamil cannot be expressed so well as in the notable works of Dr. Gilbert Slater who writes thus: "The very character of the Tamil language, the perfection with which it has been developed into an organ for precise and subtle thought, combined with the fact that it represents a much earlier stage in the evolution of inflexional language than any Indo-Germanic tongue, suggests, though of course it does not prove, the priority of the Dravidians in attaining settled order and regular government." (The Dravidian Element in Indian Culture, p 70) Though Dr. Slater, in claiming “a greater antiquity for Dravidian than for Aryan civilisation", only suggests, from a correct understanding of the perfect structure
