376
TAMIL STUDIES
non-Aryan languages of South India. And in the words of a Travancore statesman 'one could hardly help concluding that Malayalam is nothing more than old Tamil with a good admixture of Sanskrit words'; or, as Dr. Caldwell has said in one place, ‘it might perhaps be regarded rather as a very ancient dialect of the Tamil than as a distinct language'. This must be the opinion of all impartial scholars, and it must no longer be a matter of dispute whether Malayalam is an “old and much altered off-shoot” of Tamil or its sister language, because it is evidently neither.
