come into frequent and close contact with the Dravidians, and if so, when and how? These are questions which it is almost impossible to answer in the present state of our knowledge, but they are too important to be altogether set aside, and it may be therefore pointed out merely as a contribution to the subject, that the tribes driven out of the valley of the Ganges by the Aryans were almost certainly Kols to the south, and semi-Tibetans to the north. It is fair to look with suspicion on an etymology which takes us from Sanskrit to Tamil without exhibiting a connecting series of links through the intervening Kol tribes.
If the above limitations are rigidly applied, they will narrow very much the area within which non-Aryan forms are possible in Sanskrit and its descendants, and will force us to have recourse to a far more extensive and careful research within the domain of Sanskrit itself than has hitherto been made, with a view to finding in that language the origin of modern words.
§ 4. Having thus noticed the three classes of materials which have entered into the composition of the seven languages, I now proceed to examine the question as it were from the interior, in order to attain to a certain amount of precision in estimating the relative proportions of each of these three elements. For this purpose it will be convenient to use the familiar native divisions, which go to the root of the matter as far as their lights enable them. Words in any of these seven languages are divided into three classes.
- Tatsama तत्सम, or "the same as it" (i.e. Sanskrit).
- Tadbhava तद्भव, or "of the nature of it."
- Deśaja देशज, or "country-born."
This division will be used throughout the following pages, and may be thus explained.
Tatsamas are those words which are used in the modern lan-
