of relationship among their languages. The grammar and vocabulary of Tamil and Telugu are quite different, and the age when they had parted from each other goes back to pre-historic times. These considerations would favour our regarding them as sister languages. And the greater affinities of grammar and vocabulary which exist between the early Canarese and the early Tamil seem to point out that the former was the first born daughter or rather the youngest sister of Tamil; and this seems to receive an additional support from the fact that the northern limit of Tamil (Tirupati) which is bounded by Telugu has for the last two thousand years remained unaltered, while its north-western boundary had even before the fifth century A. D. been encroached by Canarese from Dvarasamudram and Coorg down to the Coimbatore district.
As regards Malayalam which was scarcely in her womb prior to the thirteenth century, we might say without any fear of contradiction for the reasons set forth above, that it is the latest dialect of Tamil which has come largely under the influence of Sanskrit. It is to be observed that at no period in historic times Sanskrit was a spoken language, and it is most unlikely that it could have been so among a non-Aryan people as the inhabitants of Malabar and Travancore Many Sanskrit words and idioms they might have borrowed ; but both in genius and in structure Malayalam remains, in spite of its Sanskritic saturation, a Dravidian tongue in close alliance with other chief
