From: cjyothibabu
Message: 71622
Date: 2013-11-21
Dear Richard
According to Krishnamurti “It is possible that items which had developed s- variants in social dialects were the ones which suffered change”.
c > s > h > zero happened in Tamil and old Malayalam.
According to Krishnamurti this is an ongoing change in a few more languages (which he calls as South Dravidian II).
Again all Proto Dravidian ‘c’ is not lost in all items; according to Krishnamurti 14 per cent of the total number of items (500 items in SD I + Telugu) that require PD *c- lost the initial ‘c’. According to him SD I + Telugu lost initial ‘c’ in 13 groups and irregular loss occurred in another 57 cases.
Other initial consonants are also dropped in many cases in many languages.
Linguists have noted p > h > zero occurred in a few words in a few South Dravidian languages.
Initial semivowel y is lost in all modern Dravidian languages.
It occurs to me that initial ‘k’ is also lost in a few cases (probably via c>s>h>0); however this requires more systematic study.
-Jyothi
---In cybalist@yahoogroups.com, <richard.wordingham@...> wrote:In cybalist@yahoogroups.com, <shivkhokra@...> wrote:From my reading of the secondary sources, the simple account is that Tamil dropped initial Proto-Dravidian *c. I get the impression is that the reconstructed route is c > s > h > zero. Why this should happen in Tamil and not in all other Dravidian languages is not an easy question to answer. Different groups of speakers do different things to their common language.> The implication here is that any reconstructed proto
> Dravidian etymology which makes a word begin with "ச" will
> have to tell us why Tamil words cannot begin with "ச" but
> other Dravidian language words can.
Richard.