One of the most characteristic features of the Dravidian verb is the existence of a separate negative conjugation. It usually has only one tense and is formed by adding the personal terminations to a negative base. Thus, Kanarese māḍ-enu, “I did not”; māḍ-evu, “we did not”; māḍ-aru, “they did not.”
The vocabulary has adopted numerous Aryan loan-words. This was a necessary consequence of the early connexion with the superior Aryan civilization.
The oldest Dravidian literature is largely indebted to the Aryans though it goes back to a very early date. Tamil, Malayālam, Kanarese and Telugu are the principal literary languages. The language of literature in all of them differs considerably from the colloquial. The oldest known specimen of a Dravidian language occurs in a Greek play which is preserved in a papyrus of the 2nd century a.d. The exact period to which the indigenous literature can be traced back, on the other hand, has not been fixed with certainty.
Bibliography.—Bishop R. Caldwell, A Comparative Grammar of the Dravidian or South-Indian Family of Languages (London, 1856; 2nd edition, 1875); Dr Friedrich Müller, Reise der österreichischen Fregatte Novara um die Erde in den Jahren 1857, 1858, 1859, unter den Befehlen des Commodore B. von Wüllerstorff-Urbair: Linguistischer Theil. (Wien, 1867, pp. 73 and ff.); Dr Friedrich Müller, Grundriss der Sprachwissenschaft, vol. iii. (Wien, 1884), pp. 106 and ff.; G. A. Grierson, Linguistic Survey of India, vol. iv. “Munda and Dravidian Languages” (Calcutta, 1906), pp. 277 and ff. by Sten Konow.
(S. K.)
[1] In Dravidian words a line above a vowel shows that it is long. The dotted consonants ṭ, ḍ, and ṇ are pronounced by striking the tip of the tongue against the centre of the hard palate. The dotted ḷ is distinguished from l in a similar way. Its sound, however, differs in the different districts. A Greek χ marks the sound of ch in “loch”; ṣ is the English sh; c the ch in “church”; and ṛi is an r which is used as a vowel. In the list of Dravidian languages the names are spelt fully, with all the necessary diacritical marks. In the rest of the article dots under consonants have been omitted in these words.
DRAWBACK, in commerce, the paying back of a duty previously paid upon the exportation of excisable articles or upon the re-exportation of foreign goods. The object of a drawback is to enable commodities which are subject to taxation to be exported and sold in a foreign country on the same terms as goods from countries where they are untaxed. It differs from a bounty in that the latter enables commodities to be sold abroad at less than their cost price; it may occur, however, under certain conditions that the giving of a drawback has an effect equivalent to that of a bounty, as in the case of the so-called sugar bounties in Germany (see [Sugar]). The earlier tariffs contained elaborate tables of the drawbacks allowed on the exportation or re-exportation of commodities, but so far as the United Kingdom is concerned the system of “bonded warehouses” practically abolished drawbacks, as commodities can be warehoused (placed “in bond”) until required for subsequent exportation.