Dravidian is a family of Indian languages of great antiquity, endurance, and importance, but it has been hardly explored and exposed in its genetic relationship with other languages of the world, especially Indo-European. It is neither due to obscurity, for millions of Indians speak Dravidian, nor due to lack of evidence, for there is proof in abundance as we shall witness in this work, but due to factors such as ignoring it that the scholars have failed to bring it to light as the common source of Indo-European.
As a consequence of this situation, a number of theories which are nothing but conjectures have been widely circulating for a long time; the two main ones being that Dravidian is an isolated language family with no relationship to any other language or language family in the world. Even though recently Dravidian is being increasingly compared with families of languages that are also proposed as related to Indo-European, the old assumption that Dravidian is an unrelated and isolated language family still persists. Secondly, the concerned scholars are under the impression that the identity of the common source of Indo-European is still a "mystery". However, the fact is that Dravidian could have been suspected as the common source of Indo-European as long ago as 1786, and with less effort, discovered as such as soon as the Indo-European root-words were recognized or reconstructed several scores of years ago.
It was in 1786, that Sir William Jones, an English judge of Supreme Court in Calcutta who is more famous as the founder of Comparative Philology, pronounced a statement in his address to the Royal Asiatic Society of Bengal, which subsequently proved to be a milestone in the history of the Indo-European languages. Sir Jones stated: "The Sanskrit language, whatever be its antiquity, is of a wonderful structure; more perfect than Greek, more copious than Latin, and more exquisitely refined than either; yet bearing to both of them a stronger affinity both in the roots of verbs and in the forms of grammar, than could possibly have been produced by accident; so strong indeed that no philologer could examine them all three, without believing them to have sprung from some common source, which perhaps, no longer exists. There is a similar reason though not quite so forcible, for supposing that both the Gothick and the Celtick, though blended with a different idiom, had the same origin with the Sanskrit; and the old Persian might be added to the family."
It should be pointed out that many other scholars of his century had conceived similar ideas concerning Indo-European languages, but it was Sir Jones who distinctly departed from their main thinking that Greek and Latin were derived from Sanskrit. He emphatically stated that all three: Sanskrit, Greek, and Latin were derived from a common source. Thus, Sir Jones was the first one to fully and cogently articulate the testimony for the common source, the ancient parent language of Sanskrit, Greek, Latin, and other languages which were mentioned by him in his above noted statement, and to the short list of which more than a hundred Indo-European languages spoken by more than half the total population of the world have been subsequently added by other scholars. It should also be pointed out that this realization of the common source of Indo-European inaugurated a period during which a number of eminent European scholars advocated an Asiatic origin of the Indo-European languages, even though they did not look for its seat of concentration as far down south as southern India where not less than twenty-seven Dravidian languages are spoken in their purest available form today.
