1 Paper read at the XIVth World Sanskrit Conference, Ky ōtō 2009 The influence of Dravidian on Indo-Aryan phonetics Ferenc Ruzsa Eötvös Loránd University, Budapest, Hungary 1 It is now a widely accepted opinion that Dravidian languages had an important effect on the development of Sanskrit. Most frequently mentioned aspects of this influence are loan-words, the appearance of retroflexion, the extensive use of gerunds and the iti construction. 2 Perhaps the almost complete loss of old syntax (notably of subordinative sentences) and the appearance of a completely new syntactical structure, generally but misleadingly called ‘compounds’ 3 might be considered even more important. Later in the Prakrits the loss of the ātmanepada conjugation and the dual, the disappearance of past finite verbal forms and the reduction of the modes to optative and imperative only 4 can all be explained in this way. In this paper only one aspect, phonetics will be investigated, and in this wider context: from the earliest Vedic up to late Middle Indic. It will appear that all the important developments in Indo-Aryan phonetics during these some twenty centuries could be interpreted as due to a single constant and strong influence – that of a language with a phonetic structure similar to Tamil. 1. Retroflexion The retroflex–dental opposition is very strong in Dravidian languages; and in Indo- Iranian it was absent, as in all Indo-European languages. 5 Retroflex pronunciation of some dentals (pui) and also retroflex phonemes (gaṇa) appeared already in the Ṛgveda 6 ; this became more and more widespread later, the number of retroflex phonemes increasing at least to the end of the Prakrit age. The most important source of this is the loss of the r or  starting the retroflexion (dua → duha, varṇa → vaṇṇa). Also r frequently causes retroflexion in plosives (prati → *prai → pai) and in later prakrits we find many unexplained retroflexes (e.g. nūṇaṁ in Jaina Mahārāṣṭrī, Jacobi 1886 [1967]; and even ṇūṇaṁ in Mahārāṣṭrī, Bubenik 1996: 60). 1 My researches were supported by the Hungarian National Research Fund, OTKA, project no. K 75550. 2 Burrow 1955: 373–88., Kuiper 1974: 146, Hock 1996: 18; 24–7, Bryant 1999: 61–5, Kobayashi 2004: 17. 3 Killingley–Killingley 1995: 42–7. The Dravidian origin of the long compounds in Indo-Aryan languages has been first seriously suggested only quite recently in an excellent paper by Scharfe (2006). 4 Of course in Pali we still have a past tense, and also the conditional and the injunctive (in prohibitive use only). The loss of the injunctive in later Prakrits seems to be unmentioned in the grammars available to me (Pischel 1981, Woolner 1928 [1996], Bubenik 1996, Hinüber 2001), so I checked it in the Prakrit texts of the ĝakuntalā (Williams 1876 [1961]) and in the Satta-saī (Basak 1971) – it does not occur. 5 At least it is not mentioned for any other Indo-European language in Ramat–Ramat 1998. 6 From now on abbreviated as RV, always referring to the received text; quoted from Aufrecht 1861–63.