Brahui etymologies and phonetic developments: new items

Abstract

1. Bray's excellent work (1909, 1934) on Brahui, the Dravidian language spoken, so improbably, in Baluchistan, could not help but be used to the full by Burrow and myself in our 35 years of work on Dravidian etymologies. My very short contact, no more than eight hours, with Brahui speakers at the Chanhu-daro excavation early in 1936 (Emeneau, 1937) had stimulated me and provided a background for intensive etymological study based on Bray's material. This resulted in my publications, especially in 1962, reprinted in part and with some slight change in 1980a (pp. 315–49). In this latter publication (p. 318) I ventured a statement: ‘More descriptive field-work would certainly provide [more material on the language]. Whether much more would emerge to add to Bray's account is uncertain. Certainly it seems that vocabulary additions would probably include no new items from the Dravidian heritage’.