A Comparative Grammar of the Dravidian or South-Indian Family of Languages c3.s8.2

c3.s8.2

The oldest Dravidian word found in any written record in the world appears to be the word for ‘peacock’ in the Hebrew text of the Books of Kings and Chronicles, in the list of the articles of merchandise brought from Tarshish or Ophir in Solomon’s ships, about 1000 B.C. This word is *tuki* in Kings, *tûki* in Chronicles. The ordinary name at present for the peacock on the Malabar coast and in Tamil is *mayil* (Sans. *mayûra*); it is also sometimes called *śiki* (Sans. *śikhi*), a name given to it on account of its crest; but the ancient, poetical, purely Tamil-Malayâḷam name of the peacock is *tôkei*, the bird with the (splendid) tail. *Śikhi* = *avis cristata*; *tôkei* = *avis caudata*. The verbal root of the word *tôkei* is *tok’* or *tôk’*, *tuk* or *tûk’*, to hang; hence ‘a scarf,’ ‘a skirt border,’ is called *tôkkei*. The vowel of the root librates between *u* and *o*: half the derivatives have the one vowel, half the other. Hence there is no reason to suppose the Phœnicians in error when they represented *tuk* as the radical part of the word. That the vowel is short in Kings and long in Chronicles is also quite in accordance with the fact that in Tamil-Malayâḷam the vowel is sometimes short, sometimes long.