What are the distinguishing features of Dravidian kinship?
Our bodies contain, in the genes, a record of the deep past, and the words we speak contain evidence of the historic relations among languages. Kinship has something of that character, too. It is striking how much similarity remains in languages as distantly related as English and Sanskrit in the vocabulary of kinship: mother (matr), father (pitr), brother (bhratr), sister (shvasr), daughter (duhitr), son (sunu). The vocabulary of kinship is very conservative. But even more conservative is the semantic structure of the kinship vocabulary. In Tamil, for example, the father’s brother (periyappa, chithappa) is a kind of father (appa), whereas in English he is an uncle. Similarly, a mother’s sister is a kind of mother rather than an aunt. This feature (called crossness) carries through the entire set of kinship categories. It has a systematic logic in Tamil and other Dravidian languages that shows the historical relatedness of Dravidian kinship systems traceable for at least 2,000 years, b
