ABSTRACT
Old Telugu belongs to the South-Central branch of the Dravidian languages. All the languages of this subgroup underwent the phonological change of metathesis, or apical displacement, whereby certain resonants and sonants which in Proto-Dravidian occurred only in the offset of a syllable appear in the onset. The inflectional morphology is well enough developed in the language to permit flexible word order. Most native lexical bases in Old Telugu are either noun or verb bases. Other parts of speech, such as adjectives, adverbs and conjunctions, are not well defined formally. As elsewhere in Dravidian, nouns and verbs are mutually distinguished by their inflectional morphology and their syntax. Nouns are forms that take case suffixes. Case markers appear at the outer layers of noun morphology, and are suffixed to plural markers. Third person pronouns include demonstratives, interrogatives, indefinites and reflexives.
