COMMENT ON BARBOSA DE ALMEIDA “ON THE STRUCTURE OF DRAVIDIAN RELATIONSHIP SYSTEMS”

BdA’s model does a service by clarifying the precise structure of Trautmann’s paradigm of Dravidian South Asian (DSA) kin term structure (KTS) as rewrite rules: expressions in an algebra of Dravidian KTS that can be only shortened by rewrite rules. It imposes a “Dravidian cross-cousin marriage rule” expounded at great effort by Trautmann: “I do not hesitate to reconstruct for the Proto-Dravidian kinship system not only a terminology but a rule of social organization” contra “Sheffler’s [ineffectual] counterargument that the rule and the semantic contrast are not invariable concomitants of one another …. The question is no longer whether a cross-cousin marriage rule is ancestrally Dravidian, but what precise form that ancestral rule took” (Trautmann 1981:235-236). I will refer to BdA’s model as “the Trautmann algebra” (Tjon Sie Fat and Trautmann, 1998), so as to expose its weaknesses independently of BdA’s model since I would expect that after reviewing the commentaries BdA would modify his current model into a paradigmatic form that accords historically and ethnographically with Dravidian terminological variants. There is no loss here in the value of Trautmann’s groundbreaking work, but a significant gain in improving the quality of his model of Dravidian KTS