Terms for Negation ?

[George Hart]

It is worth noting, I think, that old Dravidian had two words for the negative and positive: existential (il / uḷ) and attributive (al / ā).  Kampaṉ plays on these in his beautiful invocatory verse (kaṭavuḷ vāḻttu) to the Yuddhakāṇṭam:

If you say it (his way of being) is (attr.) one, it is one; if you say it is many, it is many;
if you say it's not (attr.) (something), it's not (that thing); if you say it is (attr.) (something), it is (that thing);
if you say it's not (ex.; i.e. does not exist), it's not; if you say it is (does exist), it does.
A fine thing, our Lord's way of being.  How, possibly, can we be saved?

The word translated "way of being", kuṭivāḻkkai, can mean "domestic life, mode or manner of life."

Like many Dravidian syntactical features, these are reflected in the Sanskrit I heard, where evam is generally used to mean "yes" in an existential sense and tathā in an attributive one.  It would be interesting to see if this is true in classical texts.  This distinction has mostly disappeared in modern Tamil but is still found in Malayalam, in which, I was told, there are 4 different ways each of saying "yes" and "no."