[OT] Ancient substratum in India

From: N. Ganesan (naa.ganesan@gmail.com)
Date: Fri Jul 01 2005 - 10:53:00 CDT

  • Next message: Mete Kural: "Re: Arabic 16-bit encodings"

    >I suppose the relevance to the current discussion is
    >that there can be no easy correlation between language
    >family and geographical area. So,
    >while I would agree that very probably the indigenous
    >languages of much of India were closely related to Tamil,
    >that is by no means an argument that Sanskrit is from the same
    >language family. It is certainly the majority view of scholars
    >that Indo-European languages, the ancestors of
    >Sanskrit, were brought to India by Aryan invaders who
    >oppressed the indigenous peoples, the ancestors of the
    >Tamils and India's other Dravidian minorities (who are visibly
    >racially distinct).

    For this, I once gave a linguistic example.
    Consonant assimilation from Vedic Sanskrit
    to spoken languages of North India (Prakrits)
    follows the pattern observed in pure Tamil words:
    http://listserv.liv.ac.uk/cgi-bin/wa?A2=ind9906&L=INDOLOGY&P=R4239 

    Asko Parpola wrote a reply that this is likely
    a Dravidian substratum effect. Also, saw M. Everson's
    proposal to encode Parpola's Indus civilization
    glyphs in the Unicode.
    http://listserv.liv.ac.uk/cgi-bin/wa?A2=ind9906&L=INDOLOGY&P=R4492 

    Some info and speculations esp. on PuLLi's origins:
    http://groups.yahoo.com/group/CTamil/message/386
    http://groups.yahoo.com/group/CTamil/message/311
    http://groups.yahoo.com/group/CTamil/message/253

    N. Ganesan

    >And this oppression continues, at least as perceived
    >by Srivas and others. These issues of perceived oppression
    >and linguistic imperialism are very real and should not be
    >ignored by the Unicode community. Nevertheless, if
    >U+0BB6 is actually used in writing, even if not by some
    >purists, it does need to be encoded and should not be deprecated.



    This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Fri Jul 01 2005 - 10:55:09 CDT