On Fri, 2013-09-06 at 09:29 +0530, Kingsley Jegan Joseph wrote: > You know, sometimes I think that Mr. Mahadevan may be as > over-enthusiastic in finding dravidian connections for Indus script
Problem is that there are very profound linkages between "Dravidian" and non Dravidian Indian languages indicating links that no one has explained properly. The fact that non Dravidian Indian languages (eg Hindi, Bengali) are nowadays classified as "Indo European" ( formerly Indo-Aryan) is a historic hangover from a European search for roots older than Semitic history (as found in Assyria) which caused much jealousy and heartburn among 19th century European scholars. It was their theories and machinations that eventually led to Hitler's pogroms. When Sanskrit was "found" in India, it was necessary to include the daughter languages of Sanskrit (such as Hindi and Bengali) along with European languages to claim the antiquity of the "Aryan"(==Northern European) line, but the linkages between "Dravidian" languages and Sanskrit, Hindi and Bengali were ignored and sidelined by a cooked up racist story that initially postulated European kinship with the fair complexioned north Indian Brahmin while dismissing the pigmented south Indian as "black heathendom". I have a 1910 book that clearly refers to south Indians/Dravidians as "black heathendom" whose gross corruptions sullied the purity of the Aryans. All this changed after world war 2 when European racism was beaten down to its current dormant state. This racist balderdash was cheerfully swallowed by the fair skinned north Indian upper caste Indians, and later the Church got into the fray to "rescue" the poor (formerly derided and dismissed as dull by the same Europeans) "Dravidians" from the clutches of the horrible Aryan Brahmins who had relegated the darkies to their sorry state. An entire political class and "Dravidian" political parties have been built up on cooked up history. There is no such thing as Dravidian, any more than there is "Aryan", although the southern languages tend to be called "Dravidian" languages. There are links with these southern languages all along the coast up to Gujarat, Sindh and further North - and perhaps as far away as the homeland of the Finno-Ugric languages. So a connection with Sanskrit would not be surprising, given that retroflex phonemes are common to Dravidian and other Sanskrit derived Indian languages but are absent in all other Indo European languages outside India. It is not clear that Mr. Mahadevan is wrong. That may be what upsets people who do not see themselves as "right leaners" The fact that issues of languages are linked with a political colour is indicative of the fact that linguistics the speciality moved out of science long ago and became political. Interestingly even your reference to "right leaners" in a discussion of linguistics is indicative of exactly which route these discussions take. shiv
