Dravidian substratum in Sanskrit

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The neutrality of this article is disputed. Please see the discussion on the talk page.

The presence of retroflex consonants in Vedic Sanskrit as well as vocabulary items with no Indo-European etymology is generally taken by linguists to indicate the influence of a non-Indo-European speaking substratum population, likely Dravidian (Parpola 2005).^[1]

• These sounds are found throughout Dravidian and Munda and are reconstructed for proto-Dravidian and proto-Munda and are thus clearly an areal feature of the Indian subcontinent.
• They are neither reconstructible for proto-Indo-European nor for proto-Indo-Iranian.
• They are also extremely rare among other Indo-European languages (they phonetically emerged in Swedish and Norwegian only in recent centuries).
• Presence of words with Dravidian and Munda etymologies in Sanskrit

But H. Hock (1975, 1984) rejected the Dravidian substratum list of grammatical and syntactical features created by M.B. Emeneau (1956, 1969,1974), F.B.J. Kuiper (1967) and Massica (1976).P. Thieme (1994) examined and rejected Kuiper’s (1991) list of 380 words from the Rigveda, constituting four percent of the Rigvedic vocabulary in toto, gave Indoaryan or Sanskrit etymologies for most of these words, and characterized Kuiper’s exercise as an example of a misplaced “zeal for hunting up Dravidian loans in Sanskrit”. Rahul Peter Das, likewise rejects (1994) Kuiper’s list, and emphasises that there is “not a single case in which a communis opinio has been found confirming the foreign origin of a Rgvedic (and probably Vedic in general) word”.

Critics argue that the "substratum" influences from Dravidian and Munda could equally well be adstratum influences through mutual contact without conquest, or superstratum given the advanced nature of the precedent Mature Harappan culture.^{[citation needed]}

While Dravidian languages are primarily confined to the South of India, there is a striking exception: the Brahui (which is spoken in parts of Baluchistan), the linguistic equivalent of a relict population, perhaps indicating that Dravidian languages were formerly much more widespread and were supplanted by the incoming Indo-Aryan languages (Mallory 1989)^{[page # needed]}.^[2] However other evidence suggests that Brahui and other north Indian Dravidian languages may have resulted from migrations less than a thousand years ago, a position argued by Joseph Elfenbein and Hans Hock, and implicitly accepted by Witzel^[3]

Another concern raised is that there is large time gap between the comparative materials, which can be seen as a serious methodological drawback.^[4] Some Indoeuropeanists (Such as Hock 1975, 1984, 1996, Hamp 1996, Tikkanen 1987 and Jamison 1989) maintain that the traits claimed as probably stemming from early Dravidian substrate influence can also be explained by other internal factors or adstratum influences, and that internal explanations for these traits should be preferred leaving the hypothesis of Substrata influence inconclusive.^[5] Also the wide agreement between scholars that comparatively few loanwords of non Indo-European origin is found in early Indic languages suggest to these scholars (including Hock, Witzel^[6], Das (1994) and Thieme (1994) ) that there has been no significant contact between early Indic and Dravidian. Witzel argues that there are signs of para-Munda influence in the earliest level of the Rigveda, and of Dravidian in later levels.^[7] Witzel also speculates that Dravidian immigrated into the Panjab only in middle Rgvedic times. ^[8]

However other linguists writing specifically about language contact phenomena (Thomason & Kaufman 1988 pp141-144) maintain that while separate internal explanations are indeed possible for all of the innovative traits in Indic early contact influence from Dravidian is the only one explanation that can explain all of the traits at once - it becomes a question of explanatory economy. Thomason & Kaufman likewise conclude that the situation of the Dravidian influence of Indic, namely a wide range of phonological and grammatical contact phenomena but no exchange loanwords is symptomatic for contact situations where large populations shift from one language to the other in this case from Dravidian to Proto-Indo-Aryan.

[edit] References

1. ^ Parpola writes: "...numerous loanwords and even structural borrowings from Dravidian have been identified in Sanskrit texts composed in northwestern India at the end of the second and first half of the first millennium BCE, before any intensive contact between North and South India. External evidence thus suggests that the Harappans most probably spoke a Dravidian language."
2. ^ "The most obvious explanation of this situation is that the Dravidian languages once occupied nearly all of the Indian subcontinent and it is the intrusion of Indo-Aryans that engulfed them in north India leaving but a few isolated enclaves." (Mallory 1989)^{[page # needed]}
3. ^ Hans Henrich Hock, The Problem of Time in South Asian Convergence (pdf: [www.ciil.org/Main/Announcement/MBE_Programme/images/paper%20-%20hans.pdf]; . H. Elfenbein, "A periplous of the 'Brahui problem'", Studia Iranica 16 (1987), 215-233, quoted after `The Languages of Harappa' by Michael Witzel Feb. 2000, p. 1 [1]
4. ^ Bryant 2001, p. 82 - the syntax of the Rigveda is being compared with a reconstructed proto-Dravidian. The first completely intelligible, datable, and sufficiently long and complete epigraphs that might be of some use in linguistic comparison are the Tamil inscriptions of the Pallava dynasty of about 550 c.e. (Zvelebil 1990), two entire millennia after the commonly accepted date for the Rgveda. Similarly there is much less material available for comparative Munda and the interval in their case is at least three millennia.
5. ^ Bryant 2001, p. 78-84
6. ^ | Substrate Languages in Old Indo-Aryan (Rgvedic, Middle and Late Vedic) by Michael Witzel EJVS VOL. 5 (1999), ISSUE 1 (September) page 6
7. ^ Substrate Languages in Old Indo-Aryan (Rgvedic, Middle and Late Vedic) by Michael Witzel EJVS VOL. 5 (1999), ISSUE 1 (September) page 5
8. ^ | Substrate Languages in Old Indo-Aryan (Rgvedic, Middle and Late Vedic) by Michael Witzel EJVS VOL. 5 (1999), ISSUE 1 (September) page 32