Fwd: LANGUAGES IN INDUS VALLEY & GANDHARA: Dravidian substratum

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gandhara , " yashwant0k " <yashwant0k wrote:

 

 

From an article by Dr. Tariq Rahman

 

 

The Language of the Indus Valley

 

Unfortunately the few symbols on the ceramics of the Kot Dijian

culture have not been deciphered. F.A.Durrani, following B.B. Lal

and B.K.Thapar, suggests that these symbols may be the beginning of

writing in the Indus Valley.14 There are, however, nearly 4,000

specimens of a script from the Indus Valley Civilization carved on

stone, fragments of pottery and other objects.15 They have not been

deciphered satisfactorily but a history of the attempts at such

decipherment is available in Asko Parpola's most recent book on the

subject.16 The script, or at least the pictographs, appear to have

been uniform but that is not proof that the language too was one. In

fact, as in all parts of the world, the language must have been

divided in dialects or area-bound varieties. It is possible,

however, that these were varieties of a language belonging to one

language family. The question then is what that language family was?

 

Beginning from Sir John Marshall, who was the first to suggest that

the language of the Indus Civilization was Dravidian 17, most

scholars have taken the 'Dravidian hypothesis' seriously. Piero

Meriggi, a scholar who contributed towards the decipherment of the

Hittite hieroglyphs, opined that Brahvi, the Dravidian language

spoken even now in part of Balochistan, must be the original

Harappan language 18. However, Brahvi has changed so much and become

so Balochified, as Elfenbein points out 19, that it cannot give

clear evidence of any sort in this case. Another scholar, the

Spanish Jesuit Henry Heras, 'turned more than 1,800 Indus texts

into " Proto-Dravidian " sentences' 20 but his decipherment and

linguistic theories were not accepted. Later Soviet scholars headed

by Yurij V. Knorozov, carried on a very rigorous computer analysis

of sign distribution in the Indus texts coming to the conclusion

that it belonged to the Dravidian language family 21. However, Kamil

Zvelebil, also a Russian scholar came to the conclusion that 'the

Dravidian affinity of the Proto-Indian language remains only a very

attractive and quite plausible hypothesis.22 Indeed, the

plausibility of the hypothesis is such that many people, such as

Iravatham Mahadevan, a scholar of old Tamil epigraphy, have used it

to offer readings of the Indus script 23. F.C.Southworth and D.Mc

Alpin used the Dravidian roots to reconstruct the language of the

Indus Valley.24 Walter A. Fairservis, another specialist in this

area, stated with considerable certainty that 'the Harappan language

was basically an early Dravidian language'.25 Even Parpola, after

much careful and detailed sifting of the evidence, opines 'that the

Harappan language is most likely to have belonged to the Dravidian

family'.26

 

The Dravidian Influence on Pakistani Languages

 

If the Harrapan language family was Dravidian, then the first

languages of the area of present-day Pakistan was not Indo-Aryan but

Dravidian. Such a claim has been made in an extreme and

unsubstantiated form by Ainul Haq Faridkoti, a Pakistani

philologist, in his several publications.27 Other scholars have used

the theory of linguistic 'transfer' or 'interference' to explain the

presence of Dravidian elements in the languages of present-day

Pakistan which are generally said to be the daughters of Sanskrit,

an Indo-Aryan language. 'Transfer' or 'interference' refers to the

influence of the rules of one's first language on another language

one learns later. Thus, if Pakistanis learn English, they speak it

more or less according to the rules of their first language. As they

get more and more exposed to the rules of English, they will speak

like native speakers. However, some characteristics of the mother

tongue of the speaker will remain which is what we call a Punjabi,

Pashto, Sindhi or Urdu accent. 28

 

Sometimes an old language dies out and all its speakers learn a new

language. But the way they use this language is influenced by the

rules of their old language. The new language, then, has

a 'substratum' of the old language. If we apply this theory to old

Indo-Aryan we can hypothesize that the Harappan language, which was

probably Dravidian, influenced old Aryan. Thus Pakistani languages

have a Dravidian substratum. The evidence for the presence of this

substratum, according to Bertil Tikkanen, is the presence of

retroflex consonants which do not exist in Iranian or European

members of the Indo-European family of languages.29 Another clue may

be the existence of consonantal clusters in the beginning and end of

words in Iranian, European , Dardic languages and even Sanskrit.

Thus Sanskrit has /p r e m/ which means love. But Hindi-Urdu

speakers call it /p i r e m/. They insert the vowel /i/ between the

two word-initial consonants /p/ and /r/ because their own rules of

pronunciation (called phonological rules) do not allow word-initial

consonantal clusters. Similarly, speakers of Urdu, Punjabi and

Sindhi separate consonants in word such as 'school', 'stool'

and 'small' etc.30 It may be that this splitting of consonantal

clusters comes into some of the languages of South Asia from

languages older than Sanskrit. This, however, is a suggestion by the

present author which needs much research by linguists for

substantiation.

 

 

 

17. J. Marshall, 'First Light on a Long-forgotten Civilization'. The

Illustrated London News (20 Sept 1924). Reprinted L. Possehl (ed),

Ancient Cities of the Indus (New Delhi, 1979), pp. 105-107.

 

18. Piero Meriggi, 'Zur Indus-Scrift' [German: On the Indus Script]

Zeitschrift der deutschen Morgenlandischen Gesselschaft 87; No. 12

(1934), pp. 198-241.

 

19. J.H. Elfenbein, 'Baloci'. In Rudiger Schmitt (ed), Compendium

Linguarum Iranicarium (Wiesbaden, 1989), pp. 350-362 (p. 360).

 

20. Henry Heras, Studies in Proto-Indo-Mediterranean Culture, 1

(Bombay: Studies in Indian History of the Indian Historical Research

Institute, St. Xavier's College, 1953), p. 59.

 

21. Yu. V. Knorozov; M.F. Al' Bedil and B. Ya. Volchok, Proto-

Indica: 1979. Report on the Investigation of the Proto-Indian Texts

[English version] (Moscow, 1981).

 

22. Kamil Zvelebil quoted from Parpola, op. cit. p. 60.

 

23. Iravatham Mahadevan, 'Dravidian Models of Decipherment of the

Indus Script: A Case Study', Tamil Civilization 4: 3-4; pp. 133-134.

 

24. David W. Mc Alpin, Proto-Elamo-Dravidian: the Evidence and its

Implications (Philadelphia: Transactions of the American

Philosophical Society, 1981); F.C. Southworth, 'The Reconstruction

of Prehistoric South Asia Language Contact'. In E.H. Benedict (ed),

The Uses of Linguistics (New York: The New York Academy of Sciences,

Annals 583, 1990).

 

25. Walter A. Fairservis, The Harappan Civilization and Its Writing:

A Model for the Decipherment of the Indus Script (New Delhi, 1992).

 

26. Parpola, op. cit., p. 174.

 

27. Ainul Haq Faridkoti, Urdu Zaban ki Qadeem Tareekh [urdu; The

History of Ancient Urdu] (Lahore, 1972); Also see Faridkoti, Pre-

Aryan Origins of the Pakistani Languages: A Monograph (Lahore:

Orient Research Centre, 1992).

 

28. Tariq Rahman, Pakistani English (Islamabad: National Institute

of Pakistan Studies, 1991).

 

29. Bertil Tikkanen, 'On Burushaski and Other Ancient Substrata in

North Western South Asia', Studia Orientalia [Helsinki] 64, pp. 303-

325.

 

30. For a linguistic explanation see Tariq Rahman, 'Pakistani

English: Some Phonological and Phonetic Features', World Englishes

Vol. 10: No. 1 (1991), pp. 83-95.

 

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