So... I could feasibly just invent a language family for my timeline and posit it’s presence in South India and hand wave it away as one of the many unknown extinct languages of the world that got a chance ITTL? That’s appealing to be sure, but I have to invent the Tartessian language out of whole cloth and a number of pre-Indo-European languages, so... I’m not sure about that.
I have never heard that Dravidian is derived from languages spoken in the Pamir Mountains, though? That’s pretty interesting.
This last part I am familiar with, and I have even read that recent DNA analysis has shown that the Irula people of the Nilgiri Mountains are particularly close to the peoples of the IVC. Although, I understand that genes and language don’t necessarily go hand in hand. I will give the other links a look though, I appreciate it
My understanding was that the Dravidian languages were a fairly “tightly knit” family. Am I mistaken? I guess the comparison was between Dravidian and Indo-European, and Indo-European is extremely diverse, so... yeah. So, are you positing that it is a possibility that Dravidian languages as we know them today evolved from a series of related languages (related in the way that say, Spanish, French, and Italian are) that in turn formed a
Sprachbund? Cuz if no Proto-Dravidian has been able to be reconstructed using the comparative method, then... well, I’m not really sure what to do with the languages IMTL. The situation would then be sort of like Berber languages, which appear to have been more diverse before the Roman rule of North Africa in which a koine was developed that seems to have evened out many of the differences at the time, making reconstruction beyond that stage difficult if not entirely impossible