Proto-Dravidian Sources?

[Bassarion Korax]

The Library of Congress is unfortunately lacking any decent books on Proto-Dravidian, and I have been unable to turn anything up online besides a confusing etymological dictionary cited on the Wikipedia page. Does anybody have any literary recommendations?

 

[manitobot]

We don’t really know what Proto-Dravidian was, or where it came from so it is hard to research it.

We do know it was connected to the Indus Valley language/ script so some articles on that language may help.

There are also some Dravidian loanwords in the Rigveda, so there must be some scholarly research about the languages spoken in connection with the arrival of Indo-Aryan languages.

I do appreciate that you are willing to look into this language family. Dravidian languages and culture don’t get enough love on here.

 

[PostHumans of the Avengers Universe]

The Library of Congress is unfortunately lacking any decent books on Proto-Dravidian, and I have been unable to turn anything up online besides a confusing etymological dictionary cited on the Wikipedia page. Does anybody have any literary recommendations?

Do you want information about Proto-Dravidian language or its Geographical location, timeline and it's first speakers?

If you want information about the latter, there is still very less information about that.

A wide area has been posited for the original of Dravidian languages, right from Pamir Knot to South Indian peninsula. Some even have posited the Elam region.

We don't know who it's speakers were, honestly, yet.

 

[Bassarion Korax]

We don’t really know what Proto-Dravidian was, or where it came from so it is hard to research it.

We do know it was connected to the Indus Valley language/ script so some articles on that language and Linear B may help.

There are also some Dravidian loanwords in the Rigveda, so there must be some scholarly research about the languages spoken in connection with the arrival of Indo-Aryan languages.

I do appreciate that you are willing to look into this language family. Dravidian languages and culture don’t get enough love on here.

Well, my timeline has a POD in the 36th century BC, so the Dravidians are likely to still be a thing as all of my reading on them has demonstrated that they were likely already present and widely distributed throughout India at that time. It would be kind of cheap I think if I didn’t do something with it.

I’m not sure what you mean though about linguists not really knowing “what” it was. On Wikipedia they have a reconstructed sound system and minimal reconstructed vocabulary. It would seem that not only is there some established knowledge about what it was, but also what it sounded like, just like there is with Proto-Indo-European and Proto-Semitic.

Do you want information about Proto-Dravidian language or its Geographical location, timeline and it's first speakers?

If you want information about the latter, there is still very less information about that.

A wide area has been posited for the original of Dravidian languages, right from Pamir Knot to South Indian peninsula. Some even have posited the Elam region.

We don't know who it's speakers were, honestly, yet.

I was more interested in vocabulary, for the purpose of constructing names for people, places, and institutions.

 

[Optical_Illusion]

Bayesian phylo work tends to suggest split of family around 2600 BCE - https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/pdf/10.1098/rsos.171504

Suggestions from specialists seem limited (within linguistics the maxim is usually that "linguists don't do dates" or rates of change other than by homeland reconstruction) but - https://lists.hcs.harvard.edu/mailman/listinfo/proto-dravidian - for example suggests a split off of Telugu around 1500-1000 BCE and Kannada at 0 BC.

3000-2800BCE is around the date for earliest evidence of agriculture in South India (largely as a form of pastoralism rather than cereal agriculture exactly "Unlike the rest of India, where early agriculture was synonymous with cereal farming, southern agriculture appears to have taken an alternative route via pastoralism.") See - https://www.academia.edu/13308398/Early_Agriculture_in_South_Asia. (The timing and extent of agriculture in India generally is not well understood generally however from archaeology, it seems. Much of the timing seems quite fairly late compared to the NW e.g. "Taken as a whole, the middle Ganges region displays a particularly protracted transition from the exploitation of wildrice(after 7000 BCE to fully sedentary agropastoral villages by around 2000 BCE, alongside persistent pockets of hunter-gatherer-fisher Mesolithic cultures. Once intensive rice productionwas established,however, duringthe second millennium BCE,the population grew rapidly and social complexity ultimately emerged during the period of Iron Age urbanism that took place in the middle of the first millennium BCE").

The Bayesian phylo work supports to some extent the contention that the spread of the Dravidian languages through India is probably related to the decline of farming in the Mature Harappan civilization, followed by dispersal of some offshoots through most of South India where they encountered more indigenous people, and other offshoots later encountered south moving Indo-Aryan offshoots and underwent a cultural synthesis. But it may not have been like that, and Dravidian languages could have been from some completely different group unconnected with this civilization.

 

[Deleted member 116192]

As a person whose native tongue is one of the dravidian language I appreciate your interest in this area .
As for the vocabulary of proto dravidian language well it's hard to tell , for one we have no idea whether such a language existed or not and if it did we do not know for sure that modern dravidian languages emerged from that language or was it a collection of different languages like the romance language that we find in Europe which all shared a common ancestry and from it emerged modern dravidian languages. Once this question is answered then obtaining the vocabulary is a little easy .
Now a lot of Tamil speaking people claim that proto dravidian language is Tamil because it has words/ vocabulary that are archaic and thus it's the proto dravidian language I have following points against such a idea
1)While Tamil is (similar to Proto-Dravidian) in many aspects, there are clear innovations present, as well. The probably most well-known innovation is the loss of Proto-Dravidian *cat the beginning of words, found not only already in the earliest form of Tamil, but also in other South Dravidian languages.
2 )scholars once tried to derive all other Dravidian languages from Tamil initially just because Tamil is so archaic and so early attested, but it became increasingly clear that that did not work, just as the attempt to derive all Indo-European languages from Sanskrit ran into serious problems and ultimately proved a complete failure already in the 19th century.
3)As for the name of the language family, it is a modern coining. It is probably true that it is based on the name of the Tamils (mechanically, but ahistorically "reconstructed" from Middle Indic to Old Indic, i. e. Sanskritised), but that is only because the Tamils were apparently the most well-known Dravidian-speaking ethnic group (probably due to their political power) already in ancient times

 

[Bassarion Korax]

Do you want information about Proto-Dravidian language or its Geographical location, timeline and it's first speakers?

If you want information about the latter, there is still very less information about that.

A wide area has been posited for the original of Dravidian languages, right from Pamir Knot to South Indian peninsula. Some even have posited the Elam region.

We don't know who it's speakers were, honestly, yet.

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.

Bayesian phylo work tends to suggest split of family around 2600 BCE - https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/pdf/10.1098/rsos.171504

Suggestions from specialists seem limited (within linguistics the maxim is usually that "linguists don't do dates" or rates of change other than by homeland reconstruction) but - https://lists.hcs.harvard.edu/mailman/listinfo/proto-dravidian - for example suggests a split off of Telugu around 1500-1000 BCE and Kannada at 0 BC.

3000-2800BCE is around the date for earliest evidence of agriculture in South India (largely as a form of pastoralism rather than cereal agriculture exactly "Unlike the rest of India, where early agriculture was synonymous with cereal farming, southern agriculture appears to have taken an alternative route via pastoralism.") See - https://www.academia.edu/13308398/Early_Agriculture_in_South_Asia. (The timing and extent of agriculture in India generally is not well understood generally however from archaeology, it seems. Much of the timing seems quite fairly late compared to the NW e.g. "Taken as a whole, the middle Ganges region displays a particularly protracted transition from the exploitation of wildrice(after 7000 BCE to fully sedentary agropastoral villages by around 2000 BCE, alongside persistent pockets of hunter-gatherer-fisher Mesolithic cultures. Once intensive rice productionwas established,however, duringthe second millennium BCE,the population grew rapidly and social complexity ultimately emerged during the period of Iron Age urbanism that took place in the middle of the first millennium BCE").

The Bayesian phylo work supports to some extent the contention that the spread of the Dravidian languages through India is probably related to the decline of farming in the Mature Harappan civilization, followed by dispersal of some offshoots through most of South India where they encountered more indigenous people, and other offshoots later encountered south moving Indo-Aryan offshoots and underwent a cultural synthesis. But it may not have been like that, and Dravidian languages could have been from some completely different group unconnected with this civilization.

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

As a person whose native tongue is one of the dravidian language I appreciate your interest in this area .
As for the vocabulary of proto dravidian language well it's hard to tell , for one we have no idea whether such a language existed or not and if it did we do not know for sure that modern dravidian languages emerged from that language or was it a collection of different languages like the romance language that we find in Europe which all shared a common ancestry and from it emerged modern dravidian languages. Once this question is answered then obtaining the vocabulary is a little easy .
Now a lot of Tamil speaking people claim that proto dravidian language is Tamil because it has words/ vocabulary that are archaic and thus it's the proto dravidian language I have following points against such a idea
1)While Tamil is (similar to Proto-Dravidian) in many aspects, there are clear innovations present, as well. The probably most well-known innovation is the loss of Proto-Dravidian *cat the beginning of words, found not only already in the earliest form of Tamil, but also in other South Dravidian languages.
2 )scholars once tried to derive all other Dravidian languages from Tamil initially just because Tamil is so archaic and so early attested, but it became increasingly clear that that did not work, just as the attempt to derive all Indo-European languages from Sanskrit ran into serious problems and ultimately proved a complete failure already in the 19th century.
3)As for the name of the language family, it is a modern coining. It is probably true that it is based on the name of the Tamils (mechanically, but ahistorically "reconstructed" from Middle Indic to Old Indic, i. e. Sanskritised), but that is only because the Tamils were apparently the most well-known Dravidian-speaking ethnic group (probably due to their political power) already in ancient times

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

 

[Vuu]

We simply don't know, therefore there's no info. The knowledge on well-known language families is dubious enough, and when you get to really old precursor languages it becomes even worse and more foggy. Most of the superfamilies probably did come from a single group, but that was so long ago it's basically not even worthwhile to explore because there would be nothing to find

 

[Deleted member 116192]

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

Well you are asking yourself to construct a language in a vacuum I guess don't be so hard on yourself.
Through the evolution of each dravidian languages the influence of classical Sanskrit has been pronounced especially on kannada and telugu but on language such as kodava and tulu it's moderate and on Tamil and Malayalam it's comparatively less . From existing evidence it is suggested that different languages began to emerge some 4,500 years ago when the hypothetical proto dravidian split into proto northern branch and proto southern branch and latter on south dravidian broke up to into proto south Central dravidian, central dravidian and far south dravidian and from the south Central dravidian emerged many languages the widely spoken is Telugu , central dravidian broke up into many languages while far south dravidian language broke into proto kannada Tamil , and other languages one of which is tulu and koraga the proto kannada tamil language broke up into proto kannada and Tamil kodava and it broke into Tamil and kodava and finally ancient Tamil brokr into Malayalam and middle Tamil .
Northern branch is an interesting bunch since kurkh malto is northern branch but brahui is interesting as many claim it to be a smoking gun clamming ivc inhabitants spoke dravidian language but brahui lacks any avestan or Sanskrit or Easter iranian loan words and has words similar to central dravidian language suggesting a later migration post break up of avestan language.
The point here is thry may be related but they are not close knit , for example a tulu speaker like me can't make head or foot of kannada language unless kannada is thought to us because the vocabulary is totally different but the grammatical rules and syntax are same so if you pick up the vocabulary you can speak and understand other dravidian language and this is because of the relationship between the language which they share in common.

Your hope to find out old dravidian vocabulary is to look at ancient historical records even then it's unreliable given the evolution I just explained

 

[Deleted member 116192]

have never heard that Dravidian is derived from languages spoken in the Pamir Mountains, though? That’s pretty interesting.

I would not be surprised since dravidian language has out of India origin which is often ignored because the Indo aryan languages are often said to be out of India in origin and both languages have significant local influence

 

[Deleted member 116192]

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

The emphasis is on the word close , because the ivc inhabitants were an admixture of iranian neolithic farmers usually on the paternal side and ancient ancestoral south Indians the irula tribes that you mentioned lack the neolithic farmers dna which makes them very different but similar

 

[fasquardon]

We do know it was connected to the Indus Valley language/ script so some articles on that language and Linear B may help.

Actually we don't know that. It is supposed that the IVC spoke a Dravidian language because the Vedas imply that the people who wrote the Vedas conquered an alien people and because there are a few Dravidian speaking groups in the northwest of the subcontinent.

However, the Dravidian groups in what is now Pakistan are likely more recent arrivals and it is quite easy to imagine other interpretations for the stories of the Vedas. It may well be that the IVC spoke an Indo-European language and were invaded by a people who spoke proto-Vedic.

Certainly if we look at the settlement of the Ganges plain, it really looks like the people of the IVC slowly settled the Ganges and mutated into a new culture as the centuries went by. That is, there is a continuum between late IVC material culture through the Cemetery H culture and into the Painted Grey Ware culture. And linguistically, there's a lack of Dravidian (or any other non-IE loanwords) vocabulary in Vedic, as we'd expect from a pastoral culture coming in and taking over a more advanced urban culture. And I think there's a lack of Dravidian toponyms in North India as well. All the evidence we have is that there is that Vedic culture grew out of the culture of the IVC's culture and was closely related to the culture that Zarathustra (also called Zoroaster by the Greeks, who couldn't spell anyone's name right) was born into. Almost certainly, the story is more complicated than that, but the evidence is so thin that it's hard to say what kind of complications there were to the story.

For example, were the pastoral culture who gave rise to the Vedic kingly class foreign invaders, or as related to the urban populations as Bedouin Arabs are to town-dwelling Arabs? Or were they foreign invaders who were closely related to the IVC people? Or maybe the IVC people were neither IE speakers NOR Dravidian speakers, but rather were on some now completely extinct branch of human language.

If we ever manage to translate the language of the IVC, it's gonna be huge.

fasquardon

 

[Optical_Illusion]

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

Cheers. Re Irula, sort of. To expand, the IVC people are only known indirectly at the moment, through "outlier" genetic samples that have turned up in ancient sites in Eastern Iran and Turkmenistan, where people who are thought to be migrants (possibly traders or something like this) seem to have turned up larger sample sets. They seem to be quite variable but all genetically intermediate the populations that live in Iran and Central Asia of this time and a population thought to be long resident in South Asia that is most distantly related to Andamanese groups today, termed by the awkward acronym AASI ("Ancient Ancestral South Asians"), just in different proportions. (This could represent different groups in one place in IVC or heterogenity between groups in different places in IVC or what, no one knows.)

IVC people, judging by those people who are assumed to be migrants from the IVC, actually seem genetically more North Indian groups today but lacking a slight connection to Western and Central Steppe populations of the Late Bronze Age (who are closest today to Northern Europeans).

The Irula are actually more similar to a theoretical population called the ASI ("Ancient South Indians", confusing I know), who are like the IVC + more AASI. The theory is ASI are then supposed to come together with a population called the ANI ("Ancient North Indians") who are IVC+Western and Central Steppe people (roughly like today's North Indians seem to be), to give rise to all today's Indian groups. Of course, this is probably all a bit of a simplified model for what happened in reality. The similarity between Irula and the IVC people is then sort like Freedom says, that they both have close to no "Steppe" ancestry that came via Central Asia, but they're actually more different in level of "AASI" ancestry than the most distant groups of people living in India and Pakistan today.

This is all very tentative as they have limited population samples still and they're proxies, and actually this has not even been formally published.

 

[Bassarion Korax]

Well you are asking yourself to construct a language in a vacuum I guess don't be so hard on yourself.
Through the evolution of each dravidian languages the influence of classical Sanskrit has been pronounced especially on kannada and telugu but on language such as kodava and tulu it's moderate and on Tamil and Malayalam it's comparatively less . From existing evidence it is suggested that different languages began to emerge some 4,500 years ago when the hypothetical proto dravidian split into proto northern branch and proto southern branch and latter on south dravidian broke up to into proto south Central dravidian, central dravidian and far south dravidian and from the south Central dravidian emerged many languages the widely spoken is Telugu , central dravidian broke up into many languages while far south dravidian language broke into proto kannada Tamil , and other languages one of which is tulu and koraga the proto kannada tamil language broke up into proto kannada and Tamil kodava and it broke into Tamil and kodava and finally ancient Tamil brokr into Malayalam and middle Tamil .
Northern branch is an interesting bunch since kurkh malto is northern branch but brahui is interesting as many claim it to be a smoking gun clamming ivc inhabitants spoke dravidian language but brahui lacks any avestan or Sanskrit or Easter iranian loan words and has words similar to central dravidian language suggesting a later migration post break up of avestan language.
The point here is thry may be related but they are not close knit , for example a tulu speaker like me can't make head or foot of kannada language unless kannada is thought to us because the vocabulary is totally different but the grammatical rules and syntax are same so if you pick up the vocabulary you can speak and understand other dravidian language and this is because of the relationship between the language which they share in common.

Your hope to find out old dravidian vocabulary is to look at ancient historical records even then it's unreliable given the evolution I just explained

I was told that there is no such thing as a Dravidian language free of Indo-European influence, and I know for a fact that Brahui is full of loans from Balochi, though I was aware that it lacks any loans from earlier East Iranian languages like Avestan and Bactrian. However, you say it has no Sanskrit? That didn’t come up in my reading. That’s very interesting. There is of course also no such thing as an Indo-European language that doesn’t have some influence, at least in the form of loanwords, from a substrate language it replaced, and yet we have been able to reconstruct Proto-Indo-European fairly reliably. Are you telling me that the nature of the evolution of Dravidian languages means that Proto-Dravidian cannot be reconstructed like is the situation with Proto-Berber, or rather that not as much research has been put into it as Proto-Indo-European or Proto-Semitic? I have trouble believing the former given my reading and what you just said. It sounds like we have a fair enough bit of knowledge to use the comparative method to reconstruct a number of basic words, at least a Swadesh List if not quite a bit more. The latter would be very sad, as there are resources for Proto-Cushitic (a much more diverse language family) and also a grammar of Proto-Chukotko-Kamchatkan available at the LOC.

If this is the case, I will be forced to butterfly Dravidian languages IMTL, which I really don’t want to do. I try to be as true to existing language families as possible, and I have seen almost nothing in this board that gives Dravidian languages or peoples much thought. I have a lot of ideas for them IMTL that would be a shame to hand over to some fictional group of people that I had to create just to fill in the gaps

Actually we don't know that. It is supposed that the IVC spoke a Dravidian language because the Vedas imply that the people who wrote the Vedas conquered an alien people and because there are a few Dravidian speaking groups in the northwest of the subcontinent.

However, the Dravidian groups in what is now Pakistan are likely more recent arrivals and it is quite easy to imagine other interpretations for the stories of the Vedas. It may well be that the IVC spoke an Indo-European language and were invaded by a people who spoke proto-Vedic.

Certainly if we look at the settlement of the Ganges plain, it really looks like the people of the IVC slowly settled the Ganges and mutated into a new culture as the centuries went by. That is, there is a continuum between late IVC material culture through the Cemetery H culture and into the Painted Grey Ware culture. And linguistically, there's a lack of Dravidian (or any other non-IE loanwords) vocabulary in Vedic, as we'd expect from a pastoral culture coming in and taking over a more advanced urban culture. And I think there's a lack of Dravidian toponyms in North India as well. All the evidence we have is that there is that Vedic culture grew out of the culture of the IVC's culture and was closely related to the culture that Zarathustra (also called Zoroaster by the Greeks, who couldn't spell anyone's name right) was born into. Almost certainly, the story is more complicated than that, but the evidence is so thin that it's hard to say what kind of complications there were to the story.

For example, were the pastoral culture who gave rise to the Vedic kingly class foreign invaders, or as related to the urban populations as Bedouin Arabs are to town-dwelling Arabs? Or were they foreign invaders who were closely related to the IVC people? Or maybe the IVC people were neither IE speakers NOR Dravidian speakers, but rather were on some now completely extinct branch of human language.

If we ever manage to translate the language of the IVC, it's gonna be huge.

fasquardon

So then it would seem that it is indeed possible that Dravidian languages are native to South India. Lack of identifiable Dravidian toponyms/hydronyms in North India is typically some of a smoking gun. Even Turkey still has a number of pre-Turkic toponyms/hydronyms despite exhaustive and deliberate efforts on the part of the government to rename everything in Turkish. When people aren’t intent one erasing the connection of the previous inhabitants of a place they are migrating to, toponyms and hydronyms tend to be fossilized indicators of a substrate language. I haven’t read at all about the distribution of Dravidian toponyms, though.

Cheers. Re Irula, sort of. To expand, the IVC people are only known indirectly at the moment, through "outlier" genetic samples that have turned up in ancient sites in Eastern Iran and Turkmenistan, where people who are thought to be migrants (possibly traders or something like this) seem to have turned up larger sample sets. They seem to be quite variable but all genetically intermediate the populations that live in Iran and Central Asia of this time and a population thought to be long resident in South Asia that is most distantly related to Andamanese groups today, termed by the awkward acronym AASI ("Ancient Ancestral South Asians"), just in different proportions. (This could represent different groups in one place in IVC or heterogenity between groups in different places in IVC or what, no one knows.)

IVC people, judging by those people who are assumed to be migrants from the IVC, actually seem genetically more North Indian groups today but lacking a slight connection to Western and Central Steppe populations of the Late Bronze Age (who are closest today to Northern Europeans).

The Irula are actually more similar to a theoretical population called the ASI ("Ancient South Indians", confusing I know), who are like the IVC + more AASI. The theory is ASI are then supposed to come together with a population called the ANI ("Ancient North Indians") who are IVC+Western and Central Steppe people (roughly like today's North Indians seem to be), to give rise to all today's Indian groups. Of course, this is probably all a bit of a simplified model for what happened in reality. The similarity between Irula and the IVC people is then sort like Freedom says, that they both have close to no "Steppe" ancestry that came via Central Asia, but they're actually more different in level of "AASI" ancestry than the most distant groups of people living in India and Pakistan today.

This is all very tentative as they have limited population samples still and they're proxies, and actually this has not even been formally published.

This all sounds very daunting. So, to anyone’s knowledge there is no such thing as even a Swadesh List of Proto-Dravidian? As I said, I really want to keep Dravidians as a pan-ethnicity.

 

[Optical_Illusion]

This all sounds very daunting. So, to anyone’s knowledge there is no such thing as even a Swadesh List of Proto-Dravidian? As I said, I really want to keep Dravidians as a pan-ethnicity.

Oh don't sweat it, I just went on at length re: Irula as wanted to give you a better answer than a negative, because I can see where you got it from; the Irula really are identified as a close proxy of one of the ancient peoples hypothesized to exist that form the base of the population of India today, just a layer thought to be slightly younger than the IVC and quite different in very deep population history.

I think there must be some Swadesh List around giving proposed proto-Dravidian reconstruction, but sorry, yes, not really in a position to say which is the best source.

Re; homeland generally, I think one of things to bear in mind is that Dravidian languages today and in attested written form, have a relatively restricted spatial distribution within India. One of the advantages for Indo-European of the widespread distribution, and many daughters, and the likely lack of contact due to distance, is that in theory we can then reconstruct terms which are derived from PIE roots in a large set of languages over a large area*. (These specifically aren't the terms we find on Swadesh List, which are a set of words chosen because they specifically do not relate to any particular environment or material culture and are human cultural constants, so every language should have them and they should then be unchanging regardless of where a language family migrates to). Then guided by putting that together with the center of the spatial distribution (which has probably had more weight in IE than "linguistic paleontology" and reconstruction of homeland terms), come up with a candidate culture. So that is tougher with a family of more limited extent where shared terms could reflect diffusion within an environment that was not the original homeland, so it necessarily has to be more equivocal.

*Although there is still some question around this, even in a such widespread family as IE. E.g.

A) In the reconstructed vocab itself: Commonplace shared wheel vocab derived from pIE root is used to derive knowledge of a wheel in the culture, but this is derived from an older IE terms for "turn" and "roll" *kʷékʷlos and *Hret, so its plausible (though many would argue less likely) that separate languages divergent at a stage before the invention of the wheel independently named or translated wheels as "turners" or "rollers", particularly if that's how the term translates from contact languages with wheels. Likewise horse vocab doesn't require domestication of the horse and horses were present in some frequency in most of Eurasia, enough that most speakers of most languages could be expected to know what one is and have a word for it (just most common on the Western Steppe). And so on.

B) The weight on which languages are used for reconstruction - if reconstruction is on equal weight of all subdivisions within IE, it would place weight mainly on the basis of later branching languages which topologies all agree are all from a particular branch, rather than the more poorly attested early branches of the Anatolian languages and Tocharian. Then you may just be reconstructing a late stage of the language, not actually the earliest proto-language.

 

[fasquardon]

As I said, I really want to keep Dravidians as a pan-ethnicity.

My bet is that if there really was a Dravidian language group stretching from Elam to South India, it likely was more diverse than what we see today, and the South Indian Dravidian languages will represent only one branch of a larger family. The South Indian Dravidian may be that tree's equivalent of Tocharian, while the Elamite language might be their equivalent of Irish and the IVC may have spoken the equivalent of Armenian. That is, you have plenty of blank canvas on which to make up what you like.

And while there's strong questions that have been raised about whether the IVC was really a Dravidian group, as far as I am aware, it's still the most accepted theory.

So you have a reasonable case to basically take Tamil, keep some of the most archaic features, replace some with reasonable rules that a cousin language might have (maybe pick some features from Vedic Sanskrit that are different from Avestran as a guide, on the theory that Vedic must have been influenced by the language of the IVC - though I note, the IVC was huge and had outposts in what's now Turkmenistan, so Avestran may have been influenced by the IVC too), and basically make a conlang for your story and at least is plausible, even if you know it can't be the actual language of the IVC.

Then again, we can be pretty sure that any reconstructed protolanguage must be somewhat fictional. The reconstruction of Proto-Indo European (which due to its relative nearness to us in time, relatively good historical records for its ancient daughter languages, its wide spread and the weight of scholarship applied to it is by some ways the best reconstructed of the ancient proto-languages) is a guess, we don't know for sure that this is what the proto-language was really like. But we can be fairly sure the real PIE was something like the reconstructed language.

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[manitobot]

info

There has been a large amount of studies done that have definitely painted a more clear answer to the peopling of India. Regardless, a fair amount of historians concur that the IVC was proto-Dravidian or Dravidian, and while there is nuances to that, it is a valid proposal.

 

[fasquardon]

There has been a large amount of studies done that have definitely painted a more clear answer to the peopling of India. Regardless, a fair amount of historians concur that the IVC was proto-Dravidian or Dravidian, and while there is nuances to that, it is a valid proposal.

Did I say Dravidian wasn't valid?

Still, if anyone has actually found good supporting evidence for the IVC being peopled by Dravidian speakers, I'd love to see some links!

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[Shahrasayr]

Did I say Dravidian wasn't valid?

Still, if anyone has actually found good supporting evidence for the IVC being peopled by Dravidian speakers, I'd love to see some links!

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Asko Paropola’s reaearch using logograms and doing word comparisons with IVC is the main research championing the IVC as a Dravidian speaking polity. However as time goes on people are just starting to accept that it’s most likely that the IVC was a language isolate. Even Witzel has taken his foot off the pedal about his Munda-speaking IVC theory.

 

[fasquardon]

Asko Paropola’s reaearch using logograms and doing word comparisons with IVC is the main research championing the IVC as a Dravidian speaking polity. However as time goes on people are just starting to accept that it’s most likely that the IVC was a language isolate. Even Witzel has taken his foot off the pedal about his Munda-speaking IVC theory.

Ohhhh. Doing a grammatical analysis on the logograms? Now that is cool.

fasquardon