Dravidian Cryptography

[DKumar6248 at aol.com]

Dear members of the Indology List,

I am afraid that this is too long to send by email. I am sending an attached
file. Thanks for your patience. 

Dear members of the Indology List,

This being my last communication, at least for a while, first of all I want to take this opportunity to thank you all for your patience.

Now, in view of the facts that I have noted that the names of such ancient figures as Vyasa, NArada, and others are the inverted and substituted forms of the related Dravidian words, and that these names have been used in the Indo-Aryan languages, one might wonder how is that, this phenomenon of inversion and substitution being a Dravidian phenomenon, the names of attestedly Dravidian deities are not shown to be participants in this phenomenon. And, therefore, we may take as an illustration of it, the name of Muruku or Muruga, who is one of the most ancient gods of the Dravidinas, and some of his other names.

It should be noted that when we consider any deity in the Indian theater, we need to be familiar with all the legends, stories, manifestations, and other aspects such as the cultural and other relationships that such a deity is known to be associated with., for any consideration without involving these matters would be, for sure, without any life and essence in it. It is in this respect that the fact that, in his efforts to decipher the Indus Script, the renowned scholar Asko Parpola, while considering the god Muruku, notes pertinent points going as far back as the god Rudra, (whose name occurs in the Vedas) in addition to all other relationship (such as astral) and aspects of this god,  is not only appropraite, but absolutely necessary. In my earlier work, (wherefrom I am borrowing the pertinent materal here), I have noted that the cardinal doctrine of the Sumerian religious experience and expression, that the name of the deity somehow partakes of the reality of what it denotes (The famous Sumerologist Thorkild Jacobsen states this accurately, but since, due to circumstances, I am without almost all of my reference works on hand, I can only refer the reader to his work: Toward  the Imaga of Tammuz; someplace where he discusses the aspects of the Sumerian pantheon) is also a monument in the Indian pantheon. And this aspect also must be taken into consideration while we are dealing with the names of the Indian deities. We can not, here, go into all the details concerning Muruku or Muruga, who is also known as Skanda, but we can not do without noting the most famous story concerning his birth, and the traditional visualization of this god as having six faces.

To be very brief according to this famous story (and there is more than one and different versions of the same; but we will consider the main frame work as narrated by the famous ancient Indian poet, KAlidasa in his KumAra-Sambhava): There was this Taraka who through his austerities obtained a boon from Brahma that he could be salin only by a son of Shiva. This was tantamuont to immortality, because, he knew that Shiva was in deep meditation, and eons may go by before his awakening. Now he set to terrorrize the gods systematically that the gods could not take it anymore. They contrieved a plan to wake up Shiva so that he may have a son from Parvati who was also waiting for Shiva to wake up. The gods volunteered KAma, the god of love, convincing him that he was also needed for creating the appropriate mood for Shiva. KAma subscribed the help of Vasanta, the god of Spring, who obliged by bringing into reality the spring season, complete with lush greenery, flowers, singing birds, etc., Now. taking his most powerful arrow, KAma aimed good at Shiva and let it go. Shiva was surely disturbed, and no sooner than he woke up, he knew he had been disturbed. Utmost rage erupted in him, his third eye opened and beheld the hapless KAma who instantly went up in smoke. This was more than an adequate warning to the gods that the seed of Shiva was going to be needlessly too powerfull. Somehow they deposited the emitted seed of Shiva into the sacrificial fire, but the seed was, indeed, so powerful that a leaping took place resulting in the birth of  Skanda. Skanda was a beautiful boy god, who had six faces to be nursed by the wives of the six sages who belonged to the Pleidas, and eventually became the great General of the armies of the gods, the youthful hero, chiefly the god of war and love, and slew Taraka.
The factor of leaping is a very important point in the examination of his name Skanda in light of the phenomenon of inversion and substitution; (I remember seeing someplace that Skanda denotes: 'leaper'; however, I have no reference to quote). It is an inverted and substituted form of the Dravidian Kannada word: dinku, which precisely denotes: a leap (DED. #2971); dinkisu, means: to cause to leap. In view of the fact that a number of words occuring in Sanskrit have been shown (in the work on the Internet) to be inverted and substituted forms of  the Dravidian words, it is not hard to see that we are witnessing the same situation here also.
The other Kannada word kanda, which is an inverted and substituted form of dinku, denotes: young child (DED. #1411), and Skanda or Muruga is knwon as an young boy, young man, a boy god; and he is associated with infants (Asko Parpola; Deciphering the Indud Script;1994;p.225; henceforth I shall refer to this work as: A.Parpola).

Since there is no room here, and as I am not sure that the the tables (like the ones in the above noted work; I had many problems keeping these tables in place when this work was published on the Internet; to my chagrin, there still are some imperfections there and I may not be able to fix them, but I thought the scholars would understand, and I went ahead and published it) would retain their design in the email, these just mentioned and other words may be put in the formation of tables by the reader, for visual onvenience.

There are other correspondences involving different other aspects of this god and their related Dravidian words in light of the phenomenon of inversion and substitution, but let us just take the other name of this god: Kumara. In its inverted and substituted form, this name: Kumara, constitutes two Dravidian words: Aru  muka which precisely denote: six faces; (Aru = six; muka - used most popularly by the Kannada people - or moga = face - see DED. #2485 and 4889 respectively). And Muruku is also known as Shan-mukha, 'sixfaced.' The same words Aru muka, with slight variation, become: ara maga, which in Kannada denote: king's son (Kt.p.37), and kumara has been defined as: heir apparent (Kt.p.143).

Another name: Muruga, when subjected to the phenomenon of inversion and substitution, (keeping the correspondence that many times g = k, in mind), yields: korram, which denotes: victory, success, (DED. #2169), as in a war (and Muruga is the boy warrior of the Indian pantheon, the General of the Army); and a related word in the same group (DED. #2169) is korravai, which is the name of the goddess of war and victory, according to George L. Hart III. In view of the fact that the name of the young god is also spelled as Muruku, it must be noted that the inverted and substituted form of Muruku is the Dravidian Tamil: kuram, which denotes: Kuruva tribe (DED. #1844), and that these tribal people lived (most of them still do) in the hills, hilly regions which are areas of Muruku and korravai or Korravai's abode (in Malayalam kuru, denotes: hill - 1864 - in Sumerian kur, denotes: mountain, in Sanskrit, it is giri) 

It is not astonishing (though the revelation must be) that the meanings of the entire group of the words listed under DED. #1844, denote many factors with which Muruga and Korrvai are associated. Some of them are: palmistry, fortune tellers (and the 
Kuruva women are famous as fortune tellers and they live in the same hilly places), thievish wandering hill tribe that sell wooden comb etc., (and Muruku is the god of the thieves; ibid; p.234), shepherd, a caste of shepherds (and one of Muruga's six heads is that of the goat; A.Paroola p.237), serpent charmers (and Murukan, as Subrahmanya - another name for him -is associated with the worship of the serpent - A.Parpola;p.226),and so on and so forth.

Many scholars have expressed that it is a puzzle that Murukan is associated with the snake A.Parpola;p.226), because it is very rare to see a snake on or near the person of  Subrahmannya.  But it is not hard to see that when we subject the name Murukan to the phenomenon of inversion and substitution, (keeping in mind the correspondence k=g) it yields: nAgaram, which is the cobra. There are many other illustrations like this, but this is enough for us here.

So, when we request the national god of the Tamilians, the General of the armies of the gods, he willingly ensues and clearly testifies through his names the existence and operation of the Dravidian linguistic phenomenon of inversion and substitution. Like the names of the Sumerian deities ( he and his mother have close correspondence with some of the Sumerian deities), his names, as we saw, above, somehow partake of the reality of what they denote. They are not idle names. 

Note to Professors N. Ganesan, and D.V.N.Sarma:

I have thankfully noted your kind input regarding the correspondence between p and h. I would like to bring to your notice that when we are considering correspondences such as p becoming h, we must remember at least two important points. First of all, many of these correspondences (like the phenomenon of the final u in Kannada, which I have noted in the above work; I could not cite all such there) go as far back as the ancient Sumerian, and even then, there were already different dialects. I remember Bishop Sayce (Archibald Henry Sayce) noting in his The Archaeology of the Cuneiform Inscriptions, such dialects as the potter's language, and so on. The main two Sumerian dialects, however, were, the Eme-ku and the Eme-sal, roughly interpreted as: "the noble or male speech" and "the woman's language" (J.D.Prince). And even to this day the main two dialects of Kannada the: Dharwad Kannada and the Mysur Kannada, are referred to as the male Kannada, and the female Kannada, which, as Professor Prince noted for these Sumerian dialects also, reflect the "roughness" and the "softness" of the idioms phonetically. Since the antiquity of the Dravidian dialects go to most ancient times, we can not pass judgement on such matters as certain correspondences based on a partial picture of them.

Secondly, as you know, there is the significant difference between the speech form and the written form of Kannada. Even to this day the words written with an initial p almost always (I should really say always here, but I am trying to be accurate) are pronounced in the daily speech with an initial h. No normal Kannadigas say pAlu, pallu, palli, for milk, tooth, and lizard; they say hAlu, hallu, and halli. It is so unusual to say pAlu, pallu, and Palli, in the daily speech that almost all Kannada people will ask "what is it?" or "what are they? To tell you the truth, these words beginning with an initial p are not used in the current regular writing either. Text books, daily newspapers use hAlu, hallu, and halli. The p words have been used in the old Kannada writings, especiall, poetry; but even in modern Kannada poetry, the words beginning with p are hardly ever used, unless the poet is trying to imply ancientness. This situation in the daily speeches, has not been recorded, because speech Kannada is not employed in writing Kannada. So, in situations like this, we can not strictly go by what is gathered from witnessing the written Kannada, be it an inscription or an ocassional modern poetry. Nobody knows how long this situation has been there in Kannada. It may have been there for ever; and it may have contributed for the occurence of numerous p words as h words even in ancient times, for instance, when the name Aasanga was coined. May be the one who coined it was accostomed to employ h words, rather than p words. Who knows? We can not always apply what we know now about these correspondences to ancient times. But, I understand, that in Tamil, most of the p words are used even in writing, and therefore, I further understand you pointing out this to me with a list of p and h words in Kannada. I am aware of that, as well as the facts I mentioned above. Tamil and Kannada have diverged in many respects, and this p and h word situation is one of those, especially when you take the daily speeches of the different dialects of Kannada. Notice that there are at least 275 words beginning with h which are listed in the list of the Kannada words at the end of DED, and there is not one word listed with intial h in Tamil or Malayalam. On the other hand, h was there in Sumerian. This factor needs to be studied further. Again, there are hundreds of words in Kannada which begin with b, and there is one (bomm-enal DED. #4469) which is listed in the Tamil word list in DED. This needs to be studied too. This all goes to show that much needs to be done in the study of the Dravidian languages. We need to find out why these and other such things have occured, and we need to go as far back in time as we can.  

Now, regarding the fact that Professor Ganesan said that the phenomenon of inversion/criptical (as you stated it) is not common in Tamil except for some onomatopoeic words: In my earlier work I have noted more than once that the reason that I have mostly dealt with Kannada words in illustrating the phenomenon of inversion and substitution is not because that this phenomenon is limited to Kannada, but to mainly prove its presence and operation in at least one language first. It should be noted that the participating words do not have to be from the same Dravidian language. The phenomenon will be considered as having been operated in any Dravidian language which has either of the two or more participating words. And one of these words may be in another Dravidian language. We can not expect all participating words to be in one language, such as Kannada, because this phenomenon has operated from the very infancy of  Dravidian. We are forced to expect a distribution of these participating words among all Dravidian languages, but we can not specify which language should have which participating word. Just as in Indo-European, where a related word which, for instance in Greek, skips several lands of other Indo-European languages, and appears in another language, for instance, English, (see The families of words and Story of Language by Mario Pei) so also, in witnessing this phenomenon in Dravidian, we must be prepared to witness a participant word near or away from the place of its participating counterpart. All the Dravidian languages have not been studied from this point of view. You may have noticed above that I have cited some Tamil words in the context of Murukan. This tells us that this phenomenon is there in Tamil also. Actually this phenomenon is there in Tamil as much as it is in any other Dravidian language. We just have to study these languages from this point of view. If it was there in Tamil when Murukan was there, surely, it could not have disappeared leaving him behind.

There is another very important factor which is also involved here and must be taken into account when we are studying this phenomenon especially in Tamil: I have not seen anybody say that Tamil words are significantly tri-consonantal. I do not know if anybody has studied this aspect of Tamil in depth. Of all the languages in Dravidian, Tamil is significantly tri-consonantal, and I beleive that, if that has not been looked into already, it should be. This is important not only for Tamil, but also for the larger picture of the Dravidian and his languages. It is to be noted here that the Semitic language family is primarily tri-consontal, and we know that the Semitic Akkadians took over after the weakening of the ancient Sumerians in Mesopotamia. In witnessing the phenomenon of inversion and substitution, especially in Tamil, factors such as these - tri-consonantal -must be taken into account. Actually, I had to leave out numerous Tamil words because I wanted to deal with Kannada words, as much as possible. And even then I had to note several words belonging to other languages, Tamil especially, because this phenomenon is at the very foundation of these languages. I can show as many illustrations of this phenomenon in Tamil as I have in Kannada, and more. It may be noted that tri-consonantal factor is there in Kannada also, but not as much as it is in Tamil. Also, we need to give more attention to the other Dravidian languages which also contain important information regarding the ancient Sumerian. There is much work to be done, and much enlightenment to be attained. All can be done if we only make up our mind, and in this, I am sure our friends in other countries will back us up as much as they can. The phenomenon of language is not limited to any nation or national. It is one of the fundamental grounds where we all meet and share.
 
As I mentioned earler, as far as I can, this is my last communication to the List members. Circumstances might force that I may not have the computer facility. I thank you all for your patience again. I wish every one long life, great health, happiness, prosperity, and a pleasant journey. Best wishes. Farewell.  

Yours

V. Keerthi kumar

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