Tamil words in English

[Sn. Subrahmanya]

>I am afraid Mr. Subrahmanya is dreaming a happy dream.
I am very happy to be able to dream along with all Indian archeologists.
I value an archeologists evidence more than any kind of arbitrary linguistic
speculation.

>I am reading Navaratna Rajaram and David Frawley's book "Vedic Aryans and
> the Origins of Civilazation" now, and if the academic quality of that book is
> typical of the revisionist scholarship, the chances of the revisionist
theory in
> Western Academia are as as great as the chances of a snowball in hell.
It doesnt really matter what western academia(changed the uppercase to lower:) )
thinks , as long as Indologists pursue the truth and not be bogged down by
19th century
thinking or by the colonial hangover of 'some' indian linguists educated
under the British.

>But having said this, it seems clear that theories about the Aryan
>invasion/migration into South Asia need constant revision according to the
>latest information. Even if the basic model remains fixed, there are lots of
>details that are debatable.
This sir, is called retrofitting.You seem to have agreed upon a basic model
around which a story has to be built up. Shouldnt this story agree with and
corroborate
evidence from other sources like archeology, astronomy and original sources.
When new archeological finds are pushing the boundaries of Indus-Sarasvati
civilization into an area
of more than a million square miles and reports of finds even in Goa, there
must be atleast
some kind of acknowledgement of error in past theories. Even if there are
people who do not consider that the river bed along which so many sites have
been found is not Sarasvati,
how do they explain with their linguistic evidence, the overwhelming
evidence from archeology
that there is no sign of an invasion !!.

>And by the way: It is not possible to derive Tamil from Sanskrit. Nor is it
>possible to derive English from Finnish, or Basque from Chinese. We are
>simply dealing with different language families.
There is no formula by which one langauge can be completely derived from
another.
There are too many variables which cause changes in language.
I (and many other Indians) personally find that Kannada and Telugu so
similiar to
other north-Indian languages that I refuse to believe that they belong
to different language families until some concrete evidence that can be
independently
verified is offered.
Even so called "Dravidian" experts acknowledge this structural similiarity
and come up with all kinds of convoluted ideas along with lots of hand
waving to explain it.


S.Subrahmanya
Houston