Tamil words in English

[Lars Martin Fosse]

At 15:45 17.02.98 -0600, you wrote:
>Mr. Subrahmanya wrote:
>> As the Aryan Invasion/Migration theory chokes,sputters and dies, so will its
>> other face, the artificial Aryan(or the PC indo-european)/Dravidian language
>> divide die under the weight of its own contradictions and distortions.

Ganesan wrote:

>Even after revisionist attempts, majority of academics are confidant
>and write that Aryans migrated into India and not the other way around.
>That is., Aryans did not spread out from India.
>
>If there is no divide between Indo-Iranian languages and Dravidian
>languages, can Tamil (for eg.,) be derived from Sanskrit?


I am afraid Mr. Subrahmanya is dreaming a happy dream. 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. The
best that can be said for the Rajaram/Frawley oeuvre, is that it is
extremely entertaining. If I engineered aircraft the way Rajaram writes
about history, planes would come crashing down like raindrops. (R. is an
aircraft engineer, and he should have stuck to what he understands).

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. The somewhat misguided debate in India
concerning these questions may have the positive effect of a) forcing
Western academics to brush up their theories and b) show politicos and
others in the West that the study of the distant past is not such an
innocent matter after all. God knows, Indological debates might become
fashionable with the educated public again, as they were a 100 years ago!

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.

Best regards,

Lars Martin Fosse


Dr.art. Lars Martin Fosse
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