linguistics (was: Tamil words in English)

[Bhadraiah Mallampalli]

Hello again everyone,

The rhetoric:  AIT was a clever strategy that served two purposes at the same
time: 1. To establish that Sanskrit originated outside Indian subcontinent, an
idea that seemed to take away authorship of Vedas and Sanskrit, and 2. To
divide the so called Aryans and Dravidians.

The emotional trap of this double attack was so powerful that Indian
Indologists of the last 100 years had driven themselves to take up the
opposite positions (that of no Aryan migration, or reverse migration) which
are actually on weaker ground and totally untenable, forced them on the
defensive, and worse! it deprived them of the chance to exploit latest
scientific developments.

It may be surprising for some, but despite my total lack of knowledge of
comparative linguistics, I really agree with the idea of outside origination
of Sanskrit; for the simple reason:  It agrees with geological facts.

Just 65 million years ago, at the time when dinosaurs were wiped out from the
face of the earth, the Indian continent was floating in the middle of the
"Indian" ocean.  It may have got detached from the African continent about 225
million years ago!  The Indian plate has presumably hit Chinese plate some
time around 3-5 million years ago.  The Indian plate, after hitting the
Chinese plate, has started sliding under the latter, giving birth to
Himalayas.  In fact the Himalayas are rising even now by a few inches every
year.  Also, the mass of sea life collected between the continents had so much
limestone that Himalayas have really ended up being limestone moutains that
are geologically weak.

As the Indian plate was in the ocean for more than 225 million years, it did
not participate in the human evolution at all!  No aboriginal humanoid fossils
comparable to those found in Africa are to be found in India.  Around 2-3
million years ago human evolution just started happening. The first hominids
were found to be 120,000 years old, and humans were known to have used boats
to travel from Asia to Australia at about 50,000 years ago.  Language must be
developed by this time otherwise how can they build boats?

While the Himalayas are still very young and the entire mountain belt under
the grip of violent earthquakes almost every day, it is less probable any
humans would have migrated into the Indian subcontinent.

The modern civilization and evolution of grammars may have happened around the
time 20,000 years ago, and Vedic civilization may have developed about 10,000
years ago in Central Asia and Iran.  With the activity of Himalayas having
subsided, the Civilized people may have started crossing the mountains and
moved into Indian continent.  The first batches may have gone further south to
experience the warmth they never felt before (and therefore became dark
skinned). It is ridiculous to think they would be lazy enough to settle in the
colder Saraswati or Ganga basins.  These are the present day Dravidians.  As
they were the earliest to migrate, their language was very remotely connected
to Sanskrit.   The later settlers had to remain in the colder Northern India
as southern parts have been occupied.  And the later settlers were more
recent, and their language closer to Sanskrit.

The Dravidians are from Asia because, despite their darker skin color, the
texture of hair and their facial features are more like Indo Aryans than that
of Africans. Further, the migrations into India have been continuous because
the last interglacial period was about 120,000 years ago, and there could be
no obstruction to their movement.  The slow process of migration implies that
there had never been any Aryan/Dravidian war of the proportions described by
AIT protagonists; and also cultural continuity was maintained between
different batches that settled at different places.  There were surely local
wars/battles which are most common in any society fragmented by different
regions; and these battles have been happening till 1700AD.

While most of the advanced civilizations had moved over to the newly found
warmer subcontinent, many other tribes stayed back (you know what I am driving
at! I have every right to be mischievous, no less than the first professor).

It took me a little less than two hours to cook up this story from various
internet sites on plate tectonics and human anthropology with some of my own
imagination!  And to top it all, it agrees with the IE comparative
linguistics!

For more information check the sites
http://pubs.usgs.gov/publications/text/dynamic.html or look for plate
tectonics or human anthropology, hominids etc.

Thanks,
Bhadraiah Mallampalli
http://members.aol.com/vaidix