Beluur and Belgaum

[N. Ganesan]

Of course, bEluuru and belgaum are not derived from tamil.
Is the 'bEl' related to its tamil cognate 'vEL'?
That is the question.

One time in Indology, there was an etymolgy on
Pune from Dravidian. I remember pune possibly meant a
hill village with dry lands.

S. B. Joshi has a paper in ABORI called
"Etymology of Place-names PaTTi-HaTTi" from
Dravidian.

Dr. F. C. Southworth has a paper on
the Maharashtra placenames -vali/oli related to
Dravidian paLLi. Here, ".l/(L)" transforms to "l".

Can a similar change occur for bELuuru/bE.luuru to bEluuru?
Medieval inscriptions will help a lot here.

Regards,
N. Ganesan

This from Indology.
*************************************************

MICHIGAN-LAUSANNE INTERNATIONAL SEMINAR
"ARYANS AND NON-ARYANS IN SOUTH ASIA :
EVIDENCE, INTERPRETATION, AND IDEOLOGY"

October 25-27, 1996
University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, Michigan

DRAVIDIAN PLACE NAMES IN MAHARASHTRA

F. C. Southworth (University of Pennsylvania)

In their book _The_Rise_of_Civilization_in_India_and_Pakistan_ (1982),
the Allchins state that there is a substratum of Dravidian place names in
Maharashtra. This statement, based probably on the ideas of H. D.
Sankalia, has never been properly investigated. Fortunately there exist
two lists of Maharashtrian village names which provide the data for such
a study. My investigation of these names turned up a number of candidates
for Dravidian origin among the suffixes of Marathi place names. Among
these suffixes, the most promising is -vali/oli, both because of its high
frequency and because its Dravidian origin is not questioned (< Drav.
paLLi 'hamlet, camp, place to lie down' < paT- 'lie,fall').

A study of the spatial distribution of village names with the suffix
-vali/oli shows 90% or more of them concentrated in the coastal region
known as Konkan. In the remainder of the Marahi-speaking area, the
greatest concentration is in the southern part of the Desh, i.e. in the
districts of Kolhapur and Solapur. A number of other suffixes of probable
Dravidian origin are also found in these areas, though they are of lower
frequency of occurrence. Thus these suffixes of Dravidian origin are in a
continuous distribution with the Dravidian paLLi, as well as with similar
suffixes in the state of Gujarat (discussed in Sankalia's doctoral
thesis, which is based on early inscriptions in Gujarat). Thus there can
be little doubt that these areas were previously inhabited by speakers of
some Dravidian language(s).

The paper will also discuss reflexes of Dravidian paLLi in place names in
Sindh and Pakistani Panjab, where the evidence is somewhat less clear.