Non-IE loans

[Koenraad Elst]

Yes, Dr. Thompson, what is going on here?  I say the AIT school fails to
come up with Vedic astronomical terms borrowed from Dravidian, and what do
you do in your reply?  You again fail to come up with such terms.

Instead, you assert in general that there are "hundreds" of loans in the RV.
That is how many Kuiper lists (Aryans in the RV), but he exaggerates,
including terms with known IE etymologies (though such may of course have
been borrowed by PIE: anything borrowed before the fragmentation of PIE,
hence pan-IE, is not recognizable as ultimately non-IE).  But sure, there
are loans in Vedic, and for the sake of argument, let all the words
identified as loans by Kuiper be loans.  The point is: I don't recollect any
of them being specifically an astronomical term.  Nor a specifically
religious or metaphysical term.  Kuiper's list looks more like the
vocabulary exchanged in the process of economic interaction, kind of like
the Arabic loans in European languages.  Now, of course, my knowledge and
memory are very limited, I may have missed something. Therefore, to stay
within the bounds of Dr. Wujastyk's sensible rules, could you please cut my
ignorance short by very very briefly listing a few Rg-Vedic (or by
extension, any pre-Buddhist Indo-Aryan) astronomical terms borrowed from
Dravidian?


As for the Kubha, assuming the name is a loan: well, that river is in the
Afghan border zone, not in the IE heartland as conceived by the
India-as-homeland theory (Saraswati and upper Ganga basin).  Further
northwest, deeper into Afghanistan, the expanding Aryans went beyond the
border, hence the typically colonial phenomenon that Aryan settlers gave the
rivers names from back home in India: Harayu from Sarayu, Harahvaiti from
Saraswati.

Apologies for my seeming eagerness to intervene, it'll wear off.  It's just
that I don't want it said that I leave questions unanswered.

Yours sincerely,
Koenraad Elst
http://members.xoom.com/KoenraadElst/