Rajaram unrepentent!

[Swaminathan Madhuresan]

>Has he mentioned what his criterion is for "empirical data"? My
>hunch is that he has not.

At another place, Rajaram has expoused his idea as to why Dravidian is
not independent of Sanskrit.
 "The basic claim now, and one that is central to the linguistic
 interpretation of ancient India is: there was a stage in the evolution of
 so-called Dravidian languages when they were free from the influence of
 Sanskrit; otherwise the whole idea of Dravidian as a separate language
 family falls to the ground. Tamil is the oldest language of this family
 and its literature goes back only to about 100 BCE. By then it was already
 heavily influenced by Sanskrit language and literary forms. Thus from an
 empirical point of view there is no evidence whatsoever to suppose that
 any of the so-called Dravidian languages ever existed independently of
 Sanskrit."

Of course, his notion of linking the Dravidian language family with the first
attested *written* literature of Classical Tamil texts beginning only from
100 BCE is definitely an IA-centered view; See the latest issue of J. of
Inst. Asian studies article by I. Mahadevan on coins with Tamil names dating to
2nd century BCE from southern Sri Lanka. Zvelebil, Hart, Ramanujan, Rajam, ...
have written volumes of how CT differs from IA material. Dravidian
linguistics has progressed much since the days of Thieme with an IA bias
when he wrote almost 50 years ago:
"Dravidian literature in South India came into existence under the
impulse and influence of Sanskrit literature and speech."
(Thieme, Review of The Sanskrit language by T. Burrow, Language, 1955).
That was a time when people derived "thamizh" from Skt. dramiDa!

If Rajaram is right, Linguistics experts cannot study language families whose
constituent language(s) may have no writing at all.

Regards,
SM


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