re. Soap

[Raveen Satkurunathan]

On Fri, 13 Apr 2001 09:58:04 -0400, Michael Witzel <witzel at FAS.HARVARD.EDU>
wrote:

>The Venerable Tantra writes about "A fascinating subject!"
>
>
>>Someone here says
>>that the name of the South Indian tribe Toda (originally probably from
>>Persia) is related to the word Deutsch (originally Teutsch) and means just
>>the same "the people." A fascinating subject!
>
>deutsch is of course an adjective derived from Germanic *thiuda 'people'
>(O.Engl. dheod; all connected with O. Irish tuath, Lithuanian tauta
>'people', thus IE *teuta), -- whence Old High German diutisc, Dutch
>duits(ch)   [--> Engl. Dutch], etc. etc. Cf. also the Latin adaptation
>theodiscus  'belonging the people, the people's [language, not Latin]'.
>
>Many tribes call themselves after their own words for 'man, human, people'.
>
>Toda has nothing to do with deutsch/*teuta, etc.; see Burrow-Emeneau, DEDR
>3504.
>An IE tribe migrating, sorry invading, to Toda-land?
>(pace Parpola).

The indigenous name for Toda is Ahl which is cognate with 'person' in
Dravidian (specially Tamil)

"Among the five tribal groups of the Nilgiri massif, the 1200 Toda (known
by themselves as the Ahl)"

 http://emuseum.mnsu.edu/cultural/oldworld/middle_east/toda.html

Raveen