In connection with the Indus Civilization issue, some may be interested to know that one of the Padma award recipients this year is Michel Danino, who is a Guest Professor at IIT, Gandhinagar (http://www.iitgn.ac.in/faculty/humanities/michel.htm, with a link to his publications). He is also a member of ICHR, nominated by the current Indian Government. 

Regards,
Palaniappan


On Feb 4, 2017, at 8:05 PM, Dean Michael Anderson via INDOLOGY <indology@list.indology.info> wrote:

Thanks for posting those articles Michael. The probable influence of Munda on the IVC is an area that has not been emphasized enough, imho.

Best,

Dean


From: "Witzel, Michael" <witzel@fas.harvard.edu>
To: Indology <indology@list.indology.info>
Cc: "Witzel, Michael" <witzel@fas.harvard.edu>; Steve Farmer <saf@safarmer.com>; Dean Michael Anderson <eastwestcultural@yahoo.com>
Sent: Saturday, February 4, 2017 9:18 PM
Subject: Re: [INDOLOGY] INDUS CIVILISATION.

Dear All,

Re: Blench et al. (below) on a South-East Asian origin of Munda (and other Austroasiatic languages), the opposite position has been argued by P. Donegan and D. Stampe (U. Hawai’i, Mānoa) :

P Donegan, D Stampe. Rhythm and the synthetic drift of Munda. The yearbook of South Asian languages …, 2004 


The polarity of Munda vs Mon-Khmer recalls that of ancient vs modern Indo-European:
synthetic head-last vs analytic head-first (Lehmann 1974). But Munda and Mon-Khmer are
far more divergent. Indo-European was never/w/ysynthetic, but many Munda languages are...

P Donegan, D Stampe. South-East Asian Features in the Munda Languages: Evidence for the analytic-to-synthetic drift of Munda Proceedings of the Twenty-Eighth Annual …, 2002.

The Munda (South Asian) and Mon-Khmer (South-East Asian) branches of the Austroasiatic
language family are so exactly opposite at every level of structure that Sir George Grierson
in his Linguistic Survey of India remarked that if they were descended from a common ...

cf. also:  http://ling.lll.hawaii.edu/austroasiatic/AA/rhythm1983.pdf

Munda people expansion is said to be only from 3500 BP.
Reconstructing Austroasiatic prehistory
by Roger Blench,
Chapter in Jenny, M. & P. Sidwell (eds.) 2015. Handbook of the Austroasiatic Languages. Leiden: Brill.



More on the  Indus languages (and signs) separately, when I get a moment.
Cheers, 
M.Witzel



_______________________________________________
INDOLOGY mailing list
INDOLOGY@list.indology.info
indology-owner@list.indology.info (messages to the list's managing committee)
http://listinfo.indology.info (where you can change your list options or unsubscribe)