People like Caldwell were revolutionary for their day, but there is really little point in clinging on to the views of scholars of centuries past, when we now have so much more linguistic data to work on. Much of what Caldwell said has been superseded by newer research. For example, most scholars now believe that "Dravida" was simply a Sanskritisation of "Tamil".Originally Posted by solomon
It is pretty clear that the Indo-Aryan languages and the Dravidian languages represent two entirely different language families. It is also pretty clear that there have been several rounds of migration into India, separated by vastly different periods of time. The linguistic evidence points to a lack of contact between speakers of Indo-Aryan and Dravidian languages before they each entered India. The archaelogical evidence points to a progressively increasing degree of contact and mingling between these peoples after both were established in India. There is, unfortunately, the famous "South Asian archaelogical black hole" - a period of a few centuries in relation to which we have almost no significant archaelogical evidence - which severly limits our ability to use only archaelogy to understand what was going on in India. The literary evidence, however, points to a period when the mutual influence was pretty minimal and the cultures diverged fairly significantly.
There are a range of conclusions one can draw from these individual pieces of evidence as to the contexts in which it makes sense to speak of "Aryan" and "Dravidian" in India. For a range of scholarly writings (and some different opinions) on this point, I recommend Aryan and Non-Aryan in India, edited by M.M. Deshpande and P.E. Hook. The book was published in 1979, but much of the scholarship in it is still fresh and not out-dated.
I will do so in a while - I have a very demanding full-time job and family commitments, and that doesn't give me as much time to spend here as I would like. Digging through my notes for the Hub is unfortunately fairly low down on my list of priorities.
I'm not sure why you're bringing up Mathivanan's work, since it's not something I've ever adverted to. As I understand it, linguists have raised two objections to Mathivanan's decipherment. The first is that he reads the script from left to right, although most scholars believe it was written from right to left, on the basis of the the form of the marks on seals showing the direction in which the signs on them were cut. The second is his methodology of assigning phonetic values to signs, which is said to lack rigour - the syllable he chooses to represent the phonetic value of each pictogram is not always obvious, it is said, and the system results in a large number of signs representing identical values, which is said to be counter-intuitive.
As Prof. Hart points out, there are a number of problems in Vaiyappuri Pillai's work and particularly his dating, which are largely a consequence of Pillai's rather outdated world-view, assigning priority to Sanskrit. It is also worth noting that Vaiyappuri Pillai did not use scientific methods in dating Tamil literature - it was his student M. Shanmugan who first started trying to see how they could be applied.
Prof. Zvelebil's datings are consistently several centuries later than those of other Dravidologists, such as Prof. Hart. There is a reason for this, having to do with their methodologies - Prof. Zvelebil places much weight on the relationship between the themes of Tamil and Prakrit poetry and argues that they must be close in date. Prof. Hart, on the other hand, argues that this need not be so, and quite convincingly that the Prakrit poetry is a later manifestation of the same tradition as the Tamil poetry. Prof. Hart places more weight on early Tamil epigraphy and historical references in later Tamil literature to date Sangam literature. His methodology strikes me as being superior, although it assigns significantly later dates to Sangam works than I would like to believe. As I keep saying, though, the Adichanallur excavations have thrown open the entire question, and until we have a final dating of those, all discussions are hypothetical.
I am aware of some Hebrew words thought to be of Tamil origin (such as "tukki" for peacock), which is hardly surprising, given that potshards with Tamil inscriptions have been found in sites on the Red Sea. As far as the rest of it goes - in a separate thread, please.
Could you please point to which "meaningless claims" I reiterate? Rejecting the unproven (and in my view, ridiculous) thesis that Sanskrit is the pure, unsullied root of all Indian civilisation, on the basis that it is unproven and contradicts what we know of ancient India, is hardly political.
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