Ahmad Hassan Dani (Indus Valley script)

Harappa ^ | January 6, 1998 | interviewed by Omar Khan

[SunkenCiv]

...my friends like Asko Parpola, Professor Mahadevan, and the Russians Professors who have worked on this subject. They have all been working on the assumption that the language of the Indus people was Dravidian, that the people who build the Indus Civilization are Dravidian. But unfortunately I, as well as my friend Prof. B.B. Lal in India, have not been able to agree with this... On the other hand, I have been talking to Prof. Parpola that certainly this is an agglutinative language, there is no doubt. That has been accepted by all of us. Dravidian is an agglutinative language. But at the same time Altaic is an agglutinative language, and certainly we know that there was a connection beween Turkmenistan [in Central Asia] and this region. Turkmenistan is a region where Altaic languages are spoken. Even in the pre-Indus period we have a connection. In what we call the Kot Diji period, we have a connection between Indus Civilization and excavations in Turkmenistan. So if we insist on an agglutinative language being used inthe Indus period, why not connect it with Altaic, rather than just with Dravidian? Why not connect it with Sumerian, which is also an agglutinative language? In fact, when I was in Korea, I found that their language is agglutinative, which I did not know before. Just because of agglutinative language, it is not necessary that it is connected with Dravidian.

[SunkenCiv]

As the old joke goes, "Denial isn't just a river in Egypt". I've got a little more on the drive regarding the Dravidian connection with Indus script.

Sumerian is agglutinative, but has no known relatives living or dead. Dunno about Dravidian. But Korean's closest relative is the language of the Turks. I was surprised too. :'D

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[SunkenCiv]

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[SunkenCiv]

from the following title:

Parpula's two volumes of photographs covering the collections of India and Pakistan, which appeared in 1987 and 1991... and his 1994 sign list, containing 386 signs (as against Mahadevan's 419 signs), are generally recognized as fine achievements, not least by Mahadevan... This is a significant figure. It is too high for a syllabary like Linear B... and too low for a highly logographic script like Chinese. the nearest comparison... are probably the Hittite hieroglyphs with about 500 signs and Sumerian cuneiform with perhaps 600+ signs... Most scholars therefore agree that the Indus script is likely to be a logosyllabic script like its west Asian contemporaries. [pp 281-284]

These Dravidian speakers are presumably remnants of a once-widespread Dravidian culture submerged by encroaching Indo-Aryans in the 2nd millennium BC... The Indo-Aryan hymns, the Vedas... recount tales of conquest of the forts of the dark-skinned Dasa or Dasyu... the Vedas repeatedly mention the horse in their descriptions of warfare and sacrifice, and this animal was clearly a vital part of Indo-Aryan society... But there is not horse imagery at all in the Indus Valley civilization and virtually no horse remains have been found by archaeologists. Hence the Indus civilizations is unlikely to have been Indo-Aryan. [pp 290-291]

Robinson mentions "a substantial inscription found at Dholavira near the coast of Kutch in 1990, which appears to have been a kind of sign board for the city." [p 295]

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Lost Languages: The Enigma Of The World's Undeciphered Scripts by Andrew Robinson

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[maestro]

?......who is Agglut...?

What does this have to do with oil?

Prices?

[Question_Assumptions]

Korean is also substantially related to Japanese but nobody is supposed to notice that for political reasons, much as one is not supposed to notice the similarity between Urdu and Hindi.

[ckilmer]

the society that had the horse would have been about like 19th century european imperials running amok over asia and africa with guns and trains and all the accoutrements of the 1st industrial revolution.

[ckilmer]

the society that had the horse would have been about like 19th century european imperials running amok over asia and africa with guns and trains and all the accoutrements of the 1st industrial revolution.

[SunkenCiv]

Oil? none. Wheat, maybe...

[SunkenCiv]

There's a politically correct drive on in India to deny there ever was an Aryan invasion, which is of course a strictly nationalist tendency found in plenty of places besides India. If there never was such an invasion (despite the ancient documentation in the ancient texts of India itself; I've had someone actually argue the other side of that one), then the Indus Valley civilization must have been of Hindu origin. What are the alternatives? The Dravidians in southern India and Sri Lanka (Sri Lanka has its own megalithic architecture and ancient civil engineering) are descended from the builders of that civilization? :') The hits just keep on comin'.

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[SunkenCiv]

Uralic-Altaic family tree

[SunkenCiv]

Just checking to see if I closed a tag.

[SunkenCiv]

I forgot to mention that I wouldn't turn down any "yes, helpful" votes on my review (under the name HolyOlio) of that title.

[curmudgeonII]

I have been told that both Hungarian and Finnish are also agglutinative.

[hershey]

Ha! Interesting note about the Korean language. Hmmm.

[CarrotAndStick]

When you say 'Dravidians in south India', you've probably assumed a huge misconception right there. To say India has a dark-skinned populace exlusively in the south and fair skinned ones in the north is a fallacy. Over millenia, large numbers of the northern Aryans have migrated to the south assimilated the local culture, and similarly too large populations of Dravidians have either remained firmly in the north or have migrated to, there. For example, in India's most southern state, Kerala, although the general population is dark skinned, there are large swathes of the state with fair skinned, Dravidic language speaking people, with skin lighter than their northern Indian contemporaries. This is evidence for the Aryan migration into all over India, and not just the south.

Another misconception is that of Dravidic languages being classified as such, distinct from indo-european ones. But the fact is ,each of these southern, Dravidian languages have about 50+ % Sanskrit origin, which is an Aryan (Indo-European) tongue.

Here's one famous south Indian singer...

... observe the general eye and skin colour of this 'dravidian'.

[SunkenCiv]

Actually, I made no such statement about dark and light skin; the Dravidians are primarily in southern India, and their language is not IndoEuropean, regardless of the size of the loan vocabulary.

One sees what one wants to
by Iravatham Mahadevan

I agree with Rajaram that it is time we put this 'horse business' behind us and look at the decipherment itself. I have done so. The Jha-Rajaram 'decipherment' is completely invalid. It is, in fact, a non-starter for the simple reason that the direction of reading adopted by the authors is wrong, as demonstrated by Witzel and Farmer (Frontline, October 13, box item at p.12). The 'decipherment' makes as much sense as you would get out of this page if you try to read it from a mirror reflection.

Of Rajaram's 'Horses', 'decipherment', and civilisational issues
by Asko Parpola

It is sad that in South Asia, as elsewhere in the world, linguistic and religious controversies are the cause of so much injustice and suffering. We should remember that from the very beginning, Aryan and non-Aryan languages and associated cultures, religions and peoples have intermingled and have become inextricably mixed. Every element of the population has contributed to the creation of Indian civilisation, and every one of them deserves credit for it.

[SunkenCiv]

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Deciphering the Indus Script by Asko Parpola	Early Tamil Epigraphy from the Earliest Times to the Sixth Century A.D. by Iravatham Mahadevan

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[qwerty_ca]

Dravidian languages have about 50+ % Sanskrit origin

Well, if you look at modern-day Hindi, there are actually two sets of words in it - one native, that descended from Sanskrit, and the other from Arabic, Persian, Turkish and Urdu (which itself is a hybrid of Hindi grammar and Arabic-Farsi vocabulary) brought in by the Muslim invaders. HOWEVER, hindi still retains the original Sanskrit words as well. So for example the word for "book" is either "quitab" (urdu) or "pustak" (sanskrit) and the word for "food" is either "khana" (urdu) or "bhojan" (sanskrit). It is acceptable to use either of these words in speech, and that is one of the reasons why North Indians and Pakistanis can actually understand each other (linguistically that is) atleast at a basic level. It is also why Hindi movies (which tend to use the urdu version of words a lot) are popular in Pak.

In places like Maharashtra in central India where the Muslims didn't rule for very long, the Urdu words are absent from the vocabulary. So in Marathi for example, you can say pustak but not quitab.

A similar situation exists in Tamil (the primary South Indian language) where there are two sets of words - one indegenous (Old Tamil) and the other from an invading group (Sanskrit). Although today the words most used in everyday speech in the south are indeed from Sanskrit, there does exist (atleast in Tamil) a parallel indegenous vocabulary.

[SunkenCiv]

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[SunkenCiv]

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