Dravidian language family is 4500 years old | Hacker News Reader

Dravidian language family is 4500 years old

thehindu.com

15 points_mdlf7 comments

This is exciting news for a couple of reasons.

1. The origin of proto-dravidian and how it relates to other families is a huge mystery. There were speculations that it could be related to Proto-Elamite or the Munda language family but nothing conclusive. Another fun speculation is that it was the language spoken by the people living in the Indus Valley cities.

2. Dr. Bhadriraju Krishnamurti, probably the most prominent linguist who was studying dravidian languages passed away in 2012. There has been very little happening in dravidian linguistics. A while back, I was looking for scholarly articles regarding proto-dravidian and there hasn't been results since the early 2000s when it was demonstrated that Proto-dravidian split into north, central and southern branches (Note: I'm not an expert in this field, I might have missed some developments. Please point me to any research I might have missed). This result is exciting just because it looks like somebody is working on proto-dravidian again

I appreciate the guts of the researchers, Iam quite sure that they will be under immense political pressure to contain the results.

The theory of Aryan and Dravidian is introduced by the British to create separation. The history is more than 4500 years.

History is 13.5 billion years old, till now.

Do you dispute that a proto-Aryan migration pushed proto-dravidians south in the Indian subcontinent? If so, what do you think explains the geographical distribution of Aryan vs Dravidian languages?

In the last two decades we have genetic data that paints a much more complex picture. India is a fertile land and people have been streaming in (and out) for at least 50,000 years. If people move just 30km away every generation that is enough to populate the entire land in a thousand years.

Also the existence of an isolated Dravidian language in what is now Pakistan is puzzling https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brahui_language

No question that it was a British colonist (lawyer) who stated the divergence, and no question the British routinely followed a longstanding practice of "divide and conquer".

Nevertheless I have never believed that this was a malign British effort. I know many people do believe this. But plenty of linguistic and genetic studies (by people not British and not Indian) have shown reasons to believe this theory.

I actually find these results (the ancient roots and long continuity of Dravidian languages) very cool. It appears to be a much tighter link than other old-lineage languages (e.g. Egyptian/Coptic and some Chinese languages).

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