Dravidian theory problems

One strong argument in that direction has been Brahui a Dravidian language in lands with high Iranian farmer contribution. However, we argue that Dr was not the Harappan language because:

    1. There is a common substratum including for agricultural terms and plants that is shared by both Dravidian and Indo-Aryan languages. This implies there was once a third language in the picture and unique to the subcontinent.
    1. We don’t find Dr as the earliest distinctly Indian substrate in IA but Dr loans appear later. The earliest available Dr text show evidence in contrast for a long contact with IA and IA literary and cultural conventions.
    1. If we look at the recently constructed tree for Dr based on linguistic data Brahui is lodged quite deep in the tree with no indication of a root-ward position that would be expected if it were the relict of a Harappan Dr presence in the NW.
    1. Now with genetic data we can constraint ages. The clearly defined language families like IE, DR, AA are unlikely to be much older than 6000 YBP. That offers a kind of bound that suggests that Pr-DR was not very old – at best around Mature Harappan suggesting that it might not have had deep history which also inconsistent with the loans from another language.

Hence, together we surmise that the Iranian farmers brought a now lost language that was the primary Harappan. In their southern borderlands were DR speakers who admixed with them and acquired some of the Harappan cultural elements.

The conquest and defeat of Harappan power by the Aryans actually opened an opportunity for these Dravidian speakers to spread more widely especially towards South India. Now their new interactors were the Aryans which resulted in them developing a common culture with the latter.

iShTakA

A point to note: iShTaka has an Iranic cognate &, as we discussed before, even a Tocharian one. However, it attested only in the middle layer of the veda. Notably, the below dravidian loan is from a mahArAShTrI prAkR^ita intermediate. Ask what it means for a Dravidian Harappan?

pillu elephant

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Ancestral Dravidian languages in Indus Civilization: ultraconserved Dravidian tooth-word reveals deep linguistic ancestry and supports genetics by Bahata Ansumali Mukhopadhyay at Nature

Little evidence a Pr-Dr word for elephant even existed, leave alone the claim made therein. It is even less valid than Sethna’s karpasa in Harappan making it Skt.

Among other things no Pr-Dr reconstruction would accommodate a pillu or related form for pal+V. It likely comes from a “Nostratic”-like earlier layer with cognates in Uralic, Afroasiatic, Chuchi-Kamchatkan for bite.

Bonta paper 2023

Harappan being Dravidian is a rather unfounded claim; hence, I think Steve Bonta is correct in dispelling rather strongly the idea that it was Dravidian – he is a dravidianist himself. I think he has made a real contribution to understanding the Harappan script in defining the fields P,M,C, T and their sub-structure. I also think he may have found something meaningful in his analysis of the so-called “M” field. I find his readings more “believable” than another recent IA interpretation which was posted by a person called yajnadeva. However, that doesn’t mean I believe them or am convinced by them. Could there be something to his findings?

  1. If the Southern Arc theory of the Harvard lab has something to it & Harappans are related to the Southern Arc then there could be a remote similarity between the S.arc languages & Harappan. In that case, Bonta’s observations might be features shared by those and old IE.
  2. I think he might have correctly noticed that it is encoding a language that tends to form samAsa-s probably both bahuvrIhi-s & multiple compound tat-puruSha-s among others.
  3. I also think along the lines of Bonta’s suggestions the U-shaped “jar” symbol is a genitive marker like “asya” (OIA) or assa (MIA) of later epigraphy.
  4. I don’t think that the interpretation of the up-arrow glyph as “iSh” from “iShu” is tenable in Skt interpretation. It could be a genitive of another gender or maybe another possessive marker e.g., iya; even in RV: ashv(i)yo vAraH; unless he is taking it as locative plural in Skt – but what about singulars then?
  5. I’m dubious of the terminal 3 being associated with -tR^i suffix nouns. In nominative they take forms like pitA or genitive pituH making it unlikely that they are just placed in root form.
  6. pu/bhu conflation – both deaspiration and varga change are atypical of IA though it happens to IA loans in Tam. Hence, p/bh equivalence looks dubious in his readings.
  7. He believes that there are horse-names in Harappan – they are rare. That’s a peculiar claim given the horse problem – they are quite different from the abundant horse names seen in the Mitanni sphere. I remain most skeptical of those.