Following up on the previous post about Dravidians, I ran across a fascinating (for me, anyway) article about the connection between Dravidian languages and the supposedly mother-of-all-languages, Indo-European.
Here's an excerpt from this lengthy linguistic monograph by V. Keerthi Kumar, written in 1999, where he talks about the "Dravidian birthmarks on Indo-European."
"It was in 1786, that Sir William Jones, an English judge of Supreme Court in Calcutta who is more famous as the founder of Comparative Philology, pronounced a statement in his address to the Royal Asiatic Society of Bengal, which subsequently proved to be a milestone in the history of the Indo-European languages. Sir Jones stated: "The Sanskrit language, whatever be its antiquity, is of a wonderful structure; more perfect than Greek, more copious than Latin, and more exquisitely refined than either; yet bearing to both of them a stronger affinity both in the roots of verbs and in the forms of grammar, than could possibly have been produced by accident; so strong indeed that no philologer could examine them all three, without believing them to have sprung from some common source, which perhaps, no longer exists. There is a similar reason though not quite so forcible, for supposing that both the Gothick and the Celtick, though blended with a different idiom, had the same origin with the Sanskrit; and the old Persian might be added to the family."
[Wonderful history, wouldn't you say?]
It should be pointed out that many other scholars of his century had conceived similar ideas concerning Indo-European languages, but it was Sir Jones who distinctly departed from their main thinking that Greek and Latin were derived from Sanskrit. He emphatically stated that all three: Sanskrit, Greek, and Latin were derived from a common source. Thus, Sir Jones was the first one to fully and cogently articulate the testimony for the common source, the ancient parent language of Sanskrit, Greek, Latin, and other languages which were mentioned by him in his above noted statement, and to the short list of which more than a hundred Indo-European languages spoken by more than half the total population of the world have been subsequently added by other scholars. It should also be pointed out that this realization of the common source of Indo-European inaugurated a period during which a number of eminent European scholars advocated an Asiatic origin of the Indo-European languages, even though they did not look for its seat of concentration as far down south as southern India where not less than twenty-seven Dravidian languages are spoken in their purest available form today.
[And I love hearing Mr. Kumar talk about Jones' creative thinking, going against the popular and established ideas on language origins.
Some of these scholars were also convinced that prehistoric Europe was populated by a dark-haired people, an opinion echoed even by relatively recent historians such as H. G. Wells. In a letter to the Polish Prince Adam Czartoryski, Sir Jones himself had written: "Many learned investigators of antiquity are fully persuaded, that a very old and almost primaeval language was in use among these northern nations, from which not only the Celtic dialects, but even the Greek and Latin are derived."
[Again, fascinating history, yes? Don't you wonder who those dark-haired people were?]
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