As you said there are lot of similarities between Tamil and Sanskrit. Scholars say the Sanskrit borrowed much of its structure and some words from Tamil and Tamil borrowed little structural rules and many words from Sanskrit. But still they are separate families of languages. ‘Dravidian’ is an artificial construct used by Caldwell. The word Dravidian is not original to any so called Dravidian languages. It is from Sanskrit and its derivative languages. Tamizh was pronounced as Damila and then as Dravida. It is a commonly accepted thing that southern languages are derived from Tamil and northern languages are derived from Sanskrit.

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@ Sanjeev: I agree…We do not have the complete picture yet…and it may take a while for the whole thing to unravel

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Thanks for this. I’m not an expert (not even a novice!) but I do know that there are multiple factors at work in this space which have not yet been unearthed.

DNA studies seem to imply that there were migrations from North Africa over the course of 60,000 years outwards, including to Australia through India. We all perhaps had a common Ethiopian great… great grand mother.

The Head librarian of NEHU (Shillong), a learned man with whom I had a long conversation (I unfortunately forget his name at the moment) when I was in Shillong, showed me reams of his research – there are a number of students at NEHU involved in this research as well – demonstrating the great similarity between names found in Hindu scriptures and words (including gods) found in African languages. Amazing was this analysis, as he ran me through one example after another for nearly an hour. I came back thinking there is perhaps some solid basis for his hypotheses.

In my mind, just like with ongoing DNA analysis, as people go backwards in time, they’ll probably find that most words used today in the entire world have North African roots. Unfortunately we simply don’t have the complete picture of the jigsaw puzzle. Indeed, there is a possibility that the language of other near-humans (Neanderthals comes to mind) might have mixed with modern languages as well (I don’t know if Neanderthals had vocal chords that could make sounds like ours).

That the so-called Dravidian languages are a slightly earlier stream than Sanskrit seems plausible on the surface given the earlier migrations to Australia through South India (Aborigines, I gather, are very similar genetically to South Indians). It would be worthwhile comparing Dravidian languages with Australian aborigine languages for possible similarities. I’m sure that must have already been done by someone.

Re: languages, the transmission mechanism is economic and political success. The rate of transmission of language is far greater than human miscegenation. As a rule, the language of the political ‘winners’ becomes dominant for a while. Over thousands of years, this would have meant that first one, then another, language dominated and imposed on the other; ultimately mixing to such a large extent that tracing out the specific origin of languages is virtually impossible (unlike DNA).

Note that languages also mutate very rapidly. Observe the huge variation in Hindi dialects across North India. In other words, tracing out the roots of language is fraught – a puzzle on which the jury is still out and will perhaps remain so for another hundred or two hundred years. We do know that there are hundreds if not thousands of common root words in Sanskrit and European languages. That cannot be denied; but explaining how it arose is no easy task.

Regards
Sanjeev

Brilliant ! Good spadework indeed. We need to work on a lot of issues such as:

1) Revising AIT
2) Saraswathi Civilization
3) False Language classifications

I believe that time is slowly turning around in our favour.
Let us hope for the best…

KALYAN