The presence in '
Vedic Sanskrit' of a number of
syntactical and
morphological features alien to other Indo-European languages but common to
Dravidian and other
South Asian languages, as well as the presence of non-Indo-European vocabulary, is generally held by scholars to be due to a local '
substratum' of
Dravidian,
Munda, or a combination of both.
, there is the introduction of
retroflexes, which alternate with
dentals;
morphologically there are the
gerunds; and
syntactically there is the use of a
quotative marker ("iti").
[1]
A few words in the
Ṛgveda and progressively more words in later
Vedic texts were identified as being loanwords principally from
Dravidian but with some forms traceable to
Munda.
Phonology
Retroflex phonemes are found throughout
Dravidian and
Munda and are reconstructed for proto-Dravidian and proto-Munda and are thus clearly an
areal feature of the Indian subcontinent. They are reconstructible for neither
Proto-Indo-European nor for
Proto-Indo-Iranian.
The acquisition of the phonological trait by early Indo-Aryan upon its arrival in the Indian subcontinent is thus unsurprising, but it does not allow to identify the donor language (Munda or Dravidian). Since the adoption of a retroflex series does not affect
poetic meter, it is impossible to say if it predates the early portions of the Rigveda; all that can be said for certain is that at the time of the redaction of the Rigveda (ca. 800 BC), the retroflex series had become part of Sanskrit phonology.
Vocabulary
Burrow compiled a list of approximately 500 foreign words in the
Ṛgveda that he considered to be loans predominantly from
Dravidian. Kuiper identified 383 Ṛgvedic words as non-Indo-Aryan—roughly 4% of its liturgical vocabulary— borrowed from Old
Dravidian, Old
Munda, and several other languages.
Thieme has questioned Dravidian etymologies proposed for Vedic words, most of which he gives Indoaryan or Sanskrit etymologies, and condemned what he characterizes as a misplaced “zeal for hunting up Dravidian loans in Sanskritâ€.
Das contends that there is “''not a single case'' in which a ''communis opinio'' has been found confirming the foreign origin of a Rgvedic (and probably Vedic in general) wordâ€. Burrow in turn has criticized the "resort to tortuous reconstructions in order to find, by hook or by crook, Indo-European explanations for Sanskrit words". Kuiper reasons that given the abundance of Indo-European comparative material—and the scarcity of Dravidian or Munda—the inability to clearly confirm whether the etymology of a Vedic word is Indo-European implies that it is not.
[2]
Mayrhofer identifies a "prefixing" language, based on recurring prefixes like ''ka-'' or ''ki-'', compared to the
Austro-Asiatic article by . Examples include:
''kavandha'' "barrel", ''kÄkambÄ«ra'' a certain tree, ''kavaá¹£a'' "straddle-legged", ''kakardu'' "wooden stick", ''kapardin'' "with a hair-knot"
''kimÄ«d'' a demon, ''Å›imidÄ'' a demoness, ''kilÄsa'' "spotted, leprous", ''kiyÄmbu'' a water plant, ''kÄ«nÄÅ›a'' "ploughman", ''kumÄra'' "boy", ''kulÄya'' "nest", ''kuliÅ›a'' "ax", ''kuluá¹…ga'' "antelope" (''Kuruá¹…ga'' name of a chieftain of the TurvaÅ›a).
Words such as ''nÄraá¹…gaḥ'' "
orange" (first attested in the
Sushruta Samhita, ca. 4th century AD) are often taken to be straightforward loans from Dravidian into Sanskrit, but since they belong to a later (post-Vedic) period, they are, whether they be loans or not, unsuited to establish the origin of the loans in Rigvedic Sanskrit.
Identification
A concern raised in the identification of the substrate is that there is large time gap between the comparative materials, which can be seen as a serious methodological drawback.
[3]
Dravidian
While
Dravidian languages are primarily confined to the South of India, there is a striking exception: the
Brahui (which is spoken in parts of
Baluchistan), the linguistic equivalent of a
relict population, perhaps indicating that
Dravidian languages were formerly much more widespread and were supplanted by the incoming Indo-Aryan languages.
[4] However, states that it is possible that the present-day northern location of Brahui results from later migration, and Elfenbein (as cited in ) argues that the presence of Brahui in Baluchistan is explained by a late immigration that took place within the last thousand years.
Oraon is another Dravidian language not confined to South India; in fact, its range is Central and East India. But in this case too the prehistory of populations speaking the language is unknown, i.e. whether they migrated northwards, or not.
finds Dravidian loans only from the middle Rigvedic period, or "c. 1450 BCE", suggesting that linguistic contact between Indo-Aryans and Dravidians only occurred as the Indo-Aryans expanded beyond the Punjab. The Rigveda does, still, have a "small but precious handful of Vedic forms for which Dravidian etymologies are certain" (Zvelebil 1990:81), including kulÄya "nest", kulpha "ankle", daṇá¸a "stick", kÅ«la "slope", bila "hollow", khala "threshing floor".
Writing specifically about language contact phenomena, state that there is strong evidence that Dravidian influenced Indic through "shift", that is, native Dravidian speakers learning and adopting Indic languages. Even though the innovative traits in Indic could be explained by multiple internal explanations, early Dravidian influence is the only explanation that can account for all of the innovations at once – it becomes a question of
explanatory parsimony; moreover, early Dravidian influence accounts for the several of the innovative traits in Indic better than any internal explanation that has been proposed.
[1]
Munda
Kuiper (1991) identifies the donor language as Proto-Munda. prefers "Para-Munda", a language related, but not ancestral to the contemporary
Munda languages, which he identifies as "Harappan", the language of the
Harappan civilization. argues that the earliest level of the Rigveda shows signs of para-
Munda influence and only later levels of
Dravidian, suggesting that the original inhabitants of
Punjab were
speakers of para-Munda rather than
speakers of Dravidian, whom the Indo-Aryans encountered only in middle Rgvedic times.
Substratum vs. adstratum
Hock 1975/1984/1996 and Tikkanen 1987 (as cited in ) are quite open to considering that various
syntactical developments in Indo-Aryan could have been the result of
adstratum rather than the result of
substrate influences.
About retroflexion states that "in view of the strictly areal implications of retroflexion and the occurrence of retroflexes in many early loanwords, it is hardly likely that Indo-Aryan retroflexion arose in a region that did not have a substratum with retroflexes."
Notes
1.
2. Thieme, Burrow, Kuiper, and Das, as cited in
Kuiper, as cited in and
3. - the syntax of the Rigveda is being compared with a reconstructed proto-Dravidian. The first completely intelligible, datable, and sufficiently long and complete epigraphs that might be of some use in linguistic comparison are the Tamil inscriptions of the Pallava dynasty of about 550 c.e. (Zvelebil 1990), two entire millennia after the commonly accepted date for the Rgveda. Similarly there is much less material available for comparative Munda and the interval in their case is at least three millennia.
4. : "The most obvious explanation of this situation is that the Dravidian languages once occupied nearly all of the Indian subcontinent and it is the intrusion of Indo-Aryans that engulfed them in north India leaving but a few isolated enclaves."
5.
References
★ .
★ Das, Rahul Peter (1994),''The Hunt for Foreign Words in the Ṛgveda'', Indo-Iranian Journal 38: 207-238
★ .
★ F. B. Kuiper, Rigvedic loanwords, in: Studia Indologica, ed. Spies, Bonn (1955)
★ F. B. Kuiper, Aryans in the Rigveda, Rodopi (1991).
★ .
★ Th. Oberlies, review of Kuiper (1991), IIJ 37 (1994), 333-349.
★
★ .
★ .
★ .
★ .
See also
★
Pre-Greek substrate
العربية
ä¸å›½
Français
Deutsch
Ελληνική
हिनà¥à¤¦à¥€
Italiano
日本語
Português
РуÑÑкий
Español
