I received a comment on my article ‘All Indian Languages are over 5000 years old’ thus.

‘This Venkat Ramanan guy would be laughed at any reputed  school of linguistics in the world. The headline is very misleading… All languages of India are not 5000 years old. There are only 4 major language families of India. Indo-Aryan, Dravidian, SinoTIbetan and Austro-Asiatic. Sanskrit, the mother of all the Indo-Aryan languages is indeed 5000 years old, but it is laughable to suggest that Hindi, Punjabi, Marathi, Bengali are also 5000 years old. These languages, i.e. Hindi, Punjabi etc. all started off as local dialects of Sanskrit and over the millenia morphed into the languages that you hear today. Likewise, ancient Dravidian morphed over the 4-5000 years into what we now hear as Tamil, Telugu, Kannada etc. The Austro-Asiatic languages are represented by Ho, Munda and Santali in India ( I don’t know their antiquity, but it has got to be ancient). SinoTibetan family of languages are spoken in the North East of India and yes SinoTibetan ( Ancestor of Han Chinese, Burmese etc is indeed 5K years old). If one wants to thump their chest in some exercise in petty nationalism, so be it; but it can hardly be called “Scholarship”. ‘

1.Unraveling the misinformaton about India, is ‘petty Nationalism’ be it’

2.I did not present more information on the article,as I thought it would become heavy and expected my readers to check the languages’ history and Sanatana Dharma,which my readers generally do.

Now let me on the Dravidian,Proto Dravidian,Indo Iranian,Indo Asiatic,Indo Australian group of languages.

Before proceeding further,it must be remebered that languages evolve from Dialects.

It is generally agreed that India had Brahmi and Prakrit as Dialects initially.

Sanskrit ,Prakrit,Tamil Brahmi,Tamil are to be taken into account.

Prakrit was called a colloquial language,spoken by ordinary people,while Sanskrit was spoken by Scholars and was used more for Literature and Philosophy.

There is Sanskrit Brahmi,which is considered as older and it dates back over 5000 years,and a Dialect takes much longer to evolve.

Now Sanskrit is dated( again deliberately) to 5000 BC.

Even this date should push Sanskrit Brahmi by at least 2000 years before Sanskrit,that means 7000 years ago!

2.We have Tamil Brahmi as well and as Tamil is assigned, at least,a date of 3000 BC,Tamil Brahmi must be dated 5000 BC.

3.Kannada Brahmi is found in  rock in Karnataka and it is dated a million years ago.(please read my article on this)

Dravidian Family/Proto Dravidian Family.

‘the Proto-Dravidian language is not itself attested in the historical record. Its modern conception is based solely on reconstruction. It is suggested that the language was spoken in the 4th millennium BCE, and started disintegrating into various branches around 3rd millennium BCE.   (     https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proto-Dravidian_language  )
‘Though some argue that the Dravidian Languages may have been brought to India by migrations in the fourth or third millennium BCE

migrations in the fourth or third millennium BCE or even earlier,the Dravidian languages cannot easily be connected to any other language, and they could well be indigenous to India.

Epigraphically the Dravidian languages have been attested since the 2nd century BCE. Only two Dravidian languages are exclusively spoken outside India: Brahui in  Pakistan,and Dhangar,a dialect of Kurukh, in Nepal.Dravidian place names along the Arabian Sea Coast and the Dravidian grammatical influence such as clusivity in the Indo-Aryan languages, namely Marathi, Konkani, Gujarati, Marwari, and Sindhi, suggest that Dravidian languages were once spoken more widely across the Indian subcontinent. ( https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dravidian_languages)

Tamil heads this group.Tamil Brahmi must have been there atleast 2000 earlier to reach its full bloom.

Note that these Dravidian languages were spoken ‘ Dravidian languages were once spoken more widely across the Indian subcontinent’ as far away in NorthWest of India.

Tamil Brahmi script has been found on Indus Valley civilization.

Elamite and Akkadian languages forerunner of Sumerian trace their origins to Tamil.Please check my articles on this.

This places Tamil around 5000 years ago and its pervasive nature throughout.

Indo Iranian Family.

‘The Indo-Iranian languages derive from a reconstructed common proto-language, called Proto-Indo-Iranian.

The oldest attested Indo-Iranian languages are Vedic Sanskrit (ancient Indo-Aryan), Older and Younger Avestan and Old Persian (ancient Iranian languages). A few words from another Indo-Aryan language (see Indo-Aryan superstrate in Mitanni) are attested in documents from the ancient Mitanni kingdom in northern Mesopotamia and Syria and the Hittite kingdom in Anatolia.’

Look at the spread of Sanskrit ,to Mesopotamia and Anatolia!

‘The Indo-European languages are a language family of several hundred related languages and dialects. There are about 445 living Indo-European languages, according to the estimate by Ethnologue, with over two-thirds (313) of them belonging to the Indo-Iranian branch.

Indo-European Family traces its history to Indo Iranian and Indo Iranian to Vedic Sanskrit!

Afroasiatic languages have their origins in Akkadian,Elamite and they are traced back to Tamil/Sanskrit.

( https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Afroasiatic_languages  )

Cameroonians speak Tamil even today.

Indo Semitic Group.

The Indo-Semitic hypothesis maintains that a genetic relationship exists between Indo-European and Semitic — that is, that the Indo-European and Semitic language families descend from a prehistoric language ancestral to them both. This theory has never been widely accepted by contemporary linguists in modern times, although historically it has had a number of supporting advocates and arguments, particularly in the 19th and 20th centuries.

‘According to Carleton T. Hodge (1998:318), a leading specialist of Afroasiatic, “The positing of a genetic connection between Indo-European and Semitic goes back at least as far as Richard Lepsius (1836)”.

The arguments presented for a relationship between Indo-European and Semitic in the 19th century were commonly rejected by Indo-Europeanists, including W.D. Whitney (1875) and August Schleicher.

The culmination of this first phase in Indo-Semitic studies was Hermann Möller’s comparative dictionary of Indo-European and Semitic, first published in Danish in 1909 (but usually cited in its German edition of 1911).

Sino Tibetan,Indo Australian languages go back to Sanskrit/Tamil..

So, it is not ‘Petty Nationalism’ but a statement of facts when I write on India,its History,People and its languages

Filed under: Hinduism, Language Tagged: Brahmi, Indian languages, Indo Asiatic Families, Indo European Families, Indo Iranian language families, Indo semitic group, Prakrit, sanskrit, Tamil, Tamil Brahmi