Re: Nostratic

From: Igor Sklar (yaroslavl_at_gmail.com)
Date: 09/18/04 

Date: 18 Sep 2004 02:21:19 -0700

John Atkinson wrote...
> Igor Sklar wrote...
> > QUOTE 2: The circumstances of the advent of Dravidian speakers in
> > India are shrouded in mystery. There are vague linguistic and cultural
> > ties with the Urals, with the Mediterranean area, and with Iran. It is
> > possible that a Dravidian-speaking people that can be described as
> > dolichocephalic (longheaded from front to back) Mediterraneans mixed
> > with brachycephalic (short-headed from front to back) Armenoids and
> > established themselves in northwestern India during the 4th millennium
> > BC. Along their route, these immigrants may have possibly come into an
> > intimate, prolonged contact with the Ural-Altaic speakers, thus
> > explaining the striking affinities between the Dravidian and
> > Ural-Altaic language groups.
>
> This quote is complete rubbish (except for the first sentence). There is no
> "Ural-Altaic" group. There are no "striking affinities" between Dravidian
> and either the Uralian or Altaic languages. There are typological
> similarities, which could equally be found between Dravidian and several
> other groups -- Quechuan is often quoted. Does this article have a date? I
> find it hard to believe that it could have been written by any reputable
> linguist within the last century.

The article's author is "Kamil V. Zvelebil. Professor of Dravidology,
State University of Utrecht, The Netherlands. Author of Comparative
Dravidian Phonology."

http://www.marketaz.co.uk/Zveleb1.html

Another quote from his article: "During the 1st millennium BC, while
Aryanization steadily progressed in north India, the
Dravidian-speaking newcomers began to mix with the Negritos and
Proto-Australoids in the south; this process of acculturation
continued during the period from approximately 1200 to 600 BC. Apart
from a possible Dravidian word in the Hebrew text of the Bible
(tukkhiyim "peacocks"; cf. Tamil tokai "tail of a peacock"), the
Dravidian languages enter history in Sanskrit and Greco-Roman texts.
The term dravida itself is almost certainly a Sanskritization (with an
inserted "hypercorrect" r) of the earlier Pali and Prakrit terms
damilo, damila, davida, which must have been derived from the Tamil
name of the language, tamil. A number of South Dravidian words, almost
all of them geographic and dynastic names, occur in such Greco-Roman
sources as the Periplus maris Erythraei ("Circumnavigation of the
Erythraean Sea") of about AD 89 and in the writing of Ptolemaeus of
Naukratis of the 2nd century AD; it is also very probable that
Western-language terms for rice (compare Italian riso, Latin oryza,
Greek oryza) and ginger (compare Italian zenzero, German Ingwer, Greek
zingiberis) are cultural loans from Old Tamil, in which they are arici
and icciver, respectively."

regards

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