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| Modern distribution of Indian languages |
Like many historians I use the term India, or sometimes Greater India, to mean then whole of the sub-continent, taking in the political territories of modern day Pakistan, India, Nepal, Sri Lanka, and Bangladesh. Given that the main languages of North India and Sri Lanka are all modern Indic Languages: Urdu, Panjabi, Hindi, Bihari, Bengali, Nepali, and Sinhala, the modern political divisions belie the common linguistic history they share. However we must be a little cautious. Language, ethnicity, and geography can be independent variables when discussing culture. This essay mainly concerns languages and the speakers of languages. We cannot be sure of the ethnicity of these people.
We know with some certainty that the speakers of Old Indic languages (now represented only by Vedic) came from outside India. This is an unpopular thesis amongst Indian Nationalists who try to make a case for Sanskrit arising in India and spreading out. Some would have us believe it is the original language (Cf Eco 1997). However the relationship of Old Indic with Old Iranian and a variety of other internal evidence show that Indo-Iranian -- an early offshoot from Proto-Indo-European that further split into two sub-families, Iranian and Indic -- was spoken by nomadic peoples of the Southern Central Asia. Old Indic is mostly distinguished from Old Iranian by a few sound changes. Later grammatical forms drifted apart as well, though the attested languages, Vedic and Avestan, were closely related.
Comparative linguists showed in the late 18th century that Greek, Latin and Sanskrit are all so similar that they must have derived from a common ancestor. That hypothetical languages is nowadays called Proto-Indo-European (PIE) and the language family that it spawned is called Indo-European (IE). PIE also has a Germanic branch giving rise to all the Germanic languages (including English), a Slavonic branch incorporating all the Slavic languages, and takes in many of the languages of Iran and Afghanistan, not to mention Armenian. In addition we have written evidence of a number of now dead Indo-European languages such as Tocharian and Khotanese from Central Asia. By comparing the changes in many languages, linguists are able to describe pragmatic 'rules' which describe how sounds and forms of words change. This procedure has been very successful in some areas. PIE is probably the best example. But the Sino-Tibetan language family also gives a clear view of the proto language that underlies them all.
There have been efforts of varying success to try to cover all the languages of the world in this way. And this has naturally lead some scholars to propose a further ancient layer of relatedness. So for example there is the conjectured Nostratic proto-language (or macro-family) that takes in Afroasiatic (including the Semitic languages), Kartvelian (Caucasian languages and possibly Basque), Indo-European, Uralic (including Finno-Ugric), Dravidian, Altaic (covering the Turkish, Central Asian, and probably Korean and Japanese), and Eskimo–Aleut. These macro-families are still controversial, though many of the objections are ideological rather than logical.
A major branch of the PIE family is Indo-Iranian taking in languages that were spoken throughout the combined sphere of influence of Persia and India, taking in large swathes of Central Asia. In this essay I will refer to the Indian branch of the PIE or Indo-Iranian as Indic. It has previously referred to as Aryan or Indo-Aryan but these terms have been deprecated because of the racial overtones of the word aryan and the discrediting of old ideas about race. Indic is strictly a linguistic term that gives us no information about ethnicity. We can talk about three phases of Indic: Old - principally attested as Vedic though other variations must have existed (before ca. 500 BCE); Middle - attested by Pāḷi, Gāndhārī, and Apabramsa (ca 500 BCE - 1000 CE); and New or Modern (emerging in the last millennia).
A major branch of the PIE family is Indo-Iranian taking in languages that were spoken throughout the combined sphere of influence of Persia and India, taking in large swathes of Central Asia. In this essay I will refer to the Indian branch of the PIE or Indo-Iranian as Indic. It has previously referred to as Aryan or Indo-Aryan but these terms have been deprecated because of the racial overtones of the word aryan and the discrediting of old ideas about race. Indic is strictly a linguistic term that gives us no information about ethnicity. We can talk about three phases of Indic: Old - principally attested as Vedic though other variations must have existed (before ca. 500 BCE); Middle - attested by Pāḷi, Gāndhārī, and Apabramsa (ca 500 BCE - 1000 CE); and New or Modern (emerging in the last millennia).
When the speakers of Old Indic crossed the Hindu Kush and entered India, ca 1700-1500 BCE, they met people who spoke languages with a much longer history in Greater India.
There is a whole family of Dravidian languages for example, including Tamil, Telegu, Malayalam, and Kannada. Today the people who speak languages from the Dravidian family are a large minority (about 20%). Some linguists (eg. McAlpin 1974, 1975, 1981) have noted a similarity between Dravidian and the language spoken in ancient Elam, near what is now the border of Iran and Iraq on the Red Sea. Written records of Elamite stretch back to 3000 BCE. McAlpin et al believe that Dravidian speakers split off from Elamite speakers and entered Indian very early, perhaps 4000 BC. Others are more doubtful (Blench 2008), dismissing the evidence for flimsy and pointing out affiliations with other language groups as well.
There is a whole family of Dravidian languages for example, including Tamil, Telegu, Malayalam, and Kannada. Today the people who speak languages from the Dravidian family are a large minority (about 20%). Some linguists (eg. McAlpin 1974, 1975, 1981) have noted a similarity between Dravidian and the language spoken in ancient Elam, near what is now the border of Iran and Iraq on the Red Sea. Written records of Elamite stretch back to 3000 BCE. McAlpin et al believe that Dravidian speakers split off from Elamite speakers and entered Indian very early, perhaps 4000 BC. Others are more doubtful (Blench 2008), dismissing the evidence for flimsy and pointing out affiliations with other language groups as well.
Less well known is the Austroasiatic family. This family of languages extends from the North-east of India to Vietnam. One Indian branch of this widely geographically spread out family, is Munda, with several languages spoken in small pockets of India today, but probably more widespread in the past. In Burma there is a strong overlay of Tibeto-Burman languages that descended from the north, but there are still enclaves of Austroasiatic speakers as well. Genetic studies of Austroasiatic speakers suggest that the Austroasiatic language family may have arisen in India and spread east.
Additionally there are a number of languages in India that appear to be unrelated to any known languages. These language isolates, as they are called, are found in the so-called tribal peoples who seem never to have been assimilated into the mainstream of Indian culture (in other words they were never Brahmanised).
Michael Witzel's exploration of the linguistic history of India begins by establishing his parameters, most important for the purposes of this essay is the periods of composition of the Ṛgveda (1999: 3).
- I. The early Ṛgvedic period: c. 1700–1500 BCE: books (maṇḍala) 4, 5, 6, and maybe book 2, with the early hymns referring to the Yadu-Turvaśa, Anu-Druhyu tribes;
- II. The middle (main) Ṛgvedic period, c. 1500–1350 BCE: books 3, 7, 8. 1–66 and 1.51–191; with a focus on the Bharata chieftain Sudās and his ancestors, and his rivals, notably Trasadasyu, of the closely related Pūru tribe.
- III. The late Ṛgvedic period, c. 1350–1200 BCE: books 1.1–50, 8.67–103, 10.1–854; 10.85–191: with the descendant of the Pūru chieftain Trasadasyu, Kuruśravana, and the emergence of the super-tribe of the Kuru (under the post-RV Parikṣit).
These layers of composition have been established on the basis of "internal criteria of textual arrangement, of the ‘royal’ lineages, and independently from these, those of the poets (ṛṣis) who composed the hymns. About both groups of persons we know enough to be able to establish pedigrees which sustain each other." (1999: 3).
Dutch Indologist, F. B. J. Kuiper, had already identified some 383 words in the Ṛgveda that are not Indic and must be loan words from another language family. We know this because they break the phonetic rules of Indic languages. We can use an example from English to demonstrate this. We have a word ptolemaic, which comes from the Egyptian name Ptolemy. It refers to a particular view of the world as earth-centred. Now we know that ptolemaic cannot be a native English word because English words cannot start with /pt/, and indeed native English speakers cannot easily pronounce this sound combination and tend to just say /t/. It is clues like this that linguists use to identify loan words. And we have to take into account that loan words are often naturalised. Many loans words in English are Anglicized. So another loan word like chocolate has been altered to fit English spelling patterns from an original spelling more like xocolātl, which clearly breaks English phonetic rules. We also have a number of Yiddish loan words like shlemiel, shlep, shlock, shmaltz, shmuck, and shnoozle, etc, that defy, but also to some extent redefine English spelling. Similarly no other Indic language has retroflex consonants (ṭ, ṭh, ḍ, ḍh, ṇ, ṣ), but Old Indic absorbed these from languages it met in India and they became a naturalised aspect of the Indic phonology by the time the Ṛgveda was composed.
It's not always possible to identify where a loan word has come from. But Kuiper and Witzel manage to identify most of the 300 words as belonging to Proto-Dravidian or Proto-Munda, with a few from other language families like Tibeto-Burman.
Perhaps the most striking finding that Witzel gives, repeatedly in his essay, is that in the early Ṛgvedic period there are no loan words from Dravidian, e.g.
"It is important to note that RV level I has no Dravidian loan words at all (details, below § 1.6); they begin to appear only in RV level II and III." (Witzel 1999: 6)
Ṛgvedic loans from Drav[idian] are visible, but they also are now datable only to middle and late Ṛgvedic (in the Greater Panjab), and they can both the localized and dated for the Post-Ṛgvedic texts. (Witzel 1999: 19)
This is an important finding. The landscape of the Ṛgveda is that of modern day Panjab. This is clear, for example, from the names of rivers that are mentioned, e.g. the Kabul, Indus, Sarasvati (now dried up) and Yamuna rivers.
Loan words from the earliest period are from the Austroasiatic language family, meaning that the people living in this area when the Vedic speakers arrived, spoke a variety of proto-Munda. This is important because it is believed that the people living in this area were the descendants of the collapsed Indus Valley Civilisation (IVC). They had scattered as the climate became much drier and caused their large scale cities to be unlivable. The IVC had disappeared by 1700 BCE. If the people of the Panjab ca 1500 BCE spoke a variety of proto-Munda, this strongly suggests that the people of the IVC also spoke an Austroasiatic language, rather than is usually supposed, a Dravidian on even Indic language. Indian nationalists often assume that the IVC spoke Sanskrit, but this was never plausible. Interestingly the very name we have for the north of this region, Gandhāra, is itself an Austroasiatic loan word.
It's often suggested that because there are northern pockets of Dravidian speakers, with whom the Vedic speakers presumably interacted, that Dravidian was once considerably more widespread and perhaps that the language of the IVC was Dravidian. The loan words in the Ṛgveda argue against this view. The north-western pockets of Dravidian could be isolated populations left behind by the migration of Dravidian speakers into Southern India from Mesopotamia. Those in the North-East are more consistent with a previously larger territory, but if they were ever on the Ganges Plain they were forced out of it completely, leaving remnant populations only as far north as mountain ranges on the southern edge of the Ganges Valley.
Loan words from the earliest period are from the Austroasiatic language family, meaning that the people living in this area when the Vedic speakers arrived, spoke a variety of proto-Munda. This is important because it is believed that the people living in this area were the descendants of the collapsed Indus Valley Civilisation (IVC). They had scattered as the climate became much drier and caused their large scale cities to be unlivable. The IVC had disappeared by 1700 BCE. If the people of the Panjab ca 1500 BCE spoke a variety of proto-Munda, this strongly suggests that the people of the IVC also spoke an Austroasiatic language, rather than is usually supposed, a Dravidian on even Indic language. Indian nationalists often assume that the IVC spoke Sanskrit, but this was never plausible. Interestingly the very name we have for the north of this region, Gandhāra, is itself an Austroasiatic loan word.
It's often suggested that because there are northern pockets of Dravidian speakers, with whom the Vedic speakers presumably interacted, that Dravidian was once considerably more widespread and perhaps that the language of the IVC was Dravidian. The loan words in the Ṛgveda argue against this view. The north-western pockets of Dravidian could be isolated populations left behind by the migration of Dravidian speakers into Southern India from Mesopotamia. Those in the North-East are more consistent with a previously larger territory, but if they were ever on the Ganges Plain they were forced out of it completely, leaving remnant populations only as far north as mountain ranges on the southern edge of the Ganges Valley.
Conclusion
The picture that emerges is that Old Indic speaking people crossed the Hindu Kush in small numbers and met people who spoke a form of proto-Austroasiatic; and then later, perhaps as they penetrated further into the sub-continent, people who spoke proto-Dravidian languages. The Dravidian speakers, themselves probably immigrants had lived in India for some thousands of years already, displacing and assimilating even earlier waves of human migrants. The pockets of people who speak language isolates, not related to any known language, have presumably lived in India for a very long time. Indeed they often pursue a hunter-gatherer lifestyle that reinforces this impression.
Other authors have suggested that the Old Indic speakers had the advantage of superior technology and this led them to dominate the original inhabitants. We can't really know how it happened at this distant time, but in any case Indic languages came to dominate the North of India - from Afghanistan to the Ganges Delta. Again it is worth repeating that language, culture, and location may not be correlated. To the extent that we can make comparisons, there were a few surviving similarities between the people who composed the Ṛgveda and those who composed the Avesta. But in many respects their cultures had diverged along with their languages. Zoroastrianism was the major innovation in Iran, although the dates of the founder are difficult to pin down, the most likely scenario places him a little after the Ṛgveda. Based on informal comments by Michael Witzel, I have argued for an trickle of Iranian tribes entering India ca. 1000-800 BCE, who ended up settling on the margins of the Central Ganges city states of the second urbanisation, especially Kosala and Magadha (Attwood 2012). Genetic studies suggest that though their language came to be spoken throughout the Panjab and down into the Ganges Valley, that the Vedic speakers contributed little to the gene pool, which is remarkably homogeneous in India. The genetic contribution is far less striking than we might imagine by patterns of culture or language family (Attwood 2012).
This poses a difficulty for Indian Nationalists who want Sanskrit to be the mother tongue of India (I'm not sure how they fit Dravidian into the picture) and for it to have originated within the subcontinent. People with this view often express their hatred of Michael Witzel, referring to him in extremely uncomplimentary terms. But as rational people we have to follow the evidence and allow it to guide us to conclusions, even when these are uncomfortable for us. And the evidence is abundantly clear in this case. If any language is the mother tongue then it is probably Proto-Austroasiatic, the ancestor of the modern Munda and Austroasiatic languages. Sanskrit developed from Indo-Iranian, initially somewhere in Greater Iran, then was carried into India with Vedic speaking migrants. Since we know they were nomadic cattle herders (unlike, say, the Śākyas who were settled agriculturalists) they may have made the journey up the Khyber Pass seeking greener pastures.
In Attwood (2012) I tried to show that certain important features of early Indian Buddhist culture could be tied to Zoroastrianism and/or Iran. Unfortunately all too often the history of the region is divided into Indian and Iranian by academics. And thus I fear that many connections between the two regions have been overlooked. The connections that are evident seem to demand more attention from suitably qualified scholars. We know a great deal about the interactions of Greece and Persia, but far too little about relations between Persia and India.
This poses a difficulty for Indian Nationalists who want Sanskrit to be the mother tongue of India (I'm not sure how they fit Dravidian into the picture) and for it to have originated within the subcontinent. People with this view often express their hatred of Michael Witzel, referring to him in extremely uncomplimentary terms. But as rational people we have to follow the evidence and allow it to guide us to conclusions, even when these are uncomfortable for us. And the evidence is abundantly clear in this case. If any language is the mother tongue then it is probably Proto-Austroasiatic, the ancestor of the modern Munda and Austroasiatic languages. Sanskrit developed from Indo-Iranian, initially somewhere in Greater Iran, then was carried into India with Vedic speaking migrants. Since we know they were nomadic cattle herders (unlike, say, the Śākyas who were settled agriculturalists) they may have made the journey up the Khyber Pass seeking greener pastures.
In Attwood (2012) I tried to show that certain important features of early Indian Buddhist culture could be tied to Zoroastrianism and/or Iran. Unfortunately all too often the history of the region is divided into Indian and Iranian by academics. And thus I fear that many connections between the two regions have been overlooked. The connections that are evident seem to demand more attention from suitably qualified scholars. We know a great deal about the interactions of Greece and Persia, but far too little about relations between Persia and India.
~~oOo~~
Bibliography
Attwood, Jayarava. (2012) Possible Iranian Origins for Sākyas and Aspects of Buddhism. Journal of the Oxford Centre for Buddhist Studies. 3.
Blench, Roger (2008) Re-evaluating the linguistic prehistory of South Asia. Toshiki OSADA and Akinori UESUGI eds. 2008. Occasional Paper 3: Linguistics, Archaeology and the Human Past. pp. 159-178. Kyoto: Indus Project, Research Institute for Humanity and Nature.
Eco, Umberto. (1997) The Search for the Perfect Language. London: Fontana Press.
McAlpin, David W. (1974) Toward Proto-Elamo-Dravidian. Language 50: 89-101.
McAlpin, David W. (1975) Elamite and Dravidian: Further Evidence of Relationship. Current Anthropology 16: 105-115.
McAlpin, David W. (1981) Proto Elamo Dravidian: The Evidence and Its Implications. American Philosophy Society.
Witzel, Michael. (1999) Substrate Languages in Old Indo-Aryan: Ṛgvedic, Middle and Late Vedic. Electronic Journal of Vedic Studies. 5(1): 1–67.
3 comments:
"We know a great deal about the interactions of Greece and Persia, but far too little about relations between Persia and India."
Thomas McEvilley in the Shape of Ancient Thought in the first two chapters discusses a lot of possible transit points between early Iranian and Indian civilizations. It goes back beyond that, too, since there's records it seems of trade between Mesopotamia and Harappa. There's also Akkadian loanwords, he says, to be seen in Vedic literature:
"In India in the late second millennium – the Middle Vedic period in terms of Sanskrit literary history – the reexpanding trade with the Near East brought with it elements of cultural diffusion. Contact with the Mesopotamian cultural stream may have left significant traces in the pantheistic hymns, of a type found widely in the Near East, in the the tenth book of the Rg Veda and in the appearance of Akkadian words in the Atharva Veda, both of which seem to have been taking shape at about the time the Neat Eastern trade was revived."
Thomas McEvilley, 29.
Also...
"The India macranthropic hymns begin to appear in the tenth book of the Rg Veda, in the Middle Vedic period (roughly 1000 B.C.). At the same time, the Atharva Veda shows Akkadian loan-words and remnants of Akkadian mythological names. In the Puruṣasūkta, or Hymn to the Cosmic Person, in the tenth book of the Rg Veda (X.90), the universe is described as a giant human body. The structure of the hymns parallels Akkadian examples in its tendency to allegorize the body of the pantheos from the top down."
Thomas McEvilley, 26.
A lot of Hindu and Buddhist numerology and timekeeping are sexagesimal, which is characteristic of Babylonian mathematics, and/or related somehow to Mesopotamia. For example in the Śārdūlakarṇāvadāna (in Chinese translation) there's the following definition of time units given: 1 kṣaṇa is the time it takes a lady to spin one xun 尋 of thread. 60 kṣaṇa equal 1 lava. 30 lava equal one unit (muhūrta). 30 muhūrta equal 1 day and night. Other measurements given are specifically of Magadha such as the māgadha-yojana, so presumably this was from the Magadha region. Pingree looked at the Sanskrit version and concluded a date of around 100 CE.
In any case, I think such influences go back further. It is likely that a lot of interactions started happening around 500 BCE when the Indus Valley was occupied by the Persians. There's the question of when and how Babylonian astronomy and mathematics ended up in India early on. It seems out of the question that Brahmins went and learnt how to read Cuneiform, so the likely answer is that the knowledge was transmitted through Aramaic. This makes sense in light of how Brāhmī was probably modeled on Aramaic.
Continued...
Anyway, have you ever seen this work?
Malati J. Shendge, The Language of the Harappans: From Akkadian to Sanskrit. New Delhi, India: Abhinav Publications, 1997.
Her theory is that the Harappans spoke Akkadian. She discerns over 400 words in both Sanskrit and Akkadian with comparable semantic and phonetic similarities, including the names of famous deities like Uma, Śiva, Viṭhobā and Vitthala, as well as kinship terminology for the Asuras, names for body parts and various other words (for example sūnu (son) in Sanskrit corresponds to Akkadian Śumu).
I found this personal name correspondence rather curious:
1. Kaśyapaḥ:
Kaśyapo Māricaḥ, PN composer of RV I.99, VIII.29; Rebhaḥ Kaśyapaḥ, family name of the composer of RV VIII.97. With this, cp. Sum. Kaššeba, king (priest-king?), Akk. Kaššāpu, sorcerer, (denotes sun-god Šamaš), also kašāpu, to use charms, bewitch, OB on, Kaššeba (=Šamaš)
In Indian sources, the name was borne by the husband of Aditi and father of the Ādityas (Varuṇa, Mitra, etc. seven). He was obviously a very ancient mythical personage who was connected with creation.
Her conclusion is difficult to accept, but then Mesopotamian loanwords in Sanskrit make sense, especially if Vedic Sanskrit speakers migrated from that region and/or were heavily influenced by Mesopotamian civilizations.
Interesting post. The linguistic history of India really is informative about its history. Hopefully one day the Indus Valley script will be cracked (if it even can be...)
Strange - my own comment here is lost. But at the same time I did not see your 2/2 comment. Anyway it's easy enough to repeat my comments.
I find all this similarity between languages stuff utterly tedious, when it is not accompanied by proper scholarship. Have a look at Witzel's article introduction for what I mean - e.e. Whorf's formulas encapsulating the morphology of Sanskrit words. One cannot simply choose words that look the same. That's not how it works. FFS Vedic kaśyapa means *turtle*! How does the author miss this simple fact? And Witzel actually mentions this word - so you could have fact checked it. It is of Central Asian origin (p.55)
"kaśyapa / kasiiapa ‘turtle’, Sogdian kyšph, NP. kašaf, kaš(a)p ‘tortoise’; cf. Kashaf Rūd, a river in Turkmenistan and Khorasan;"
You couldn't have picked a better example to discredit Shengde. She's an idiot or disingenuous, or both.
I leafed through three standard texts on Indo-European linguistics. No mention of Akkadian in any of them. Kuiper and Witzel find a small handful of words that occur in both Avestan and Vedic indicating a brief contact in the Indo-Iranian stage or Bactria-Margiana Complex (ca 2100-1900 BC). No loan words *at all* from Akkadian in the early Vedic period. Nor later.
In fact there is no reliable evidence of contact between Vedic and Akkadian. And why should there be any? They were thousands of miles apart, long before the Persians had any dealings with either (before there were Persians even)! On the other hand there is reliable evidence that at least some people in Panjab spoke proto-Munda during the first stage of composition of the Ṛgveda. And that the collapsing IVC migrated north into the Panjab. Ergo...
As far as McEvilley is concerned I see no sign of any Akkadian loan words in the Atharvaveda either. Which authority is he citing for this? None that I have come across. He also seems to be confusing Akkadian and Persian. Persian influence we can understand because we have direct evidence of cultural contacts between them at around the right time. Never-the-less the number of Persian loanwords in Vedic is tiny - less than Munda or Dravidian even. Where is the evidence of contact between Akkadia and India? Given the distance we'd expect considerably less linguistic influence from Akkadian than from Dravidian, and your sources are saying that it is considerable more? It's just not credible.
Re the giant who creates the earth, again it's worth referring to Witzel, this time his book The Origins of the World's Mythologies. He shows that this is a standard Laurasian mythic theme found in many places around the world. Again McEvilley takes a a superficial similarity out of context and makes a massive generalisation. This is not good quality scholarship. It's rubbish.
The more I hear about McEvilley the less reliable he seems when it comes to India. He's not much better than a crackpot. I wish people would stop citing him without doing some basic fact checking!
Re sexigesimal time keeping. You may recall from my essay on this that there was no mention of standard times in any Pāḷi source of any time - at best we see references to the three watches of the night, but there is no description of how this is worked out or if they amount to equal periods even. One commentarial note (5th century Sri Lanka) did say that every monastery divided the day into a different number of time periods according to their own desires. So it seems to me that any influence on time keeping probably came with the Sassanians if not considerably later.
You're wasting my time with this stuff.
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