Franklin C. Southworth | |
---|---|
Born | 1929 |
Nationality | American |
Occupation | Linguist |
Academic background | |
Academic work | |
Institutions | University of Pennsylvania |
Main interests | Dravidian languages |
Franklin C. Southworth (born 1929) [1] is an American linguist and Professor Emeritus of South Asian linguistics at the University of Pennsylvania. [2]
Brahui is a Dravidian language spoken by some of the Brahui people. The language is spoken primarily in the central part of the Balochistan Province of Pakistan,with smaller communities of speakers scattered in parts of Irani Baluchestan,Afghanistan and Turkmenistan and by expatriate Brahui communities in Iraq,Qatar and United Arab Emirates. It is isolated from the nearest Dravidian-speaking neighbour population of South India by a distance of more than 1,500 kilometres (930 mi). The Kalat,Khuzdar,Mastung,Quetta,Bolan,Nasirabad,Nushki,and Kharan districts of Balochistan Province are predominantly Brahui-speaking.
The Dravidian languages are a family of languages spoken by 250 million people,mainly in southern India,north-east Sri Lanka,and south-west Pakistan. Since the colonial era,there have been small but significant immigrant communities of speakers of those languages in Mauritius,Myanmar,Singapore,Malaysia,Indonesia,Philippines,United Kingdom,Australia,France,Canada,Germany,South Africa,and the United States.
In historical linguistics,the homeland or Urheimat of a proto-language is the region in which it was spoken before splitting into different daughter languages. A proto-language is the reconstructed or historically-attested parent language of a group of languages that are genetically related.
The Elamo-Dravidian language family is a hypothesised language family that links the Dravidian languages of Pakistan,and Southern India to the extinct Elamite language of ancient Elam. Linguist David McAlpin has been a chief proponent of the Elamo-Dravidian hypothesis. The hypothesis has gained attention in academic circles,but has been subject to serious criticism by linguists,and remains only one of several scenarios for the origins of the Dravidian languages. Elamite is generally accepted by scholars to be a language isolate,unrelated to any other known language.
Mleccha is a Sanskrit term,initially referring to those of an incomprehensible speech,later foreign or barbarous invaders as contra-distinguished from elite groups.
Indo-Iranian peoples,also known as Indo-Iranic peoples by scholars,and sometimes as Arya or Aryans from their self-designation,were a group of Indo-European peoples who brought the Indo-Iranian languages,a major branch of the Indo-European language family,to major parts of Eurasia in the second part of the 3rd millennium BCE. They eventually branched out into Iranian peoples and Indo-Aryan peoples,predominantly in the geographical subregion of Southern Asia.
Jim G. Shaffer is an American archaeologist and professor of anthropology at Case Western Reserve University.
The Indo-Aryan migrations were the migrations into the Indian subcontinent of Indo-Aryan peoples,an ethnolinguistic group that spoke Indo-Aryan languages,the predominant languages of today's North India,Pakistan,Nepal,Bangladesh,Sri Lanka and the Maldives. Indo-Aryan population movements into the region from Central Asia are considered to have started after 2000 BCE,as a slow diffusion during the Late Harappan period,which led to a language shift in the northern Indian subcontinent. Several hundred years later,the Iranian languages were brought into the Iranian plateau by the Iranians,who were closely related to the Indo-Aryans.
Proto-Dravidian is the linguistic reconstruction of the common ancestor of the Dravidian languages. It is thought to have differentiated into Proto-North Dravidian,Proto-Central Dravidian,and Proto-South Dravidian,although the date of diversification is still debated.
Asko Parpola is a Finnish Indologist,current professor emeritus of South Asian studies at the University of Helsinki. He specializes in Sindhology,specifically the study of the Indus script.
Vedic Sanskrit has a number of linguistic features which are alien to most other Indo-European languages. Prominent examples include:phonologically,the introduction of retroflexes,which alternate with dentals,and morphologically,the formation of gerunds. Some philologists attribute such features,as well as the presence of non-Indo-European vocabulary,to a local substratum of languages encountered by Indo-Aryan peoples in Central Asia (Bactria-Marghiana) and within the Indian subcontinent,including the Dravidian languages.
Indigenous Aryanism,also known as the Indigenous Aryans theory (IAT) and the Out of India theory (OIT),is the conviction that the Aryans are indigenous to the Indian subcontinent,and that the Indo-European languages radiated out from a homeland in India into their present locations. It is a "religio-nationalistic" view on Indian history,and propagated as an alternative to the established migration model,which considers the Pontic–Caspian steppe to be the area of origin of the Indo-European languages.
The People of Assam inhabit a multi-ethnic,multi-linguistic and multi-religious society. They speak languages that belong to four main language groups:Tibeto-Burman,Indo-Aryan,Tai-Kadai,and Austroasiatic. The large number of ethnic and linguistic groups,the population composition,and the peopling process in the state has led to it being called an "India in miniature".
The Dravidian peoples,or Dravidians,are an ethnolinguistic and cultural group living in South Asia who predominantly speak any of the Dravidian languages. There are around 250 million native speakers of Dravidian languages. Dravidian speakers form the majority of the population of South India and are natively found in India,Pakistan,Afghanistan,Bangladesh,the Maldives,Nepal,Bhutan and Sri Lanka. Dravidian peoples are also present in Singapore,Malaysia,South Africa,Myanmar,East Africa,the Caribbean,and the United Arab Emirates through recent migration.
The Harappan language is the unknown language or languages of the Bronze Age Harappan civilization. The language being unattested in any readable contemporary source,hypotheses regarding its nature are reduced to purported loanwords and substratum influence,notably the substratum in Vedic Sanskrit and a few terms recorded in Sumerian cuneiform,in conjunction with analyses of the undeciphered Indus script.
The peopling of India refers to the migration of Homo sapiens into the Indian subcontinent. Anatomically modern humans settled India in multiple waves of early migrations,over tens of millennia. The first migrants came with the Coastal Migration/Southern Dispersal 65,000 years ago,whereafter complex migrations within south and southeast Asia took place. West-Asian (Iranian) hunter-gatherers migrated to South Asia after the Last Glacial Period but before the onset of farming. Together with a minor number of ancient South Asian hunter-gatherers they formed the population of the Indus Valley civilisation (IVC).
Old Tamil is the period of the Tamil language spanning from 300 BCE to 700 CE. Prior to Old Tamil,the period of Tamil linguistic development is termed as Pre Tamil. After the Old Tamil period,Tamil becomes Middle Tamil. The earliest records in Old Tamil are inscriptions from between the 3rd and 1st century BCE in caves and on pottery. These inscriptions are written in a variant of the Brahmi script called Tamil Brahmi. The earliest long text in Old Tamil is the Tolkāppiyam,an early work on Tamil grammar and poetics,whose oldest layers could be as old as the mid 2nd century BCE. Old Tamil preserved many features of Proto-Dravidian,the earliest reconstructed form of the Dravidian including inventory of consonants,the syllable structure,and various grammatical features.
The Indo-European migrations were hypothesized migrations of Proto-Indo-European language (PIE) speakers,and subsequent migrations of people speaking derived Indo-European languages,which took place approx. 4000 to 1000 BCE,potentially explaining how these languages came to be spoken across a large area of Eurasia,from India and Iran,to Europe.
Tamil loanwords in Ancient Greek came about due to the interactions of Mediterranean and South Indian merchants. Tamil loanwords entered the Greek language during different periods in history. Most words had to do with items of trade that were unique to South India. There is a general consensus about Tamil loanwords in Ancient Greek,while a few of the words have competing etymologies.
The Inner–Outer hypothesis of the subclassification of the Indo-Aryan language family argues for a division of the family into two groups,an Inner core and an Outer periphery,evidenced by shared traits of the languages falling into one of the two groups. Proponents of the theory generally believe the distinction to be the result of gradual migrations of Indo-Aryan speakers into India,with the inner languages representing a second wave of migration speaking a different dialect of Old Indo-Aryan,overtaking the first-wave speakers in the center and relegating them to the outer region.