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How to count every language in India (2018)

atlasobscura.com

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Re: How to count every language in India (2018)

#21

There is a widespread misconception about India's National language as being Hindi. Article 343 of the Constitution prescribes Hindi as written in Devanagari script as the official language of the government along with English. The Constitution, however, did not declare Hindi as the national language or any other language. Hindi does not have any special privilege than any other state languages like Tamil, Telugu, Ma…

This is just nonsense. Hindi has nothing to do with caste system. Hindi was promoted because of the need for a common language for a nation with 300+ official languages (not counting the dialects) - as it's the language that is most commonly spoke and understood. It's again absolutely nonsense about BJP/RSS. In the recent times the only party that worked for the poor/lower castes/class is BJP. Most regional parties w…

> Hindi was promoted because of the need for a common language for a nation with 300+ official languages (not counting the dialects) - as it's the language that is most commonly spoke and understood

I thought that English actually served that purpose even in India (unofficially).

Re: How to count every language in India (2018)

#22
post #15
post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Why should the lingua franca of any country be a foreign language, it should be a local language. Hindi fits the bill My understanding is that this is (or was) contested in the south. While Hindi is (as you say) large and local, it's also specifically northern. (The southern languages are very different, non-indo-european.) The counter-argument for English is that, while foreign, at least it's equally foreign all r…

Yes I believe that is correct. The opposition is mostly political in nature. Also, only Tamil has a non-Sanskrit origin and is completely different. Other South Indian languages do have Sanskrit origin/influence. Which is possibly why Tamil Nadu is the most anti-Hindi state.

> Also, only Tamil has a non-Sanskrit origin and is completely different. Other South Indian languages do have Sanskrit origin/influence.

Recent scholarship around this paints a very different and complicated picture of interactions between Dravidian and Indo-Iranian languages. Specifically, there is evidence that Indo-Iranian speakers and Dravidian speakers exchanged vocabulary even before Sanskrit and Tamil branched off from their parent languages.

From Rice in Dravidian by Franklin Southworth [0]:

> The reconstructed vocabulary of Proto-Dravidian depicts a society whose main source of food is animals and their products. Though the speakers of Proto-Dravidian had some knowledge of agriculture, the absence of reconstructible names for cereals strongly suggests that they were not sedentary farmers at this stage—rather, they were probably herders of sheep and cattle, supplementing their diet with grains and other agricultural products through gathering, trade, and occasional periods of sedentism. The first association of Dravidian speakers with a specific cereal is signaled by the occurrence of the word gōdhūma “wheat” in Vedic Sanskrit, a word derived from a Proto-Zagrosian word meaning “stand of grain”. This word, along with other Dravidian-derived words relevant to agriculture (words for “fruit” and “field, threshing ground”, “joint of plant”) and animals (words for “sheep”, “ass”, “hoof”) suggests a significant role for Dravidian speakers in Indus Valley agriculture. As the distribution of these words in modern Indo-Aryan languages—with cognate forms in Dardic and/or Nuristani languages—is similar to that of inherited words like Old Indo-Aryan “brother” (4 Nuristani, 16 Dardic cognates) or “mother” (four Dardic cognates), it is reasonable to assume that the initial contact between Indo-Aryan and Dravidian speakers took place outside of the Indus Valley, in parts of Iran, Afghanistan, or Turkmenistan, probably at a time when Dravidian speakers were involved in wheat cultivation. Chronologically, this might have been anywhere “from about 3500 BC onwards”, in Bellwood’s words (2005:334, see also Bellwood 2009). The presence of cognates of some of these loans in Iranian languages suggests that both Indo-Aryan and Iranian-speaking groups may have been involved in early interactions with Dravidian speakers.

> By the mid-third millennium BCE, Dravidian had become the dominant language of the Southern Neolithic; the Dravidian languages had split into North Dravidian and Peninsular Dravidian, and the latter was further divided into four subgroups. The Southern Neolithic was “…a system that combined animal husbandry—including the well-known cattle pens (Allchin 1963)—with a new package of crops, of which the staples were legumes and millets, a description applicable to the diet of most South Indians today” (Southworth and McAlpin 2012, unpublished). Its main cereal crops were two millets, bristley foxtail (Setaria verticillata) and browntop (Brachiaria ramosa), whose names were either taken from some unknown language(s) or derived from existing Dravidian words such as ko rr - “food” DEDR 2171. Since South India is not a suitable climate for wheat cultivation, the old word for “wheat” was no longer even a memory, surviving only as Tamil kūlam, a generic term for “grain”, and a few related words in Gondi-Kui (DEDR 1906). When Dravidian speakers today refer to wheat, they use a form borrowed from Sanskrit godhūma, such as Tamil gōdume.

> Contrary to Southworth’s claim (2009) that the language of the Southern Neolithic was a form of “late Proto-Dravidian” (equivalent to what is now being called “Peninsular Dravidian”), it now appears that the Southern Neolithic involved a coming together of various subgroups of Proto-Peninsular Dravidian which had already separated some time previously, had been in intermittent contact over a long period in the interim as each branch developed its own unique crop package, and ultimately pooled their resources to create the collection of crops identified in the Southern Neolithic.

> Regarding rice: the Proto-Peninsular Dravidian word vari-(n)ci, which probably originally had the meaning “seed, grain”, appears first as a word for “barley” in two Nuristani languages. The contact that produced the Nuristani words is perhaps dateable to the same period as that of the word for “wheat”: any time from about 3500 BCE onwards. Lacking evidence to the contrary, it seems reasonable to assume that Dravidian-speaking farmers became part of the population of the Indus Valley from about that time. That they retained that role for a long period of time is shown by the appearance of the OIA words vrīhi “paddy” and “threshed (husked/unhusked) rice” in about 1200 BCE, and by the later replacement of these words by another Dravidian loanword, cāmala/cāvala, a millennium or so later. Additional evidence may come from other names of cereals: for example, Dravidian *co nn al “millet” is the probable source of the late Sanskrit yavanāla (reshaped under the influence of OIA yava “barley”), the source of modern Indo-Aryan words for “sorghum” such as Marathi

[0] https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s12284-011-9076-9

Re: How to count every language in India (2018)

#24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> With so many, where do you draw the line? The whole issue of language v/s dialect is a complex one; but I have adjusted to the one in this popular article [1]: if you speak a language and can enter into a conversation with a speaker of a variation on that language relatively easily, it qualifies as a dialect. > A Mandarin-speaker can no more “adjust” to Cantonese than a Swede could “adjust” to German. Most of the w…

At least with Hindi and Tamil, you can be sure because they come from different language families.

True. This may sound obvious to you, but I am not so sure about its obviousness in general in the West.

A lot of western-educated people have asked me “So Hindi is the main language, and there are a lot of different dialects throughout the country, right?” – and I have no idea where to begin explaining that it's nothing like that, so I go with the time-tested “Well, it's slightly different...”

Re: How to count every language in India (2018)

#25
The notion of an 'old language' is weird. What does that even mean? Why is Bo one of the oldest languages? Is Greek old? Is English old? Is Lithuanian old? Is Tamil old? Korean? Chinese (which one?)? Any language? If your answer is 'yes', then (a) please explain what you mean, and (b) rest assured that it is not the same language today as when it was 'young' (whatever that means) -- 'young X' is probably a different language than 'old X', but what does that mean for 'X'? I don't get it.

Such a weird notion. It seems to me that 'old' for a language is often used to imply that it is 'important' (culturally? presumably yes.), which feels, well, not racist, but maybe 'linguist' -- OK, that word is already occupied... Even fighting exists about which language is 'oldest' -- could you please make up the rules of the game before playing?

Anyway -- this is just me not understanding what people mean.

Re: How to count every language in India (2018)

#26
post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes I believe that is correct. The opposition is mostly political in nature. Also, only Tamil has a non-Sanskrit origin and is completely different. Other South Indian languages do have Sanskrit origin/influence. Which is possibly why Tamil Nadu is the most anti-Hindi state.

> Also, only Tamil has a non-Sanskrit origin and is completely different. Other South Indian languages do have Sanskrit origin/influence. Recent scholarship around this paints a very different and complicated picture of interactions between Dravidian and Indo-Iranian languages. Specifically, there is evidence that Indo-Iranian speakers and Dravidian speakers exchanged vocabulary even before Sanskrit and Tamil branche…

Thank you for a high-quality source! I am surprised to learn that phala “fruit” has Proto-Dravidian origins, it is used quite frequently in Sanskrit shlokas in both the literal and figurative (“reward”) senses.

Even though the link seems to imply that it's more Elamitic than Dravidian, the case of Brahui [1] is very interesting as an instance of a Dravidian-linked language that's very different in origin from its geographical neighbors.

----------------------------------------------------

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brahui_language

Re: How to count every language in India (2018)

#27
post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There is a widespread misconception about India's National language as being Hindi. The same misconception is present with national sport (believed to be Hockey, actually is no sport)

Hockey? Really? I would surely have guessed Cricket.

[deleted]

Re: How to count every language in India (2018)

#28
post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is just nonsense. Hindi has nothing to do with caste system. Hindi was promoted because of the need for a common language for a nation with 300+ official languages (not counting the dialects) - as it's the language that is most commonly spoke and understood. It's again absolutely nonsense about BJP/RSS. In the recent times the only party that worked for the poor/lower castes/class is BJP. Most regional parties w…

> Hindi was promoted because of the need for a common language for a nation with 300+ official languages (not counting the dialects) - as it's the language that is most commonly spoke and understood I thought that English actually served that purpose even in India (unofficially).

un officially yes, but as you can imagine, it's not an Indian language, and it's the language of our colonizer. It's more acceptable now, but back in the day, it was an absolute no no. Besides, common men did not speak English. Just the very highly educated (back then. Now, it's much more common among all classes).

Re: How to count every language in India (2018)

#29

The notion of an 'old language' is weird. What does that even mean? Why is Bo one of the oldest languages? Is Greek old? Is English old? Is Lithuanian old? Is Tamil old? Korean? Chinese (which one?)? Any language? If your answer is 'yes', then (a) please explain what you mean, and (b) rest assured that it is not the same language today as when it was 'young' (whatever that means) -- 'young X' is probably a different…

I hate that it is trendy nowadays to claim that everything is racist. It is just ignorance.

Re: How to count every language in India (2018)

#30
post #3

It's a pity there's no (link to the) definition of language they used. With so many, where do you draw the line?

Unknown attribution, I've read that a language is a dialect with an army and a navy. Not entirely applicable here though, as there are likely geographic and historical separations at play too.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_language_is_a_dialect_with_a...
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