From Periannan Chandrasekaran Sun Sep 19 13:25:08 1999
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Date: Sun, 19 Sep 1999 13:37:13 -0700 (PDT)
From: Periannan Chandrasekaran
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Subject: [agathiyar] Re: Language, sacred and secular
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--- "Mani M. Manivannan" wrote:
> GAIL OMVEDT writes about Sanskrit and Tamil, sacred and secular
> languages in her opinion piece in the Sunday Hindu, September 19,
> 1999.
>
> http://www.indiaserver.com/thehindu/stories/1319067p.htm
>
> The mythic claims to the priority and Centrality of Sanskrit and the
> Aryan component of Indian culture has had wide influence even on
> secular scholars. It is sad that there is a reluctance to admit the
> priority of Dravidian languages. .....

>
> Dravidian languages, then, are older than Sanskrit. ...

>. This would suggest
> that the ``Tamil/ Dravid'' terminological distinction is fairly
> recent historically. Nevertheless, there is reason to maintain a
> ``Dravidian-Tamil'' distinction, since Dravidian languages were
> spread throughout most of the Indian subcontinent,

>and it is not
> necessarily true that contemporary Tamil is closer than others to the
> early Dravidian of northwest India.
Zvelebil disagrees here:
[quoted from p 45 of "Tamil Culture and Civilization" published by The
International Institute of Tamil Studies, Chennai which in turn
excerpts
writings by Zvelebil on pp 367-372 of Archiv Orientalis, 33, 1965]

"From four literary languages [of the Dravidian family], Tamil ....has
the richest and most ancient literature,... has a phonological (and to
some extent also grammatical) system which corresponds rather closely
to the state of affairs in the parent Proto-Dravidian."

That is Tamil has preserved rigorously the ancient forms with the least
corruption of Proto Dravidian forms. Actually it has preserved so many
from pre-Proto Dravidian days. I have personally identified more than
100 words that are common with Greek/Latin etc that do not seem to
occur even in Skt!.



> Still, Dravidian is clearly older
> in the subcontinent than the Sanskritic languages.
>
> But Hindutva proponents are reluctant to admit this; to them Indian
> identity involves not only the sacredness of Sanskrit but its
> centrality, its priority. As a result, widespoken ``adivasi''
> languages like Santhal and Munda hardly receive any linguistic or
> media recognition, while Sanskrit is taught in schools and given
> programme on the media. This effort to derive everything from
> Sanskrit has led to contradictions, indeed the proponents of Hindutva
> sometimes tie themselves up in logical knots trying to maintain their
> particular version of unity-in-diversity. How, for instance, can the
> condemnation of efforts to divide ``North'' from `South'' or ``Aryan
> from Dravidian'' at the same time insist on an ``Aryan-Sanskritic''
> priority that can only increase the resentment of southerners, not to
> mention inviting ridicule from serious scholars?

Surely they are refusing to recognize the diversity which exists at all
levels since the universe if fractal. There can be no unity without
gracefully accepting diversity.

>
>
=== message truncated ===

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