Witzel: No new announcement at all, only a fresh play at words!
I don't find any new announcement by Witzel in his mail under reference to Balakrishna Chadalawada.
Witzel is frantically busy creating new strategies to defend the old barbarous image of Vedic people that stands drastically changed today by new findings in archaeology, genetics and other disciplines including textual studies.
A poetry, a story, a legend, or any other literary creation can exist (has, in fact, existed) for ages orally, that is, without having been put in writing.
This is a sort of floating mass of literature called *oral literature*. The Vedas too existed as such for a very long time before they were collected as Samhitas (i.e., ‘Collections’). Much of Smriti literature too was in that form that has been utilized and incorporated freely in their Smritis by Manu, Yajnavalkya, Narada, and other Smritikaras. Even today many of the songs sung in ceremonies and festivals, and most of other folklore continue as oral literature.
Witzel’s message is clear:
*Vedic people and Harappans, both, were illiterate. But Harappans were only ‘functionally illiterate’, not illiterate in the sense of being uncivilized while (implicitly) the Vedic people were completely illiterate, unaware of writing as well as barbarous.* [Uncivilized means barbarous. Refer to stages: savagery to barbarism to civilization].
Nothing new in this. Witzel has simply reiterated his old stand. No occasion for Witzel to exclaim ‘Eureka’!
His mail does provide a peep into what he considers worth making a thrust area in research. He intends to interpret pictorial depictions left by Harappans in terms of non-Vedic motifs. And it may be presumed that his interpretations of what he calls ‘myths, complex religion, and (other) oral literature’ depicted on Harappan tiny tablets will further aim at contrasting the image of civilized Harappans against that of assumed uncivilized Vedic people.
What a tragedy! When will Witzel realize that his intentions behind play at words distinguishing ‘illiterate’ from ‘functionally illiterate’ is being understood and watched by everybody.
Prof. Shivaji Singh
July 25, 2013
See related links listed below. Note: The links expose and refute the motivated statements made by Witzel wearing an academic garb (burqa) to debunk Hindu civilization and traditions.
http://bharatkalyan97.blogspot.in/2013/07/vedic-people-opposed-literacy.html Vedic people opposed literacy? An unexpected accusation. A response to Witzel -- Prof. Shivaji Singh
http://bharatkalyan97.blogspot.in/2013/07/srotriya-brahmana-and-oralwritten.htmlŚrotriya brāhmaṇa and oral/written preservation of the Veda
http://bharatkalyan97.blogspot.in/2013/07/were-vedic-people-illiterate-and-did.html Were Vedic people illiterate and did they oppose literacy? A riposte to the canard spread by a Harvard Professor.
http://bharatkalyan97.blogspot.in/2013/07/taksat-vak-incised-speech-evidence-of.html Takṣat vāk, ‘incised speech’ -- Evidence of Indus writing of Meluhha language in Ancient Near East (S. Kalyanaraman, July 2013)
http://bharatkalyan97.blogspot.in/2013/07/chandas-pingala-bhasa-limits-of-writing.html Chandas (Pingala), bhāṣā, limits of writing systems to encode Veda chants or mathematics of poetry and music
Rao, TRN & Kak, Subhash, 1998, Computing science in Ancient India, Lafayette, LA, The Centre fo Advanced Computer Studies, Univ. of Southwestern Louisiana,https://ikashmir.net/subhashkak/docs/Computing%20Science%20in%20Ancient%20India.pdf
B. van Nooten notes that Pingala has succeeded in introducing the binary number as a means for classifying metrical patterns.”Instead of giving names to the meters he constructs a prastāra, a ‘bed’, or matrix, in which the laghus and gurus are listed horizontally…The device of the prastāra has to be visualized as an actual table written on a board, or in the dust on the ground. Each horizontal line of the table stands for a line of verse represented as a succession of laghu and guru syllables. Every possible combination of the laghus and gurus is spelled out for a particular meter. Hence there will be separate prastāras for 8-syllabi, for 11-syllabic and 12-syllabic meters. The first line in each will consist of all laghus, the last line of all gurus…He (Pingala) knew how to convert that binary notation to a decimal notation and vice versa. We know of no sources from which he could have drawn his inspiration, so he may well have been the originator of the system…this knowledge was available to and preserved by Sanskrit students of metrics. Unlike the case of the great linguistic discoveries of the Indians which directly influenced and inspired Western linguistics, this discovery of the theory of binary numbers has so far gone unrecorded in the annals of the West.” (van Nooten, B., Binary numbers in Inian Antiquity, in Rao, TRN & Kak, Subhash, opcit., pp. 21-38; this article had appeared in Kluwer Academic Publishers, Journal of Indian Studies 21: 31-50, 1993).
Kak, Subhah, 2000, Yamātārājabhānasalagām, an interesting combinatoric sūtra, in: Indian Journal of History of Sience, 35.2 (2000) 123-127. The note considers the history of a sūtra which describes all combinations of a binary sequence of length 3 in connection with the classification of metres as sequence of laghu and guru syllables.