Mirror: http://tinyurl.com/p42btqg
Indian sprachbund (speech union) is a recognized language feature including Indo-Aryan, Dravidian, Munda and Tibeto-Burman streams. This sprachbund can be extended to identify cultural convergences among contact areas of civilizations. A good example is the presence of ancu in Tocharian and amsu in Vedic with ancu suggesting iron. Metalwork in Bronze Age has led to extensive contacts in Eurasia and decipherment of Indus Script Corpora as catalogus catalogorum of metalwork provides a framework for constructuring a Cultural sprachbund of Bronze Age along the Tin Maritime Road from Hanoi to Haifa.
Cultural convergence in contact areas of civilizations of the Bronze Age can be gleaned from artifacts unearthed from archaeological digs and from evidence preserved in languages of people involved in cultural contacts. There is an understanding from cuneiform texts that the Sumerian-Mesopotamian civilization had Meluhha as a contact area, together with Dilmun and Magan. There is evidence from a cylinder seal of Shu-Ilishu (Akkadian interpreter of Meluhhan) and from cuneiform texts that Meluhhan merchants had settlements in the Ancient Near East.![]()
Prakritam are vernaculars with pronunciation variants. Pronunciations at variance from Vedic Samskritam are called mleccha (meluhha).
Prakritam and Samskritam have 63 or 64 varNas.
त्रिषष्टिश्चतुः षष्टिर्वा वर्णाः शम्भुमते मताः
प्राकृते सम्स्कृते चापि स्वयं प्रोक्ता स्वयम्भुवा (पाणिनि शिक्षा 63, 64 वर्णाः)
Vernaculars are: Gāndhārī, Paiśāci, Elu (Sri Lanka), Dramatic Prakritam: Maharashtri, Sauraseni, Magadhi Jaina canon: Ardha-magadhi, Jain-Maharastri, Jain-Sauraseni, Apabhramsa, Avanti, Pracya, Bahliki, Daksinatya, Sakari, Candali, Sabari, Abhiri, Dramili, and Odri are Prakritam vernaculars. (Variations in pronunciation are discussed in Alfred C. Woolner, 1917, Introduction to Prakrit, University of the Panjab, Lahore).
https://archive.org/details/introductiontopr00woolrich In dramas, Dramili was the language of "forest-dwellers", Sauraseni was spoken by "the heroine and her female friends", and Avanti was spoken by "cheats and rogues" (Banerjee, Satya Ranjan. 1977. The Eastern School of Prakrit Grammarians : a linguistic study. Calcutta: Vidyasagar Pustak Mandir, pp. 19-21).
The idea can be traced to Jernej Kopitar who, in 1830, recorded areal convergence among Albanian, Bulgarian and Romanian: "nur eine Sprachform...mit dreierlei Sprachmaterie" [(that is, one form of language (grammar) with three voice material (lexicons)].
Another term is sprachraum (language area) documenting dialects or vernaculars of a geographical area with "decreasing mutual intelligibilty as distances increase." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sprachbund
Trubetzkoy and Jakobson are early founders of a phonological method called sprachbunds. Emeneau applied the method to Indian languages and identified an Indian sprachbund. Trubetzkoy first suggested in 1923 in "Vavilonskaja basnja i smesenie jazykov" and proposed in 1928 in the First International Congress of Linguists in The Hague the term 'sprachbund' to add to language families and groups. Trubetzkoy states: "Viele Missverstandnisse und Fehler entstehen dadurch, das die Sprachforscher die Ausdrucke Sprachgruppe und Sprachfamilie ohne genugende Vorsicht und in zu wenig bestimmter Bedeutung gebrauchen." (Trubetzkoy, NS, 1928, 'Proposition 16' in Actes du premier congres international des linguistes, Leiden, p. 17-18).
This statement can be translated: "Many misunderstandings and errors arise because the linguists use the expression language group and language family without enough caution and in the end to little specific meaning." Trubetzkoy went on to delineate a sprachbund as a group of languages with parallels in syntax, morphology, cultural vocabulary and phonetics (even without systematic sound correspondences or shared basic vocabulary).
In the context of Indo-European language family, a comparable profundity in understanding semantics is made by MB Emeneau, a co-author of Dravidian Etymological Dictionary with T. Burrow. Identifying an Indian sprachbund, Emeneau proposed in 1956 in his paper, 'India as a Linguistic Area' based on his observation that Dravidian and Indo-Aryan languages shared a number of language areal structural language features caused by sustained contact among Indo-Aryan, Dravidian, Munda and Tibeto-Burma language families. One such shared feature was reduplication of words in sentences or phrases. Within Autro-Asiatic language family for which an Etymological Dictionary is under construction in University of Hawii, Khmer (Mon–Khmer), Cham (Austronesian) and Lao (Kadai) languages have almost identical vowel systems. Sumerian and Akkadian have shared features. (Deutscher, Guy, 2007, Syntactic changes in Akkadian. Sumerian has substratum words which have parallels in Indian languages, words such as sanga 'priest' [sanghvi 'leader of pilgrims' (Gujarati)]; nangar 'carpenter', ashgab 'leather worker'. The evolution of sentential complementation, Oxford University Press, p. 20-21). This linguistic exploration of sprachbunds should go on to delineate with reasonable precision the Indian sprachbund relatable to Indus Script Corpora.
Identifying an Indian sprachbund can also be advanced by using archaeological evidences of artifacts and epigraphs. One set of epigraphs has emerged for Indian sprachbund which is composed as about 7000 epigraphs in Indus Script Corpora. For example, Brunswig et al have identified some epigraphs with or without cuneiform inscriptions which share features with Indus Script epigraphs of the corpora, say, compiled by Marshall, Mahadevan, Parpola.
RH Brunswig, Jr., A. Parpola, and DT Potts, 'New Indus type and related seals from the Near East,' in Dilmun: New Studies in the Archaeology and Early History of Bahrain, ed. DT Potts (BBVO 2, 1988), 101-15.
Mahadevan, Iravatham, ed., 1977, The Indus Script: Texts, Concordance, and Tables, Delhi, ASI Memoir No.77.
Joshi, JP & A Parpola (eds.), 1987, Corpus of Indus sedals and inscriptions, I: COllections in India, Annales Academiae Scientiarum Fennicae, B239), Helsinki, Suomalainen Tiedeakatemia
Shah, SGM & A. Parpola (eds.), 1991, Corpus of Indus seals and inscriptions, II: Collections in Pakistan, Annales Academiae Scientiarum Fennicae, B239), Helsinki, Suomalainen Tiedeakatemia
Asko Parpola, BM Pande & Petter Koskikallio (eds.), 2010, Corpus of Indus seals and inscriptions, Volume 3: New material, untraced objects and collections outside India and Pakistan (Memoirs of ASI, No. 96), Helsinki, Suomalainen Tiedeakatemia
What is a sprachbund?
"First, the languages of a Sprachbund show certain similarities in the field of phonetics, morphology, syntax and lexis. Secondly, the languages of a Sprachbund belong to different families. They are neighbouring geographically, as Trubetzkoy has show, using the example of the Balkansprachbund...In contrast to the genetically defined family of languages (genus proximum), the Sprachbund comprises a typologically defined group of geographically neighbouring language whose common features are derived from mutual influences (differentia specifica)." (Schaller, Helmut W, Roman Jakobson's conception of 'sprachbund' in: Cahiers de l'ILSL, No. 9, 1997, p.200, 202). R. Jakobson published in 1931 three articles about the question of Sprachbund. He also noted that the phonological system of Serbo-Croatian is a remnant of proto-slavic languag features.
Les unions phonologiques des langues, Le Monde slave 1931, p. 383-395
O fonologiceskich jazykovych sojusach, Evrazija v svete jazykoznanija, Prague 1931, 7-12
Uber die phonologischen Sprachbunde, Travaux du Cercle Linguistique de Prague IV, 1931, 164-183.
![]()
Indian sprachbund (speech union) is a recognized language feature including Indo-Aryan, Dravidian, Munda and Tibeto-Burman streams. This sprachbund can be extended to identify cultural convergences among contact areas of civilizations. A good example is the presence of ancu in Tocharian and amsu in Vedic with ancu suggesting iron. Metalwork in Bronze Age has led to extensive contacts in Eurasia and decipherment of Indus Script Corpora as catalogus catalogorum of metalwork provides a framework for constructuring a Cultural sprachbund of Bronze Age along the Tin Maritime Road from Hanoi to Haifa.
Cultural convergence in contact areas of civilizations of the Bronze Age can be gleaned from artifacts unearthed from archaeological digs and from evidence preserved in languages of people involved in cultural contacts. There is an understanding from cuneiform texts that the Sumerian-Mesopotamian civilization had Meluhha as a contact area, together with Dilmun and Magan. There is evidence from a cylinder seal of Shu-Ilishu (Akkadian interpreter of Meluhhan) and from cuneiform texts that Meluhhan merchants had settlements in the Ancient Near East.
The rollout of Shu-ilishu's Cylinder seal. Courtesy of the Department des Antiquites Orientales, Musee du Louvre, Paris. A Mesopotamian cylinder seal referring to the personal translator of the ancient Indus or Meluhan language, Shu-ilishu, who lived around 2020 BCE during the late Akkadian period. The late Dr. Gregory L. Possehl, a leading Indus scholar, tells the story of getting a fresh rollout of the seal during its visit to the Ancient Cities Exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York in 2004.
Positing Meluhha as a vernacular of Indian sprachbund, many homonyms can be identified frrom Prakritam vernaculars of this sprachbund. Some lexical entries might have been retained in more than one language of the speech area and hence it was possible to construct over 8000 semantic categories in an Indian Lexicon of over 25 ancient Indian languages including glosses from Indo-Aryan, Dravidian and Munda language streams. http://www.docstoc.com/docs/64000625/Indian-Lexicon-introduction
There may be disagreements among researchers on identification of hieroglyphs or hieroglyph components. For example, 'fish' hieroglyph may be seen by some as a thread-loop. Yet, there are many unambiguous hieroglyphs on Indus Script Corpora which can provide a basis for identification of Meluhha glosses for 'pictures' such as: tiger, leopard/cheetah, monkey, rhinoceros, elephant, young bull, young antelope (kid), zebu, crocodile (allegator, gharial). See such symbolic hypetexts identified by Dennys Frenez and Massimo Vidale (2012). If homonyms are identified in languages of the contact area where the script hieroglyphs have been found, it should be possible to construct a table of homonyms. Such an attempt has been made and the entire Indus Script Corpora are deciphered under one category of life-activity: metalwork. This is a falsifiable assertion; researachers are welcome to prove the rebus-metonymy renderings of hieroglyph-multiplexes wrong.
Prakritam are vernaculars with pronunciation variants. Pronunciations at variance from Vedic Samskritam are called mleccha (meluhha).
Prakritam and Samskritam have 63 or 64 varNas.
त्रिषष्टिश्चतुः षष्टिर्वा वर्णाः शम्भुमते मताः
प्राकृते सम्स्कृते चापि स्वयं प्रोक्ता स्वयम्भुवा (पाणिनि शिक्षा 63, 64 वर्णाः)
Vernaculars are: Gāndhārī, Paiśāci, Elu (Sri Lanka), Dramatic Prakritam: Maharashtri, Sauraseni, Magadhi Jaina canon: Ardha-magadhi, Jain-Maharastri, Jain-Sauraseni, Apabhramsa, Avanti, Pracya, Bahliki, Daksinatya, Sakari, Candali, Sabari, Abhiri, Dramili, and Odri are Prakritam vernaculars. (Variations in pronunciation are discussed in Alfred C. Woolner, 1917, Introduction to Prakrit, University of the Panjab, Lahore).
https://archive.org/details/introductiontopr00woolrich In dramas, Dramili was the language of "forest-dwellers", Sauraseni was spoken by "the heroine and her female friends", and Avanti was spoken by "cheats and rogues" (Banerjee, Satya Ranjan. 1977. The Eastern School of Prakrit Grammarians : a linguistic study. Calcutta: Vidyasagar Pustak Mandir, pp. 19-21).
The idea can be traced to Jernej Kopitar who, in 1830, recorded areal convergence among Albanian, Bulgarian and Romanian: "nur eine Sprachform...mit dreierlei Sprachmaterie" [(that is, one form of language (grammar) with three voice material (lexicons)].
Another term is sprachraum (language area) documenting dialects or vernaculars of a geographical area with "decreasing mutual intelligibilty as distances increase." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sprachbund
Trubetzkoy and Jakobson are early founders of a phonological method called sprachbunds. Emeneau applied the method to Indian languages and identified an Indian sprachbund. Trubetzkoy first suggested in 1923 in "Vavilonskaja basnja i smesenie jazykov" and proposed in 1928 in the First International Congress of Linguists in The Hague the term 'sprachbund' to add to language families and groups. Trubetzkoy states: "Viele Missverstandnisse und Fehler entstehen dadurch, das die Sprachforscher die Ausdrucke Sprachgruppe und Sprachfamilie ohne genugende Vorsicht und in zu wenig bestimmter Bedeutung gebrauchen." (Trubetzkoy, NS, 1928, 'Proposition 16' in Actes du premier congres international des linguistes, Leiden, p. 17-18).
This statement can be translated: "Many misunderstandings and errors arise because the linguists use the expression language group and language family without enough caution and in the end to little specific meaning." Trubetzkoy went on to delineate a sprachbund as a group of languages with parallels in syntax, morphology, cultural vocabulary and phonetics (even without systematic sound correspondences or shared basic vocabulary).
In the context of Indo-European language family, a comparable profundity in understanding semantics is made by MB Emeneau, a co-author of Dravidian Etymological Dictionary with T. Burrow. Identifying an Indian sprachbund, Emeneau proposed in 1956 in his paper, 'India as a Linguistic Area' based on his observation that Dravidian and Indo-Aryan languages shared a number of language areal structural language features caused by sustained contact among Indo-Aryan, Dravidian, Munda and Tibeto-Burma language families. One such shared feature was reduplication of words in sentences or phrases. Within Autro-Asiatic language family for which an Etymological Dictionary is under construction in University of Hawii, Khmer (Mon–Khmer), Cham (Austronesian) and Lao (Kadai) languages have almost identical vowel systems. Sumerian and Akkadian have shared features. (Deutscher, Guy, 2007, Syntactic changes in Akkadian. Sumerian has substratum words which have parallels in Indian languages, words such as sanga 'priest' [sanghvi 'leader of pilgrims' (Gujarati)]; nangar 'carpenter', ashgab 'leather worker'. The evolution of sentential complementation, Oxford University Press, p. 20-21). This linguistic exploration of sprachbunds should go on to delineate with reasonable precision the Indian sprachbund relatable to Indus Script Corpora.
Identifying an Indian sprachbund can also be advanced by using archaeological evidences of artifacts and epigraphs. One set of epigraphs has emerged for Indian sprachbund which is composed as about 7000 epigraphs in Indus Script Corpora. For example, Brunswig et al have identified some epigraphs with or without cuneiform inscriptions which share features with Indus Script epigraphs of the corpora, say, compiled by Marshall, Mahadevan, Parpola.
RH Brunswig, Jr., A. Parpola, and DT Potts, 'New Indus type and related seals from the Near East,' in Dilmun: New Studies in the Archaeology and Early History of Bahrain, ed. DT Potts (BBVO 2, 1988), 101-15.
Mahadevan, Iravatham, ed., 1977, The Indus Script: Texts, Concordance, and Tables, Delhi, ASI Memoir No.77.
Joshi, JP & A Parpola (eds.), 1987, Corpus of Indus sedals and inscriptions, I: COllections in India, Annales Academiae Scientiarum Fennicae, B239), Helsinki, Suomalainen Tiedeakatemia
Shah, SGM & A. Parpola (eds.), 1991, Corpus of Indus seals and inscriptions, II: Collections in Pakistan, Annales Academiae Scientiarum Fennicae, B239), Helsinki, Suomalainen Tiedeakatemia
Asko Parpola, BM Pande & Petter Koskikallio (eds.), 2010, Corpus of Indus seals and inscriptions, Volume 3: New material, untraced objects and collections outside India and Pakistan (Memoirs of ASI, No. 96), Helsinki, Suomalainen Tiedeakatemia
What is a sprachbund?
"First, the languages of a Sprachbund show certain similarities in the field of phonetics, morphology, syntax and lexis. Secondly, the languages of a Sprachbund belong to different families. They are neighbouring geographically, as Trubetzkoy has show, using the example of the Balkansprachbund...In contrast to the genetically defined family of languages (genus proximum), the Sprachbund comprises a typologically defined group of geographically neighbouring language whose common features are derived from mutual influences (differentia specifica)." (Schaller, Helmut W, Roman Jakobson's conception of 'sprachbund' in: Cahiers de l'ILSL, No. 9, 1997, p.200, 202). R. Jakobson published in 1931 three articles about the question of Sprachbund. He also noted that the phonological system of Serbo-Croatian is a remnant of proto-slavic languag features.
Les unions phonologiques des langues, Le Monde slave 1931, p. 383-395
O fonologiceskich jazykovych sojusach, Evrazija v svete jazykoznanija, Prague 1931, 7-12
Uber die phonologischen Sprachbunde, Travaux du Cercle Linguistique de Prague IV, 1931, 164-183.
Meluhha acculturation in Ancient Near East
Many scholars have noted the contacts between the Mesopotamian and Sarasvati-Sindhu (Indus, Hindu) Civilizations, in terms of cultural history, chronology, artefacts (beads, jewellery), pottery and seals found from archaeological sites in the two areas.
"...the four examples of round seals found in Mohenjodaro show well-supported sequences, whereas the three from Mesopotamia show sequences of signs not paralleled elsewhere in the Indus Script. But the ordinary square seals found in Mesopotamia show the normal Mohenjodaro sequences. In other words, the square seals are in the Indian language, and were probably imported in the course of trade; while the circular seals, although in the Indus script, are in a different language, and were probably manufactured in Mesopotamia for a Sumerian- or Semitic-speaking person of Indian descent..." [G.R. Hunter,1932. Mohenjodaro--Indus Epigraphy, JRAS: 466-503]
The acculturation of Meluhhans (probably, Indus people) residing in Mesopotamia in the late third and early second millennium BC, is noted by their adoption of Sumerian names (Parpola, Parpola and Brunswig 1977: 155-159).
"The adaptation of Harappan motifs and script to the Dilmun seal form may be a further indication of the acculturative phenomenon, one indicated in Mesopotamia by the adaptation of Harappan traits to the cylinder seal." (Brunswig et al, 1983, p. 110).
One example can be presented to show how convergences occurred to form lexis of Indo-European languages, in the context of archaeo-metallurgy of the Bronze Age since the invention of tin bronzes was a revolutionary advance in industrialization. Metalwork provides a framework for defined meaning of words used in the vernacular and continued use of such words in writing systems using what Frenez and Vidale call 'symbolic hypertexts' as on Indus Script provide the evidence for Indus Script decipherment of Indus Script Corpora as catalogus catalogorum of metalwork. (Dennys Frenez & Massimo Vidale, 2012,Harappa Chimaeras as 'Symbolic Hypertexts'. Some Thoughts on Plato, Chimaera and the Indus Civilization in: South Asian Studies Volume 28, Issue 2, pp. 107-130).
On mED 'copper' in Eurasian languages:
Wilhelm von Hevesy wrote about the Finno-Ugric-Munda kinship, like "Munda-Magyar-Maori, an Indian link between the antipodes new tracks of Hungarian origins" and "Finnisch-Ugrisches aus Indien". (DRIEM, George van: Languages of the Himalayas: an ethnolinguistic handbook. 1997. p.161-162.) Sumerian-Ural-Altaic language affinities have been noted. Given the presence of Meluhha settlements in Sumer, some Meluhha glosses might have been adapted in these languages. One etyma cluster refers to 'iron' exemplified by meD (Ho.). The alternative suggestion for the origin of the gloss med 'copper' in Uralic languages may be explained by the word meD (Ho.) of Munda family of Meluhha language stream:
Sa. <i>mE~R~hE~'d</i> `iron'. ! <i>mE~RhE~d</i>(M).
Ma. <i>mErhE'd</i> `iron'.
Mu. <i>mERE'd</i> `iron'.
~ <i>mE~R~E~'d</i> `iron'. ! <i>mENhEd</i>(M).
Ho <i>meD</i> `iron'.
Bj. <i>merhd</i>(Hunter) `iron'.
KW <i>mENhEd</i>
@(V168,M080)
— Slavic glosses for 'copper'
Мед [Med]Bulgarian
Bakar Bosnian
Медзь [medz']Belarusian
Měď Czech
Bakar Croatian
KòperKashubian
Бакар [Bakar]Macedonian
Miedź Polish
Медь [Med']Russian
Meď Slovak
BakerSlovenian
Бакар [Bakar]Serbian
Мідь [mid'] Ukrainian[unquote]
Miedź, med' (Northern Slavic, Altaic) 'copper'.
One suggestion is that corruptions from the German "Schmied", "Geschmeide" = jewelry. Schmied, a smith (of tin, gold, silver, or other metal)(German) result in med ‘copper’.
I suggest that the lanuages which use Med 'copper, metal, iron' are cultural contact areas of Meluhha and in particular, Meluhha metalworkers.
I have suggested, based on the fact the the largest tin belt of the globe is in Mekong river delta, that a cultural sprachbund of tin bronzes and related metalcastings as cultural markers can be traced along the Tin Maritime Road from Hanoi to Haifa which predates the Silk Road by about 2 millennia -- from Dong Son bronze drums to Nahal Mishmar cire perdue arsenical bronze artifacts of 5th millennium BCE.
S. Kalyanaraman
Sarasvati Research Center
August 20, 2015