Tuesday, July 13, 2010

Dravidian Substratum in Indo-Aryan Languages

Due to early Dravidian settlement in Northern India there is a Dravidian substratum in Indo Aryan. There are Dravidian loans in the Rg Veda, even though Aryan recorders of this work were situated in the Punjab which occupied around this time by the BRW Dravidians.

There are islands of Dravidian speakers in Afghanistan, Iran and Pakistan. There are over 300,000 Brahui speakers in Qualat, Hairpur and Hyderabad districts of Pakistan. There are an additional 40,000 Brahui in Emeneau and Burrow (1962) found 500 Dravidian loan words in Sanskrit. In addition, Indo-Aryan illustrates a widespread structural borrowing from Dravidian in addition to 700 lexical loans (Kuiper 1967; Southward 1977; Winters 1989).
Iran and several thousand along the southern border of Russia and Yugoslavia. (ISDL 1983:227)

Emeneau and Burrow (1962) have found 500 Dravidian loan words in Sanskrit. the number of Dravidian loans in Indo Aryan is expected to reach 750.

There are numerous examples of Indo Aryan structural borrowings from Dravidian. For example, the Bengali and Oriya plural suffix ra is analogous to the Tamil plural suffix ar. Both of these suffixes are restricted to names of intelligent beings. (Chatterji 1970:173) Oriya borrowed the gura plural suffix from the Dravidians. (Mahapatra 1983:67) The syntax of the Indo Aryan languages is ambivalent because of the Dravidian influence on these languages. As a result, they represent both SOV and SVO traits.

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