Pre-Greek languages

[Vidhyanath Rao]

Eduard Selleslagh <edsel at glo.be> wrote:
> after all, Elamite - which was in the same situation - was
> finally recognized as Dravidian

Actually, Dravidianologists profess agnosticism or reservations: The most
sympathetic view seems to be that a connection is believable but not
proven. Kamil Zvelebil, in his original review of McAlpin, pointed out
several problems; his more recent books seem to indicate guarded
acceptance, but still he leaves himself some escape hatches.

>[rather strangely late, if you ask me, because
> the word Elaam still exists in Tamil, I was told]

I don't know what Elamites called themselves and how they pronounced it.
In Modern Tamil it is i:zham, where the `zh' stands for the same sound as
in `tamilzh'. In some dialects, it comes out a retroflex l, but the older
pronunciation (and still the standard pronunciation) is not quite an l.
People have claimed success in teaching it to Americans starting from some
American varieties of r. Some attempt to connect retroflex s of Sanskrit
to it (and the transliteration as zh or z-underdot seems to come from
Cyrilic which makes sound like a shibilant). It seems to me that the
difficulty is describing it due to ignoring the most important bit: the
tongue moves along the roof of the mouth >while< the sound is being made.

Anyway, i:zham nowadays refers to Sri Lanka or rather the northern parts
of it. I am not sure why anyone should have rushed to connect this to
Elam.