Pre-Greek languages

[JoatSimeon at aol.com]

>vidynath at math.ohio-state.edu writes:

>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.

-- yes, it's not a settled question.  For one thing, our knowledge of Elamite
proper is still so patchy!

On the whole, though, it seems to be gaining acceptance.  An Elamo-Dravidian
speech community through Iran to the Indus and beyond in the Neolithic and
Early Bronze Age, later disrupted by the intrusive Indo-Aryan and
Indo-Iranian languages, does fit the archaeological and historical data
rather nicely.

(Eg., the specifically Indo-Aryan linguistic element in the Mitannian kingdom
which can be shown to definitely preceed about 1600 BCE, but postdate 2000
BCE.)

And it accounts for the presence of Dravidian loanwords in Vedic, and their
absence in Avestan.

>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.

-- I agree; that sounds like folk-entymology to me.