Brahui

[Gábor Sándi]

[GS]

>From Gabor Sandi mailto:g_sandi at hotmail.com

----- Original Message -----
From: Anthony Appleyard <mclssaa2 at fs2.mt.umist.ac.uk>
Sent: Tuesday, 28 March, 2000 10:32 PM

> Brahui is a Dravidian language spoken in a most unexpected place ::
> Baluchistan, which is a northwest part of Pakistan. Such an outlier weighs
> on the history of the IE-descended and other languages in the area. I have
> heard two theories re Brahui:-

> (1) It is a valuable relic of a time when Dravidian was spoken over much of
> India.

> (2) The Brahui-speakers are descended from soldiers that were raised in
> Dravidian South India fairly recently and dumped in Baluchistan when no
> longer needed. As such, their language is irrelevant here.

> Which is true?

[GS]

As I happen to live in India right now, I have been able to collect a fair
amount of information on this topic, some of it not easily reachable in the
west.

I don't think anyone can answer your question "Which is true?" - the truth
of the matter is probably undecidable, given the insufficient amount of
data. All we can talk about is probabilities, and the consensus on this
seems to point at answer (2) above. Perhaps the best summary of this view is
by Josef Elfenbein, one of the top experts on Brahui, who says in Chapter 14
("Brahui") of Steever (1998):

"Brahui prehistory is entirely obscure. I have argued against the
traditional assumption that Brahuis are a relic of the original Dravidian
migrations into India, c. 3000 BCE, who remained in Kalat as the first group
to separate from the other Dravidians. In my view a more prosaic history is
far more likely. The Brahuis, never a very close-knit group, migrated
northwest from the central Deccan in India across Gujarat and into Sindh in
many waves from about 800-1100 CE. Afterwards they entered the Kalat
highlands." (p.389)

In further discussion, Elfenbein claims that Brahui is a North Dravidian
language closely related to Kurux (spoken in the states of Bihar, Orissa and
Madhya Pradesh) and Malto (spoken in Bihar and West Bengal). This close
relationship is also stated by Zograph (1982).

Elfenbein's views on the origin of Brahui are also accepted by Sergent
(1997), pp.129-130. This scholar refers to evidence provided by Elfenbein (I
don't have the source myself) that all Indo-Iranian loanwords into Brahui
are from Baluchi, a language with which Brahui has a long history of
symbiosis, which is a language that was introduced from further west into
what is now Pakistan only in the 13th century AD at the earliest. Had Brahui
been in the area before the arrival of Baluchi, we would of course expect
loanwords from other Indo-Iranian languages as well, say from Pashto or
Sindhi.

The only scholar I could find who supports the theory of the Brahui being
present in the area from Harappan times on is Parpola (1994). Parpola is a
scholar who has long claimed that the Harappans were Dravidian speakers - a
theory that is not discredited at all, in my view, even if the Brahui are
recent arrivals in Baluchistan.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Parpola, Asko (1994). Deciphering the Indus Script. Cambridge University
Press.

Sergent, Bernard (1997). Genese de l'Inde [Genesis of India]. Paris: Payot.

Steever, Sanford [ed] (1998). The Dravidian Languages. London: Routledge.

Zograph, G.A. (1982). Languages of South Asia. London: Routledge.


> How much is Dravidian related to Elamite, as I have heard ideas of?

[GS]

I think that Elamite is so little known that no solid theorizing is
possible. An article on the topic (unfortunately I don't have access to it)
is:

McAlpin, David, "Towards Proto-Elamo-Dravidian". Language 50:89-101.

> Where does the word "Dravidian" come from?

[GS]

>From Sanskrit drbviDa / draviDa (D stands for the retroflex d). This is a
borrowing of a Dravidian word related to Tamil "tamiR" (R is r with two dots
under it), meaning "the Tamil language, the Tamils". For all its cognates,
see the appropriate entry in Burrow & Emenau (1998): A Dravidian
Etymological Dictionary.

> As regards the idea that the language of the Indus valley civilization was
> Dravidian, I read once that:-

> (1) Two Indus Valley gambling dices were found, and on their faces were
> pictures of things whose names resembled the numbers 1 2 3 4 5 6 in
> Dravidian.

> (2) Over time more and more Dravidian words get into Indian Sanskrit
> writings, but no more in the Andhra period and after, as if that is when the
> lower castes in the north of India finally forgot their old Dravidian
> languages.

> What is usual opinion about this?

[GS]

No comments on this for now.

Best wishes,
Gabor Sandi