Help with a citation
Harold F. Schiffman
haroldfs at CCAT.SAS.UPENN.EDU
Mon May 17 14:53:22 UTC 2004
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I need help with a citation source. Some time ago, Carol Myers-Scotton
(many of you may know her work; she writes extensively about
code-switching) asked me to look at what she had written about India and
Tamil, and I then provided her with some quotes that I thought would
enhance her treatment of the issue.
Carol has in the meantime lost the bibliographic source that I provided
her with but retained the quote, which is:
"Although it is now unlikely this will happen in the foreseeable future,
Dravidian language speakers (especially the Tamils) resist any instances
of Hindi domination. Thus, the motivation to replace words is two-fold:
one is to preserve Tamil as a language with its own character and the
other is more socio-political, to maintain Tamil identity as an ethnic
group in the face of pressure from the more numerous speakers of
Indo-European languages in India, most notably Hindi.
For these reasons, Sanskrit words in Tamil are being replaced.
Sanskritized poets, writing in the High variety of Tamil in the 15th
century, used many Sanskrit words*as many as 35 or 40% of their words came
from Sanskrit. Educated estimates are that in the last fifty years, the
influence of Sanskrit has been reduced to about 20% of the entire
vocabulary of High Tamil (Zvelebil, 1983)."
Can anybody identify the source here? I can't find any monographs dated
1983 for Zvelebil; his website is not helpful, and I can't find any
articles by him with that date, either.
Thanks,
Hal Schiffman
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