The hypothesized tree of the Elamo-Dravidian family
The Elamo-Dravidian language family is a hypothesised language family that links the Elamite language of ancient Elam (present-day southwestern Iran, and southeastern Iraq) to the Dravidian languages of South Asia. The latest version (2015) of the hypothesis entails a reclassification of Brahui as being more closely related to Elamite than to the remaining Dravidian languages. Linguist David McAlpin has been a chief proponent of the Elamo-Dravidian hypothesis, followed by Franklin Southworth as the other major supporter.[1] The hypothesis has gained attention in academic circles, but has been subject to serious criticism by linguists, and remains only one of several possible scenarios for the origins of the Dravidian languages.[note 1] Elamite is generally accepted by scholars to be a language isolate, unrelated to any other known language.[3]
History of the proposal
The concept that Elamite and Dravidian are in some way related dates from the beginnings of both fields in the early nineteenth century. Edwin Norris was the first to publish an article in support of the hypothesis in 1853.[4] Further evidence was proposed by Robert Caldwell when he published a comparative linguistics book in 1856 about the Dravidian languages.[5] David McAlpin, assistant professor of Dravidian languages and linguistics at the University of Pennsylvania, published a series of papers providing evidence supporting the theory.[6][1] He also speculated that the Harappan language (the language of the Indus Valley civilization) might also have been part of this family.
Linguistic arguments
According to David McAlpin, the Dravidian languages were brought to present day Pakistan by immigration from the Middle East via Elam, located in present-day southwestern Iran.[7][6] McAlpin (1975) in his study identified some similarities between Elamite and Dravidian. He proposed that 20% of Dravidian and Elamite vocabulary are cognates while 12% are probable cognates. He further claimed that Elamite and Dravidian possess similar second-person pronouns and parallel case endings. They have a number of similar derivatives, abstract nouns, and the same verb stem+tense marker+personal ending structure. Both have two positive tenses, a "past" and a "non-past".[8]
Reception
The hypothesis has gained attention in academic circles but is difficult to assess due to the limited resources on the Elamite language.[5] Supporters of the Elamo-Dravidian hypothesis include Igor M. Diakonoff[9] and Franklin Southworth.[1]
Bhadriraju Krishnamurti regarded McAlpin's proposed morphological correspondences between Elamite and Dravidian to be ad hoc, and found them to be lacking phonological motivation.[10] Similar criticisms have been made by Kamil Zvelebil and others.[10]Georgiy Starostin criticized them as no closer than correspondences with other nearby language families.[5] For the majority of historical linguists, the Elamo-Dravidian hypothesis remains unproven, and Elamite is generally accepted by scholars to be a language isolate, unrelated to any other known language.[11][12][13]
Apart from the linguistic similarities, the Elamo-Dravidian hypothesis rests on the claim that agriculture spread from the Near East to the Indus Valley region via Elam. This would suggest that agriculturalists brought a new language as well as farming from Elam. Supporting ethno-botanical data include the Near Eastern origin and name of wheat (D. Fuller). Later evidence of extensive trade between Elam and the Indus Valley Civilization suggests ongoing links between the two regions.
Renfrew and Cavalli-Sforza have also argued that Proto-Dravidian was brought to the Indus Valley by farmers from the Fertile Crescent,[14][15][16][note 2] but more recently Heggarty and Renfrew noted that "McAlpin's analysis of the language data, and thus his claims, remain far from orthodoxy", adding that Fuller finds no relation of Dravidian languages with other languages, and thus assumes it to be native to India.[2] Renfrew and Bahn conclude that several scenarios are compatible with the data, and that "the linguistic jury is still very much out".[2]
Narasimhan et al. (2019) conclude that the Iranian ancestral component in the IVC people was contributed by people related to but distinct from Iranian agriculturalists, lacking the Anatolian farmer-related ancestry which was common in Iranian farmers after 6000 BCE.[17][note 3] Those Iranian farmers-related people may have arrived in India before the advent of farming in northern India,[17] and mixed with people related to Indian hunter-gatherers c. 5400 to 3700 BCE, before the advent of the mature IVC.[20][note 4] Sylvester et al. (2019) noted that (referring to Renfrew (1996)) "the existence of Brahui speakers, solitary Dravidian language speakers in Balochistan in Pakistan, supports the Elamo-Dravidian hypothesis",[22][23] and concluded that bidirectional migration and admixture occurred during neolithic times.[24]
^Renfrew and Bahn conclude that several scenarios are compatible with the data, and that "the linguistic jury is still very much out."[2]
^Derenko: "The spread of these new technologies has been associated with the dispersal of Dravidian and Indo-European languages in southern Asia. It is hypothesized that the proto-Elamo-Dravidian language, most likely originated in the Elam province in southwestern Iran, spread eastwards with the movement of farmers to the Indus Valley and the Indian sub-continent."[16]
Derenko refers to: * Renfrew (1987), Archaeology and Language: The Puzzle of Indo-European Origins * Renfrew (1996), Language families and the spread of farming. In: Harris DR, editor, The origins and spread of Agriculture and Pastoralism in Eurasia, pp. 70–92 * Cavalli-Sforza, Menozzi, Piazza (1994), The History and Geography of Human Genes.
^Narasimhan et al.: "[One possibility is that] Iranian farmer–related ancestry in this group was characteristic of the Indus Valley hunter-gatherers in the same way as it was characteristic of northern Caucasus and Iranian plateau hunter-gatherers. The presence of such ancestry in hunter-gatherers from Belt and Hotu Caves in northeastern Iran increases the plausibility that this ancestry could have existed in hunter-gatherers farther east."[17] Shinde et al. (2019) note that these Iranian people "had little if any genetic contribution from [...] western Iranian farmers or herders";[18] they split from each other more than 12,000 years ago.[19] See also Razib Kkan, The Day of the Dasa: "...it may, in fact, be the case that ANI-like quasi-Iranians occupied northwest South Asia for a long time, and AHG populations hugged the southern and eastern fringes, during the height of the Pleistocene."
^Mascarenhas et al. (2015) note that "new, possibly West Asian, body types are reported from the graves of Mehrgarh beginning in the Togau phase (3800 BCE)."[21]
^ abDavid McAlpin, "Toward Proto-Elamo-Dravidian", Language vol. 50 no. 1 (1974); David McAlpin: "Elamite and Dravidian, Further Evidence of Relationships", Current Anthropology vol. 16 no. 1 (1975); David McAlpin: "Linguistic prehistory: the Dravidian situation", in Madhav M. Deshpande and Peter Edwin Hook: Aryan and Non-Aryan in India, Center for South and Southeast Asian Studies, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor (1979); David McAlpin, "Proto-Elamo-Dravidian: The Evidence and its Implications", Transactions of the American Philosophical Society vol. 71 pt. 3, (1981)
^Dhavendra Kumar (2004). Genetic Disorders of the Indian Subcontinent. Springer. ISBN978-1-4020-1215-0. Retrieved 2008-11-25. The analysis of two Y chromosome variants, Hgr9 and Hgr3 provides interesting data (Quintan-Murci et al., 2001). Microsatellite variation of Hgr9 among Iranians, Pakistanis and Indians indicate an expansion of populations to around 9000 YBP in Iran and then to 6,000 YBP in India. This migration originated in what was historically termed Elam in south-west Iran to the Indus valley, and may have been associated with the spread of Dravidian languages from south-west Iran (Quintan-Murci et al., 2001).
^David McAlpin, "Toward Proto-Elamo-Dravidian", Language vol. 50 no. 1 (1974); David McAlpin: "Elamite and Dravidian, Further Evidence of Relationships", Current Anthropology vol. 16 no. 1 (1975); David McAlpin: "Linguistic prehistory: the Dravidian situation", in Madhav M. Deshpande and Peter Edwin Hook: Aryan and Non-Aryan in India, Center for South and Southeast Asian Studies, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor (1979); David McAlpin, "Proto-Elamo-Dravidian: The Evidence and its Implications", Transactions of the American Philosophical Society vol. 71 pt. 3, (1981)
^Diakonoff, I.M. (1990). "Language Contact in the Caucasus and the Near East". In T. L. Markey; John A. C. Greppin (eds.). When Worlds Collide: The Indo-Europeans and the Pre-Indo-Europeans. Ann Arbor: Karoma. pp. 53–65.
^Namita Mukherjee; Almut Nebel; Ariella Oppenheim; Partha P. Majumder (December 2001), "High-resolution analysis of Y-chromosomal polymorphisms reveals signatures of population movements from central Asia and West Asia into India", Journal of Genetics, 80 (3): 125–35, doi:10.1007/BF02717908, PMID11988631, S2CID13267463, More recently, about 15,000–10,000 years before present (ybp), when agriculture developed in the Fertile Crescent region that extends from Israel through northern Syria to western Iran, there was another eastward wave of human migration (Cavalli-Sforza et al., 1994; Renfrew 1987), a part of which also appears to have entered India. This wave has been postulated to have brought the Dravidian languages into India (Renfrew 1987). Subsequently, the Indo-European (Aryan) language family was introduced into India about 4,000 ybp.
^Sylvester et al. (2019) refer to Renfrew (1996), Language families and the spread of farming. In: Harris DR, editor, The origins and spread of Agriculture and Pastoralism in Eurasia, pp. 70–92.
McAlpin, David W. (2003). "Velars, Uvulars, and the North Dravidian Hypothesis". Journal of the American Oriental Society. 123 (3): 521–546. doi:10.2307/3217749. JSTOR3217749.
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