| Myth of Aryan Invasion Update 2005 - Page 4 | | Print | |
| Written by David Frawley (Pandit Vamadeva) | |||||||
Page 4 of 5 Languages and Natural History Ancient languages, like the populations and cultures, mainly arose as efforts to adapt to the natural environment. Languages were not simply affairs of the last five thousand years but have existed for tens of thousands of years, as long as the species, and have also been strongly impacted by natural history. We can trace the movement of languages along with this movement of peoples, who would not have been mute. Such early ancient peoples would have kept their languages in tact as best they could because they relied on the spoken language as the main repository of their culture. This would require making ancient language groups, including the Indo-European family, much older, arising eight to ten thousand years ago along with flood changes and migrations. It is even possible that currently recognized language groups reflect languages formed and spoken even longer back in the Ice Age Period. This movement of peoples out of India and Southeast Asia at the end of the Ice Age can provide the impetus for the spread of Indo-European languages north and west into Europe and Central Asia, regions that in the Ice Age era could only hold very small if any populations, having a climate that resembles Tibet (as a cold dry desert). Or perhaps it began even earlier, in some of the warm interludes that did occur during the latter portions of the Ice Age. The end of the Ice Age afforded the natural events to create widespread migrations from populated to unpopulated regions. The much later proposed migrations, like those speculated for the Aryans into India around 1500 BCE – which still has yet to be proved to have occurred at all – do not have this natural justification. They are proposed migrations from unpopulated to populated and from uncultured to cultured regions that could not count for so much in terms of cultural changes. Yet even such shifts of people in the late ancient period appear to be related to climate changes and droughts that began around 2200 BCE, which also led to the drying up of the Sarasvati River in India, but this was another movement out of India or a relocation inside of India from the Sarasvati to the Ganga. Language Families India is not only the eastern focus of Indo-European languages; it is also the western focus of Indo-Pacific languages. The Indo-Pacific family covers the languages of the Australian aborigines and the Papuans. The Austro-Asiatic cuts across from India to the Pacific (the Munda in India, the Thai, and the Vietnamese), extending to Madagascar. Indian languages of both the Sanskritic and Dravidian groups have considerable affinities and connections with Pacific languages. These have not been adequately explored owing to the obsession with PIE (Proto-Indo-European) relative to Europe and Central Asia that has kept scholars from taking Indian languages further south and east. Both Sanskritic and Dravidian languages of India have considerable connections with the Munda and Southeast Asian languages that they have been in physical proximity to, which has been throughout the historical period. These Pacific languages similarly have their connections with Dravidian and Sanskritic languages. Within India, the connections between the structure and vocabulary of the north and the south Indian languages indicate much internal migration of people and diffusion of culture, linking not only India to the Central Asia, but more importantly, India to the Pacific region and to Southeast Asia. In addition, it is not only the Indo-European languages that connect India with Central Asia. The Dravidian languages also have connections with the Altaic family of languages that includes the Japanese, Korean, and the Turkic. That is why western scholars have proposed similar Dravidian migrations into India in late ancient times – a kind of Dravidian invasion theory much like the Aryan Invasion idea, sometimes dated even after it, making the Dravidians into post-Aryan migrants into the region – to explain the connection of Dravidian languages in India with those in Central Asia. This was the view of Bishop Caldwell who first brought up the idea of a Dravidian family of languages. These Aryan and Dravidian invasion models would make the dominant language families of India intruders from the northwest at a late period. Such an idea is contrary to the natural history and the fact that India had stable populations and a cultural continuity throughout the ancient period. A much more likely scenario is that both Dravidian and Sanskritic languages developed in India and their influence spread to the northwest along with the movement of peoples in the Post-Ice Age era. This makes India an important central focus for not only populations, but for many of the languages of the world. The Indo-European languages and the Dravidian are probably offshoots of such an older Indo-Pacific group of languages. Ancient South India at the time of the end of the Ice Age was probably the home of a proto-Vedic culture and of languages that later gave rise to both Dravidian and Sanskritic groups. Languages like peoples developed regionally, were occasionally displaced by powerful natural events, and spread also by communication. Languages like populations cannot be defined by the lesser migrations of the late ancient period, by which time most population bases were already defined. They should be related to earlier and more powerful events. |