Set of posts go here because they're about how history keeps becoming controversial. The first post is very loosely related to the next two so it also goes here.
Might repost (free of my comments) in a more relevant thread, if I can find one and remember to.
Post 1/3
[color="#0000FF"]This is not the important post. The next one is.[/color] But the following item is posted partly because the linked article by "Johnson" mentions something about "Pure Tamil" which in typically-christist parlance has the connotation of "Tzh With No Skt=no Skt influences". The reason why that is an impossible statement to make - at least based on available evidence - is what the *next*, more important, post is about. (I.e. show me a time, but provide documentation, outside of the modern dravoodian purges of course, when there was *no* Skt influence on/connection to Tzh. Note that even one Tzh word with known Skt connection is sufficient to disprove the existence of a "Pure Tamizh" for that entire historical period.)
rajeev2004.blogspot.co.uk/2013/05/what-strange-piece-on-dravidian.html
The "kannada gent" seems to refer to the "Johnson" character who wrote the original article. That makes it a christoconvert. And *that* explains the moronisms of the article being referred to.
But Rajeev is dismissing Hindi unfairly. Bollywho's so-called "Hindi" may be turning more and more Urdu everyday (it certainly sounds uncouth enough to make me think it can't be Hindi), and bollywho's insipid audiences may be starting to speak less Hindi and more Urdu in connection with this (whether it's a cause or effect I don't know: "are they insipid *because* they watch Bollywho, or is a natural insipidity causing them to watch it?"), but that doesn't make Hindi itself "essentially Urdu" the way Rajeev claims. What absurdity.
It is Urdu that was concocted as a mixture of -NOTE- pre-existing Hindi with dollops of Persian and Arabic. As opposed to Hindi being a supposed "offshoot" of Urdu or even forming a "syncretism" with Urdu. Urdu's existence is dependent on Hindi, not the other way around. Hindi could have done entirely without Urdu, and gone on developing naturally without Urdu's unnatural interference.
While the widely-heard Hindi does have a tendency to lop off the inherent vowel in Skt consonants, especially on endings, only bad logic could force the conclusion that this makes Hindi itself "essentially Urdu".
It sounds abrupt. Indeed, it sounds wrong to Hindus not used to hearing this, because the original Bhima is a Skt name.
BUT, Bhim IS a valid form in *Hindi*, as far as I understand. I don't know that it is the *only* form of pronouncing it in Hindi, and I suspect that "Bhima" may still be - or, at least, may once have been - a valid pronunciation of the name in Hindi (while it remains the only correct pronunciation in Skt). Perhaps the earliest Hindi dialects pronounced it as "Bhima"? Still, you don't need Urdu to explain why Bhima may have become Bhim in Hindi. It could just be a natural process of simplification, the way Skt tended to get simplified into various Prakrits, including Hindi.
You don't see Hindus taking offence (or at least I hope not) that Tamizh Hindus at times may refer to "Sudarshanam" for Sudarshana, the way any number of Hindi speakers may refer to the same as Sudarshan. Sure yes, Sudarshana is the original Skt name. But Sudarshanam and Sudarshan are the valid local variants of it, and my money's on him answering to all three.
I'm not sure how to construe this sentence though:
He appears to be comparing languages with a script...? That makes the statement confusing. Because:
- If he meant that the southern languages have no *full* correspondence with Hindi, well, they don't have full correspondence with each other either or with Skt. There are sounds in Tzh that don't exist in Telugu, Kannada and Skt (and at least one Tzh sound is deprecated in Malayalam. The Malayalam script at least is a superset covering both Skt and Tzh sounds: i.e. the traditional unmodified Malayalam script - perhaps uniquely - can represent all the sounds in both Tzh and Skt. DevanAgarI has been expanded artificially - for data representation purposes, not for natural usage - to allow it to represent sounds unique to southern Indian languages, but that's using the dot to extend the character set, and the resulting compound characters don't appear to be traditionally in use in devanAgarI.) All southern languages have 2 additional hrasvas not in Skt (but which yet exist in every European language I'm familiar with).
- If he meant that you can write the southern languages in devanAgarI, you can equally write Hindi in devanAgarI (well, obviously). Rajeev can't have meant that devanaagari is *more* suitable for representing southern languages than it's suitable for representing Hindi - even *had* he also intended to imply alongside that southern languages have a 1-1 correspondence with Samskritam - because devanAgarI can represent Hindi completely and, with the extension feature, can therefore represent Southern languages completely too.
And despite (some) Hindi speakers not voicing the inherent vowel in some parts of some words, I am sure that when reading through the basic akSharas they would voice it: that is, they wouldn't be saying "k, kh", but would say it with the vowel. This shows they *know* the vowel is present there by default. It's just that (some dialects?) of Hindi may not always make pedantic use of the same in actual words of speech.
- If he meant that the southern languages have significant correspondence with Samskritam (i.e. all the akSharas of Skt), then Hindi does too. Perhaps the La is depecrated in some northern tongues, whereas it is actually a key sound of Tamizh at least (and gets as good a workout as in the Rig). But then, most native languages miss out on many sounds of Skt: the R^I, L^i, L^I type vowels don't get used as much in any of them I imagine. Then again, Skt doesn't appear to use L^I for many words at all, I could be wrong, and even R^I isn't the most common vowel.
So if he had intended to say that the sounds of southern languages can't be respresented fully in Hindi ("but they can in Skt"), well much of the Tamizh language can fairly be represented by Hindi sounds. Not all, admittedly, but then, the same is true for Skt.
In fact, I could argue with reason that the sounds of spoken Hindi give a decent coverage of the sounds in Tamizh: Hindi has all the varga sounds that are made in sounding Tzh (Tzh script may not distinguish between d and t etc, and between k and g etc, and at times even between ch and s/sh, but spoken Tzh does mostly: at least we can hear the difference between when someone says a ka or a ga and the like, even if sometimes people choose to interchange them. And unlike some French people, Tamizh Hindus can easily say the "ha", but we sometimes choose to write and even say ga or ka instead).
Next, while Tzh doesn't have mahaapraaNas (either in script or pronunciation) - unlike Kannada, Telugu, Malayalam and Skt, where I still hear native speakers faithfully pronounce things correctly - Hindi speakers seem to be more lax/relaxed with mahapraaNas: to my ear, I hear them say "dukka" rather than what's written. And that's *exactly* what Tamizh Hindus say (except if they were pronouncing Skt, of course, in which case they'd say what's written). The difference is that in Tzh you also *spell* it that way. Not surprising, both being prakrit (lowercase p). So in some respects, Hindi speakers are a lot like Tamizh speakers. In other (many) respects, Malayalam speakers are a lot like Tamizh speakers. And sometimes Tamizhs do the v -> b thing that the Bengalis do. Etc.
A sidenote: one entire varga sets all the many official Indian languages as a group apart from all the European languages I've ever heard: (W) Europeans don't make *those* sounds. Not even by accident.
Also the usage of "devanAgarI" in Rajeev's statement seems misleading. It is after all only one of numerous scripts for representing Skt (and not even the earliest one among those still in use at present).
+ Kashmiris, Punjabis and other Hindus, I think upto Afghanistan, used their SiddhamAtrika aka Sharada script for Skt - named after Saraswati again - from which the more recent Gurmukhi script was derived (if you can read Siddhamaatrika, it looks to me like you can easily read Gurmukhi, it seems that similar to my otherwise untrained eye). Kashmiri Hindus still use Sharada for Skt.
+ Tamizh [and also Malayali] Hindus have a special and ancient script for Skt, though Malayalis on first glance don't need it as much as the Tamizh Hindus do, as the Malayalam script perfectly suffices for Skt AND all the southern languages. However, this Skt-specific script has support for Veda notation from the ground up, which is why I think Malayali Hindus use it for Vedic Skt too. I prefer to read Skt either in this script or devanAgarI (and Tzh in Tzh script of course), rather than itrans which I don't seem to compute too well. An extended character set version of the script - historically in use, hence not artificial/not invented for modern data representation - supports both Tamizh and Skt.
+ Balinese Hindus use their Akshara Bali which appears to have most everything in Skt - it certainly covers all the akSharas - and further looks to my ignorant eye like it even supports in-built veda marks. Curiously, the Bali Hindus' OM looks like it's composed of their number 3 (which is also their o) combined with their chandrabindu. The number 3 I suppose stands for the Trimoorti then, which would be appropriate. The Sadaashiva/shivalingam is after all composed of the Trimoorti + nAdabindu represented by the chandrabindu. Or something approximately like that. You know what I mean, it's described in our Stuff. <- Ooh, great use of the word Stuff there.
tuff:
Might repost (free of my comments) in a more relevant thread, if I can find one and remember to.
Post 1/3
[color="#0000FF"]This is not the important post. The next one is.[/color] But the following item is posted partly because the linked article by "Johnson" mentions something about "Pure Tamil" which in typically-christist parlance has the connotation of "Tzh With No Skt=no Skt influences". The reason why that is an impossible statement to make - at least based on available evidence - is what the *next*, more important, post is about. (I.e. show me a time, but provide documentation, outside of the modern dravoodian purges of course, when there was *no* Skt influence on/connection to Tzh. Note that even one Tzh word with known Skt connection is sufficient to disprove the existence of a "Pure Tamizh" for that entire historical period.)
rajeev2004.blogspot.co.uk/2013/05/what-strange-piece-on-dravidian.html
Quote:Wednesday, May 08, 2013
what a strange piece on dravidian languages!
http://www.economist.com/blogs/johnson/2...-dravidian
this kannada gent is going off on odd tangents. and the fact is that southern languages have 1-1 correspondence with devanagari (*not* with hindi).
hindi is an awkward language, as it is essentially urdu written in devanagari (which is not an appropriate script for urdu -- devanagari is vowel rich, whereas arabic-derived languages are vowel-poor, and in old arabic, the vowels are often missing altogether. this is why you have this debate about whether it is actually 72 virgins or 72 white raisins -- the word is 'hr', and if you say it is 'houri' it is the virgins; if you put other vowels in there it is white raisins). the vowel-poverty is what makes hindi speakers do abrupt endings, eg bhim for bhima. this sounds very rough to a sanskrit (or south indian language) speaker.
--
sent from samsung galaxy note, so please excuse brevity Posted by nizhal yoddha at 5/08/2013 09:52:00 AM 1 comments Links to this post
The "kannada gent" seems to refer to the "Johnson" character who wrote the original article. That makes it a christoconvert. And *that* explains the moronisms of the article being referred to.
But Rajeev is dismissing Hindi unfairly. Bollywho's so-called "Hindi" may be turning more and more Urdu everyday (it certainly sounds uncouth enough to make me think it can't be Hindi), and bollywho's insipid audiences may be starting to speak less Hindi and more Urdu in connection with this (whether it's a cause or effect I don't know: "are they insipid *because* they watch Bollywho, or is a natural insipidity causing them to watch it?"), but that doesn't make Hindi itself "essentially Urdu" the way Rajeev claims. What absurdity.
It is Urdu that was concocted as a mixture of -NOTE- pre-existing Hindi with dollops of Persian and Arabic. As opposed to Hindi being a supposed "offshoot" of Urdu or even forming a "syncretism" with Urdu. Urdu's existence is dependent on Hindi, not the other way around. Hindi could have done entirely without Urdu, and gone on developing naturally without Urdu's unnatural interference.
While the widely-heard Hindi does have a tendency to lop off the inherent vowel in Skt consonants, especially on endings, only bad logic could force the conclusion that this makes Hindi itself "essentially Urdu".
Quote:eg bhim for bhima. this sounds very rough to a sanskrit (or south indian language) speaker.
It sounds abrupt. Indeed, it sounds wrong to Hindus not used to hearing this, because the original Bhima is a Skt name.
BUT, Bhim IS a valid form in *Hindi*, as far as I understand. I don't know that it is the *only* form of pronouncing it in Hindi, and I suspect that "Bhima" may still be - or, at least, may once have been - a valid pronunciation of the name in Hindi (while it remains the only correct pronunciation in Skt). Perhaps the earliest Hindi dialects pronounced it as "Bhima"? Still, you don't need Urdu to explain why Bhima may have become Bhim in Hindi. It could just be a natural process of simplification, the way Skt tended to get simplified into various Prakrits, including Hindi.
You don't see Hindus taking offence (or at least I hope not) that Tamizh Hindus at times may refer to "Sudarshanam" for Sudarshana, the way any number of Hindi speakers may refer to the same as Sudarshan. Sure yes, Sudarshana is the original Skt name. But Sudarshanam and Sudarshan are the valid local variants of it, and my money's on him answering to all three.
I'm not sure how to construe this sentence though:
Quote:southern languages have 1-1 correspondence with devanagari (*not* with hindi).
He appears to be comparing languages with a script...? That makes the statement confusing. Because:
- If he meant that the southern languages have no *full* correspondence with Hindi, well, they don't have full correspondence with each other either or with Skt. There are sounds in Tzh that don't exist in Telugu, Kannada and Skt (and at least one Tzh sound is deprecated in Malayalam. The Malayalam script at least is a superset covering both Skt and Tzh sounds: i.e. the traditional unmodified Malayalam script - perhaps uniquely - can represent all the sounds in both Tzh and Skt. DevanAgarI has been expanded artificially - for data representation purposes, not for natural usage - to allow it to represent sounds unique to southern Indian languages, but that's using the dot to extend the character set, and the resulting compound characters don't appear to be traditionally in use in devanAgarI.) All southern languages have 2 additional hrasvas not in Skt (but which yet exist in every European language I'm familiar with).
- If he meant that you can write the southern languages in devanAgarI, you can equally write Hindi in devanAgarI (well, obviously). Rajeev can't have meant that devanaagari is *more* suitable for representing southern languages than it's suitable for representing Hindi - even *had* he also intended to imply alongside that southern languages have a 1-1 correspondence with Samskritam - because devanAgarI can represent Hindi completely and, with the extension feature, can therefore represent Southern languages completely too.
And despite (some) Hindi speakers not voicing the inherent vowel in some parts of some words, I am sure that when reading through the basic akSharas they would voice it: that is, they wouldn't be saying "k, kh", but would say it with the vowel. This shows they *know* the vowel is present there by default. It's just that (some dialects?) of Hindi may not always make pedantic use of the same in actual words of speech.
- If he meant that the southern languages have significant correspondence with Samskritam (i.e. all the akSharas of Skt), then Hindi does too. Perhaps the La is depecrated in some northern tongues, whereas it is actually a key sound of Tamizh at least (and gets as good a workout as in the Rig). But then, most native languages miss out on many sounds of Skt: the R^I, L^i, L^I type vowels don't get used as much in any of them I imagine. Then again, Skt doesn't appear to use L^I for many words at all, I could be wrong, and even R^I isn't the most common vowel.
So if he had intended to say that the sounds of southern languages can't be respresented fully in Hindi ("but they can in Skt"), well much of the Tamizh language can fairly be represented by Hindi sounds. Not all, admittedly, but then, the same is true for Skt.
In fact, I could argue with reason that the sounds of spoken Hindi give a decent coverage of the sounds in Tamizh: Hindi has all the varga sounds that are made in sounding Tzh (Tzh script may not distinguish between d and t etc, and between k and g etc, and at times even between ch and s/sh, but spoken Tzh does mostly: at least we can hear the difference between when someone says a ka or a ga and the like, even if sometimes people choose to interchange them. And unlike some French people, Tamizh Hindus can easily say the "ha", but we sometimes choose to write and even say ga or ka instead).
Next, while Tzh doesn't have mahaapraaNas (either in script or pronunciation) - unlike Kannada, Telugu, Malayalam and Skt, where I still hear native speakers faithfully pronounce things correctly - Hindi speakers seem to be more lax/relaxed with mahapraaNas: to my ear, I hear them say "dukka" rather than what's written. And that's *exactly* what Tamizh Hindus say (except if they were pronouncing Skt, of course, in which case they'd say what's written). The difference is that in Tzh you also *spell* it that way. Not surprising, both being prakrit (lowercase p). So in some respects, Hindi speakers are a lot like Tamizh speakers. In other (many) respects, Malayalam speakers are a lot like Tamizh speakers. And sometimes Tamizhs do the v -> b thing that the Bengalis do. Etc.
A sidenote: one entire varga sets all the many official Indian languages as a group apart from all the European languages I've ever heard: (W) Europeans don't make *those* sounds. Not even by accident.
Also the usage of "devanAgarI" in Rajeev's statement seems misleading. It is after all only one of numerous scripts for representing Skt (and not even the earliest one among those still in use at present).
+ Kashmiris, Punjabis and other Hindus, I think upto Afghanistan, used their SiddhamAtrika aka Sharada script for Skt - named after Saraswati again - from which the more recent Gurmukhi script was derived (if you can read Siddhamaatrika, it looks to me like you can easily read Gurmukhi, it seems that similar to my otherwise untrained eye). Kashmiri Hindus still use Sharada for Skt.
+ Tamizh [and also Malayali] Hindus have a special and ancient script for Skt, though Malayalis on first glance don't need it as much as the Tamizh Hindus do, as the Malayalam script perfectly suffices for Skt AND all the southern languages. However, this Skt-specific script has support for Veda notation from the ground up, which is why I think Malayali Hindus use it for Vedic Skt too. I prefer to read Skt either in this script or devanAgarI (and Tzh in Tzh script of course), rather than itrans which I don't seem to compute too well. An extended character set version of the script - historically in use, hence not artificial/not invented for modern data representation - supports both Tamizh and Skt.
+ Balinese Hindus use their Akshara Bali which appears to have most everything in Skt - it certainly covers all the akSharas - and further looks to my ignorant eye like it even supports in-built veda marks. Curiously, the Bali Hindus' OM looks like it's composed of their number 3 (which is also their o) combined with their chandrabindu. The number 3 I suppose stands for the Trimoorti then, which would be appropriate. The Sadaashiva/shivalingam is after all composed of the Trimoorti + nAdabindu represented by the chandrabindu. Or something approximately like that. You know what I mean, it's described in our Stuff. <- Ooh, great use of the word Stuff there.
tuff: