From: viswanath@draco.rutgers.edu
Newsgroups: soc.culture.tamil
Subject: Re: Tamil, Sanskrit and North Indian languages
Date: 15 Sep 92 15:00:31 GMT
Organization: Rutgers University RUCS-Newark

In article <BuLBMs.IJB@watserv1.uwaterloo.ca>, selvakum@watserv1.uwaterloo.ca (C.R.Selvakumar - Electrical Engineering) writes:
> In article <1992Sep14.115213.1@draco.rutgers.edu>, viswanath@draco.rutgers.edu writes:
>> In article <BuJ3En.FKn@watserv1.uwaterloo.ca>, selvakum@watserv1.uwaterloo.ca (C.R.Selvakumar - Electrical Engineering) writes:
>> > 
>> > Sanskrit : chaaTi, chaatta , chadda = 'pot',  
>> > Prakrit:  chadda ='oil vessel in a lamp'    Pali: chaaTi ='vessel,jar,measure' 
>> >                                              Bhojpuri: --------------
>> > Gypsy (european): chaaro ='bowl, pan'        Bihari : chaar(d) ='earthern 
>> >                                                       vessel for grain' 
>> > ----------------------------
>> and examples from various other Indian languages.
>> 
>> > R.L.Turner's acknowledgement of root: <--- Dravidian (Tamil:chatti, chaadi)
>> > 
>> 
>> English has a word 'shard' which I have seen used mainly in archeology;
>> it means "a broken piece of earthenware" according to the Oxford American
>> Dictionary.  I have not checked its etymology.  However (realizing fully
>> well that the similarity of sounds may be coincidental), may one suggest 
>> that there may be two similar roots, one Indo-European and the other
>> Dravidian?  
>> 
>> P.V. Viswanath
> 

I am not reproducing Selvakumar's response here because it is too long.
In fact, I am quite overwhelmed at the vehemence of his response.
I don't quite understand his central point; he seems to have thought 
that I was suggesting that Indo-European and
Dravidian somehow had a common parent (Nostratic); he discusses the pros
and cons for this and for borrowing/lending from Tamil to Indo-European
and vice-versa.  He also seems to attribute to me an unwillingness to consider
the possibility of Sanskrit borrowing from Tamil.
(I may be misunderstanding him here, because there seems
to be more than one thread in his post.)

Anyway, my point was much simpler.  Since Turner did not give any support
to his theory of borrowing from Tamil (or Selvakumar did not cite this), I
was speculating that perhaps the North Indian words were derived from an
Indo-European root and the similarity to the Tamil root is accidental.

(Selvakumar believes that the possibility of such an occurrence 
is is very small.  I am not sure that I agree with him on this.
At the level at which we are making 
comparisons (very unsystematic), there is a range of meaning that we can
associate with a word; similarly, there is a range of phoneme sets that we 
would consider 'similar' to the given word.  This being the case, we can
come up with many more than the 5-8 pairs that Selvakumar thinks is 
possible.  In fact, this is the reason why linguists do not depend simply
upon 'similarity' of words to establish that two words are cognate; they 
use much more--for example, regularity of sound changes.)

I did look up 'shard' later in the Oxford Etymological Dictionary; he
relates it mainly to other Germanic languages, such as Old Frisian, 
Middle Dutch, Middle Low German and Middle High German.  Apparently, the
word is not sufficiently old to have cognates in the other Indo-European
languages, such as Greek or Sanskrit.  Such being the case, I would
withdraw my conjecture.  (Just to be clear, let me mention that I have
no bias against Sanskrit borrowing from Tamil, or vice-versa; in fact, 
given how languages generally develop, I would be surprised if such
borrowing in both directions did not happen.)

P.V. Viswanath
Newsgroups: soc.culture.tamil