From: bkannan@ha06.eng.ua.edu (Balaji Kannan)
Newsgroups: soc.culture.tamil
Subject: Proto Indo-European Languages (was Re: ammA/appA)
Date: 27 Aug 1992 00:03:33 -0500
Organization: UTexas Mail-to-News Gateway
NNTP-Posting-Host: cs.utexas.edu



In article <14699@borg.cs.unc.edu>, krishnar@chopin.cs.unc.edu (Rajarama Krishna
n) writes:
>
> One thing common about several languages I have heard about is that the
> sound "pa" is associated with father and the sound "ma" is assosiated
> with mother. This is true about Tamil, English, Sankrit, Hindi and several
> other Indian and European languages. Does anyone know the reason for this?
> Is this the case with other languages like African or Oriental languages?
> Does the fact that the original Aryans who settled in Indus Valley were from
> Europe (somewhere near Caspian sea) have anything to do with it? Anyway
> Tamil was supposed to have developed, initially atleast, independently.
> So, was Amma and Appa a integral part of ancient Tamil? Or was only thAi
> and thanthai used in those days and ammA and appA were added later due to
> Sanskrit influence?
>
> Thanks,
>
> Rajaraman




   This is extracted from Bill Bryson's book "Mother Tongue: English
   and how it got that way" and here he examines the Proto Indo-European
   language theory put forward by Sir William Jones. Keep in mind that
   etymology is not an exact science and historical linguistics relies
   on etymology to a large extent. The Merriam-Webster's dictionary [book?]
   of word histories too dwells on this Proto Indo-European language
   business and argues that there is sufficient reason to believe [all
   from linguistics] that such a family knitting together languages of
   diverse geographical regions today, could have existed.
                                       ------------------

   One also should not overlook the fact that historical linguistics
   [sometimes mired in politics] is a very controversial subject. Some
   use it as a revisionist tool. Then there are monsters that sieze
   this opportunity to prove something beyond language itself. "Whose
   language is superior?;Which group of peoples are superior? etc.
   Pity, that language, which is simply a human invention [for communica
   ting ideas] should be another issue that has degenerated into something
   akin to  "religious warfare" the world over.
 


  

                        The Dawn of Language [I/II]

----------------------------------------------------------------------
   

               [some details about Creoles in the preceding 
                paragraph deleted]

  All of this would seem to suggest that certain properties of languages
  are innate. Moreover, as we have seen, it appears that the earth's
  languages may be more closely related than once thought. The links
  between languages - between, say, German bruder, English brother,
  Gaelic bhrathair, Sanskrit bhrata, and Persian biradar - seem self-
  evident to us today but it hasn't always been so. The science of
  historical linguistics, like so much else, owes its beginnings to
  the work of an amateur enthusiast, in this case an Englishman named
  Sir William Jones.

  Dispatched to India as a judge in 1783, Jones whiled away his evenings
  by teaching himself Sanskrit. On the face of it, this was an odd
  and impractical thing to do since Sanskrit was a dead language and
  had been for many centuries. That so much of it survived at all was
  in large part due to efforts of priests who memorized its sacred
  hymns, the Vedas, and passed them on from one generation to the next
  for hundreds of years even though the words had no meaning for them.
  These texts represent some of the oldest writings in any Indo-European
  languages. Jones noticed many striking similarities between Sanskrit
  and European languages - the Sanskrit word for birch for instance was
  bhurja. The Sanskrit for king, raja , is close to the Latin rex. The
  Sanskrit for ten, dasa, is reminiscent of the Latin decem. And so on.
  All of these suggested a common historical parentage. Jones looked at
  other languages and discovered further similarities. In a landmark
  speech at the Asiatick Society in Calcutta he proposed that many of
  the classical languages - among them Sanskrit, Greek , Latin, Gothic,
  Celtic and Persian - must spring from the same source. This was a
  bold assertion since nothing in recorded history would encourage such
  a conclusion, and it excited great interest among scholars all over
  Europe. The next century saw a feverish effort to track down the
  parent language, Indo-European, as it was soon called. Scores of
  people became involved, including noted scholars such as the Germans
  Fredrich von Schlegel and Jacob Grimm(yes, he of the fairy tales, though
  philology was his first love) and the splendidly named Franz Bopp.
  But, once again, some of the most important breakthroughs were the
  work of inspired amateurs, among them Henry Rawlinson, an official
  with the British East India Company, who deciphered ancient Persian
  more or less single-handed, and somewahat later, Michael Ventris,
  an English architec, who deciphered the famously difficult Linear B
  script of ancient minoa, which had flummoxed generations of academics.

  These achievements are all the more remarkable when you consider that
  often they were made using the merest fragments - of ancient Thracian
  an important language spoken over a wide area until as recently as the
  Middle Ages, we have just twenty-five words - and in the face of
  remarkable indifference on the part of ancient Greeks and Romans,
  neither of whom ever bothered to note the details of a single other
  language. The Romans even allowed Etruscan, a language that had
  greatly contributed to their own, to be lost, so that today Etruscan
  writings remain tantalizingly untranslated.
  -----------------------------------------------------------------------

  contd.....


  anbudan,
  bk
Newsgroups: soc.culture.tamil