Re: [breakingindia] Re: Webster's dictionary: 'Brahmi script is derived from Aramaic'

[navaratna rajaramnavaratna]

 

   Koenraad is essentially right, but he is wrong to say "how come none has been argued for in confrontation with any of the other decipherments, Sanskritic or Dravidian or other? How come no one (except for SR Rao, as mentioned) has tried to fit the proposed history of Harappan and Brahmi in the wider history of scripts?"

 

   Jha and I have made a brief comparision with both Brahmi and Aramaic. Instead of debating us, Witzel & Co diverted attention from the obvious conclusion of Harappan as Vedic with personal attacks and raising irrelevant issues like the Harappan horse. (On a technical matter, there is no 'Dravidian' script independent of Brahmi.)

 

   Recognizing that the climate was not conducive to an informed debate, Jha and I decide to hold back any more publications of our results until the climate improved. In the meantime Jha died and I have been too busy with my work on natural history and genetics, and more recently on Vedanta and quantum physics, which has attracted a good deal of attention.

 

   So exploring the evolution of scripts (and number systems, the should be studied together) is low on my priority list. If this means loss of important results, it is not my fault. India scholars (Elst included) should have ensured a healthy climate instead of advising me to withdraw our work and concede the Witzel-Farmer claims. Again, Parpola's advocacy of the DMK ideology (for money) has received no condemntations from the linguists (including Elst).

 

   Why should I treat such people as reputable scholars and colleagues, especially when I can deal with my science colleagues in a professional manner, with civility and on the basis of mutual respect.

 

   In the meantime, Witzel & Co are in disgrace, I went to Cambridge, Mass and presented my findings in his face and he wouldn't dare face us at Dartmouth where Elst was also present. And the field is also facing a meltdown, with little money and few students. So, why should I waste time on such people?

 

   So, my advice is set your house in order. Right now there are too many amateures and academic pretenders for a serious person to waste his time on.

 

N.S. Rajaram

On Wed, Jul 20, 2011 at 9:04 AM, Koenraad <koenra...@telenet.be> wrote:

 

--- In breaki...@yahoogroups.com, sreekumar menon <gskmenon@...> wrote:
>
> This is yet another christian fraud. Aramic was the language spoken during the biblical times, these are all fraudulent claims being circulated to create a myth that christianity is older than Hinduism. Some trickster Kerala padre must be behind such deceptive claims
>

How do you know this? Seems to be a case of activism that Rajiv Malhotra called "under-informed and over-opinionated".

The 19th-century German Orientalists who suggested an Aramaic source for Brahmi did so on entirely non-religious and quite sensible grounds. Visual similarities between the corresponding letters may be a matter of taste, but more fundamental reasons include:
* the same principle, viz. an essentially syllabic script in that consonants have an implicit vowel, and that vowels after consonants are written as diacritics, not as letters in their own right;
* instances of incipient Brahmi written from right to left, like Aramaic;
* the genesis of Brahmi not long after Aramaic reached India's borders, viz. as official language of the Achaemenid empire in the 6th century BC (hence the use of Aramaic along with Greek in Ashoka's inscriptions on the NW frontier), chosen because it was the language of Babylon, where, as a NW-Semitic language (with Ugaritic, Phoenician, Hebrew), it has displaced Akkadian;
* the proven success of the NW-Semitic alphabet (itself probably based on the Egyptian phonetic alphabet, a purely auxiliary script existing alongside the complex hieroglyphic, like the Chinese zhuyinfuhao as a schoolbook aid alingside the character script, or as the phonetic script in modern disctionaries), since its inception ca. 1600 BC, as model for the writing systems of other languages: Greek (and its derivative Cyrillic), Latin, Etruscan, Germanic (Runic) and Armenian.

Twenty years ago, SR Rao opined that the NW-Semitic alphabet had been derived from Harappan. Interesting, but why has nobody developed that idea since? One ray of hope here is Subhash Kak's statistical analysis showing a similar frequency between look-alike Harappan and Brahmi signs. Also see the relevant chapter from my book Asterisk in Bharopiyasthan: http://www.svabhinava.org/HinduCivilization/KoenraadElst/Asterix5Farmer-frame.php

The anti-AIT case is marred by a strange smugness: people just launching hypotheses and then completely abstaining from the normal follow-up, viz. confrontation with the established paradigm and with rival hypothesis in oral and written discussion forums. Of the at least six Sanskrit decipherments of Harappan that have been proposed in the last decades (by two Rao-s, Kalyanaraman, Jha & Rajaram, Ushanas-Richter and another German) how come none has been argued for in confrontation with any of the other decipherments, Sanskritic or Dravidian or other? How come no one (except for SR Rao, as mentioned) has tried to fit the proposed history of Harappan and Brahmi in the wider history of scripts? It is not enough to satisfy *yourself* that your hypothesis is convincing.

Kind regards,

KE

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