Tamil language and Ural-Altaic languages
Peter k Chong
Hi there! I'm just a net-citizen who's curious about a possible Tamil -
Hungarian/Turkish/Mongolian/Sumerian/Manchu/Finnish language
relationship. I've heard some theories that the Tamil language came from
Mesopotamia and was brought into the Indian subcontinent by Sumerian-type
people around 2000-1000 BC. Could someone enlighten me on this?
Curious
Peter Chong
hubert
Peter:
I'm not an expert Dravidian scholar so this may not count for much.
Hopefully somebody else can give a more complete answer. There are a lot
of controversial attempts to link up language families like Finno-Ugric
and Dravidian in the realm of comparative and historical linguistics,
and most aren't settled though some look better than others. One (now
somewhat old) source of this speculation that I know of can be found in
"Collected papers on Dravidian linguistics" by Thomas Burrow (1968).
Burrow gives evidence based on the phonological shapes of root words to
suggest that Finnish and Tamil are related. I know there have been more
recent attempts to do just this same thing, but I don't know the
citations. I have read that some linguist compared just the initial
sounds of a number of words in Finnish and Tamil and found a
greater-than-chance probability that words in this sample will have the
same word-initial sound.
Personally, I am inclined to doubt that the two languages are closely
related. Not really for any good, scientific reason, but just because I
would like to see more proof than I have that the similarities they
share are more likely to be from genetic affiliation than from chance or
linguistic universals.
On the other hand, I would love to hear that there is good evidence that
they are related. I wouldn't be surprised if this proof is already out
there. I know the languages have phonological and morphological
similarities but it would be nice to hear from some comparative
linguists.
Charles Gotcher
Peter k Chong
Dear Mr. Gotcher
Hey there! Peter Chong from his basement... The website I've found
this theory is somewhere in the Hungarian pages (not soc.culture.magyar
though) by a Magyar-American named Fred Hamori. His page on the Hungarian
language HTTP://EXO.COM/~FREDH/LANGUAGE.HTM raises some questions on the
validity of placing Hungarian solely in the Uralic family of languages.
From here, he offers several word lists on various topics such as
anatomy, numbers, nature, animals, noun cases, prefixes & suffixes and so
on with examples in Magyar, Sumerian, Mongol, Turkish, Egyptian,
Akkadian, Dravidian, Finnish and a dozen lesser-known tongues. I am
somewhat hesitant about accepting whole-heartedly his theories but the
proof in the form of his word lists is there. Some of his examples in the
representative languages (such as Turkish, Finnish and Sumerian) differed
from what I had already studied and read about (especially Turkish). All
in all though, the lists are fairly accurate and his essays are
thoughtful so its worth a look.
Peter Chong
Charles Gotcher
Peter:
Thanks for following up. I appreciate the reference. I have read Mr.
Hamori's essay and glanced through some of his data (mainly body parts,
numbers, kinship-terms, and verbs). Some of the correspondences between
say, Hungarian and Dravidian, are striking. Now that I have a source of
info, I'll try to bounce this off some linguistics professors I know.
However, as skepticism as generally considered a virtue in the
historical ling. community, I am not sure that they will say much at
all, except that drawing connections between languages such as these
which, if indeed are reasonably closely related, might have diverged so
long ago in history that it would be difficult to "prove" beyond a
scientific doubt that they share a common ancestry, no matter how
suggestive a sample of data might appear at first sight. What would need
to be done, I think, to demonstrate the hypothesis, is to establish
systematic sound correspondences between all of these languages, draw up
family trees, etc. One difficulty here might be a lack of texts which
are sufficiently ancient in many of these languages to see what the
languages looked like a couple thousand years ago. On the other hand,
Indo-European had textual evidence which is quite old for languages such
as Greek, Latin, Hittite, and Sanskrit. This evidence has been crucial
in attempting to reconstruct Proto-Indo-European. I am aware of some
essays which highlight the difficulty and unreliability of
reconstructing proto-proto-languages from unattested proto-languages
thought to be related.
Hopefully, this will keep linguists employed for a long time :-)
Charles Gotcher