--- In cybalist@..., "kalyan97" <kalyan97@...> wrote:
> --- In cybalist@..., "Ash" <equinus100@...> wrote:
> > retroflexes. Does Dr Kalyanaraman know a good on-line account?
Thanks for looking for the links. However, I was looking for a
fuller story that also described what happened after Vedic Sanskrit.
The Indology links gave a fuller story. It was fascinating to see
the later merger of dental and retroflex nasals in Indic languages
ascribed to an interaction with Dravidian. (I feel sold short by the
usual accounts, which ignore the three-way contrast of dental,
alveolar and retroflex in Dravidian.)
> Here is an URL:
> http://www.hindunet.org/saraswati/mleccha/hurrian01.htm
> MB Emeneau: "...Most of the languages of India, of no matter which
> major family, have a set of retroflex, cerebral, or domal
consonants
> in contrast with dentals.
<Snip>
> But, in fact, in Dravidian it is a matter of the utmost certainty
> that retroflexes in contrast with dentals are Proto-Dravidian in
> origin, not the result of conditioning circumstances..."
But the unproven Elamo-Dravidian hypothesis says not much further
back!
> Another: http://www.bharatvani.org/books/ait/ch34.htm
The discussion of up the links with Austronesian surprised me. I
hope the author hadn't confused Austro-Asiatic with Austronesian!
(Austro-Asiatic and Austronesian are often united, along with Tai-
Kadai, in the hypothesised Austric phylum.) Actually, one thing that
struck me when I first saw a list of Austronesian (Tagalog to be
precise - thanks, gLeN) verb stems was how Semitic they looked! The
overwhelming patterns were CVCVC and reduplicated CVC, i.e. of a form
like 'barbar', which I now understand to be the preferred word
structure of Proto-Austronesian. However, I do recall reading that
the reconstructed Proto-Austronesian numerals look rather less IE-
like than the Malay forms.
Richard.