Re: [tied] Devanagari -A script without a language?

24-07-03 18:23, A.S.Sundar wrote:

> After due application of mind,I have arrived at the
> following possibilities.
> Possibility 1:
> Some scholars consider Brahmi as a possible source of the
> Devanagari script Asokan insciptions circa 300 BC were reported to be
> in Brahmi script.But no evidence is available to indicate that Brahmi
> was a spoken language at all

A general remark first: you still have problems understanding the
difference between a _script_ and a _language_. You can't identify the
two concepts. Unrelated languages (e.g. Hungarian and English) may
employ closely related writing systems, and, conversely, very closely
related languages or dialects (e.g. Hindi and Urdu, Serbian and
Croatian) may use different scripts. Ideas may be borrowed to and fro.
The IE-speaking Greeks borrowed the idea of alphabetic writing from the
Semitic-speaking Phoenicians. Then the non-IE-speaking Etruscans
borrowed it from the Greeks, etc.

Brahmi was a script, not a language! It was employed as the writing
system of several Middle Indic dialects (prakrits). They were certainly
spoken languages, otherwise As'oka's inscriptions would have had no
addressees.

> (except the Tamil dialect Brahmi spoken
> in Baluchistan).

That's _Brahui_, not "Brahmi", and it's a _Dravidian_ language (so is
Tamil, of course, but Brahui is not a variety of Tamil!).

> Asokan inscriptions are in a script that appears to
> have centuries of development behind it .It is highly improbable that
> Brahmi could have been a source of such highly developed script.

What does the above mean? (Keep it in mind that Brahmi is the script of
the As'okan inscriptions.) I have read it several times, but it seems as
difficult to decipher as the Harappan inscriptions.

> Some
> scholars suggested Indus script.However this possibility has been
> ruled out by some linguists as Indus script was pictorial in nature.
> I attempted to solve this problem on the following
> lines. I examined all the possibilities and my findings are:
> 1)Possibility: The script could have been borrowed from any IE
> language.

??? _Any_ IE langauge? [several lines skipped]

> 2)P :The script could have been borrowed from an established language
> spoken in the geographical area where Indic languages were spoken.
> F: The only other language family with established
> presence in India, is the Dravidian family of languages.

What about the majority view that the Brahmi script was inspired by the
Aramaic writing system? The Persian empire was a powerful source of
cultural influence at the time Brahmi was invented.

> The lead
> language of the family, Tamil has a history of atleast 2000 years and
> evidence of having been spoken widely in major parts of Indian sub-
> continent .

What's a "lead language" (if it means something other than "best
known")? Tamil is a major Dravidian language, but Telugu has a similar,
if not greater, number of speakers (ca. 70 million), and Malayalam or
Kannada are not minor languages either. Tamil has a long literary
tradition, but that of Kannada is nearly as ancient.

[skip]

> Based on the foregoing findings I propose that the
> script used by the Indic branch of the Indo-European family of
> languages is basically provided by Tamil.

Unfortunately it has already been demonstrated that the various scripts
used for the Dravidian languages (old and modern alike) derive from
Brahmi, not the other way round.