--- In cybalist@..., "Piotr Gasiorowski" <gpiotr@...> wrote:
>
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: x99lynx@...
> To: cybalist@...
> Sent: Friday, April 05, 2002 6:58 AM
> Subject: [tied] The Dravidian Salesman
>
>
> > I think you underestimate how much, say, a Dravidian cotton
farmer and family's well-being may have been tied to the
marketplace. And in that kind of situation, prestige should be the
last thing on their minds. The children's count in the cotton field
had better match the count given a week later to the buyer. That's
just good business. And there's an obvious advantage to using the
same words to count in the field as you use in the market.
>
> What I mean is, was it consistently the Dravidians who sold things
and the Indo-Aryans who bought them? The question is not rhetorical --
I simply don't know if the traditional occupations of the peoples of
India warrant such an idealised scenario. As an additional
complication, the pattern of replacement is not the same everywhere --
the South Dravidian languages and some of the South-Central ones
(e.g. Telugu) either have retained the inherited set or replace some
of the higher numerals only variably, while the remaining languages
have already replaced the 4-10 (or at least 8-10) series with Indo-
Aryan items. Anyway, if the vague notion of "prestige" is substituted
with something more concrete like the "economic dominance" of the
Indo-Aryan speakers (which would be the case if most of the moneyed
customers belonged to that linguistic group), I don't mind. I have
already attempted to relate the rate of borrowing to the proportion
of bilingual speakers among the borrowing speech community.
>
> Piotr
The latest buzzword for explaining the spread of vedic sanskrit into
India is Ehret's "elite kit" espoused by some Indologists. This comes
to as close to 'prestige effect' as one can get.
In this model, the spread of vedic among Dravidian, Munda, language-X
(one is not even sure of the contemporary lingusitic mix)speakers is
not due to commercial transactions, but the elite of non-aryan
speakers first "going aryan" by wholesle takeover of aryan language,
spritual and material culture. Surely, the non-aryan, non-elite also
succumb to this 'aryan kit'. Who were these aryans whom the non-
aryans were so eagar to imitate ? it was some "lost tribes" from the
wilds of Afghanistan? But why should the elite of non-aryan speakers
consider these aryans nomads as elite in anyway wothy of imitation in
every way. No reason is known.
But that is the latest Indological thinking about the aryan
linguistic spread