--- In cybalist@..., Piotr Gasiorowski <piotr.gasiorowski@...>
wrote:> The etymologically obscure part of Nahali vocabulary is
thought to represent an ancient pre-Indo-Aryan substrate of the
Madhya Pradesh/Maharashtra border. Although the figure 25% may be
exaggerated, the substrate -- unrelated to any known family -- seems
to be real enough. Kuiper's attempts to establish a distant
relationship between Nahali and Ainu ("Isolates of the world,
unite!") should not be taken too seriously. It's quite possible that
Central India was once a crazy quilt of tiny families. Relics of the
Nahali substrate and perhaps of other, hitherto unidentified extinct
languages may be lurking in the local varieties of Indo-Aryan, e.g.
in the numerous but poorly investigated languages of the Bhil group.
Thanks, Piotr for the clarifications and insights.
Yes, Nahali is spoken on the upper reaches of the Tapati river
valley. The Tapati river extensions have been submerged in the Gulf
of Khambat when the gulf was formed ca. 10,000 yrs. Before Present
and resulted in the start of regular monsoons in India. Nahali
provides the key to unravel further the proto-Indo-Aryan using
epigraphs of the 4th to 2nd millennia.
Piotr's thoughts jibe with Emeneau's postulate on a linguistic area
and Norman Brown's observations. I am proceeding on the assumption
that a proto-Indo-Aryan linguistic area may explain the glyphs on
inscribed objects found between ca. 3500 to 1500 BCE in Sarasvati-
Sindhu River basins.
I had noted earlier about the so-called Pas'upati seal. Some scholars
have noted parallels with the Gundestrup cauldron. Who knows? The
people in search of metals may have travelled far and wide!
Two introductory papers are:
http://www.hindunet.org/saraswati/gundestrup1.pdf [Gundestrup
Cauldron and Pas'upati seal]
http://www.hindunet.org/sarasvati/gkcc1.pdf [Gulf of Khambat Cultural
Complex to River Sarasvati]
The latter includes a hypothesis, assuming the language to be proto-
Indo-Aryan (Meluhhan) and an interpretation of the Pas'upati seal
glyphs.
sal sa~k = bead-seller's workshop (s'an:kh s'a_la)
cu_l.a = tiger's mane [depicted on the face of the seated person]
rebus: cu_l.a, 'furnace'.
The animals surrounding may be types of furnaces used by a lapidary.