Re: [tied] AA Substrate in India

Reading George van Driem's "The Languages of the Himalayas" I learn that
there is/was another (linguistic) isolate on the Indian subcont. called
Kusunda (which was not previously classified as an isolate).

On Wed, 27 Oct 2004, Richard Wordingham wrote:

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> Paul Manansala has just pointed out an interesting paper on the
> genetic make-up of India:
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> > http://www.genome.org/cgi/reprint/13/10/2277
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> The interesting point for us is that the paper suggests that the
> original population of India was Austro-Asiatic speaking, adding
> support to the notion of a Para-Munda substrate in Vedic Sanskrit.
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> "Sociocultural and linguistic evidence indicates (Risley 1915; Thapar
> 1966; Pattanayak 1998) that the AA tribals are the original
> inhabitants of India. Some other scholars have, however, argued that
> tribal groups speaking DR and AA languages have evolved from an older
> substrate of proto-Australoids (Keith 1936), whereas the TB tribals
> are later immigrants from Tibet and Myanmar (Guha 1935). Our
> findings strongly support the hypotheis that AA tribals are the
> earliest inhabitants of India."
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> AA = Austro-Asiatic, not Afro-Asiatic.
> DR = Dravidian
> TB = Tibeto-Burman
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> Richard.
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