Piotr Gasiorowski, a linguist active on the cybalist group: "Strictly
speaking, Nahali (spoken on the upper Tapti) is not an isolate, though
it's classified as such e.g. on the SIL site. Present-day Nahali is
genetically an Indo-Aryan language whose lexicon shows several layers
of absorbed substrates. Though the exact percentages apparently vary
from dialect to dialect (while minor and endangered, Nahali is not a
monolithic languages), according to Kuiper's estimates the largest
lexical component (ca. 36%) is borrowed from Kurku (a.k.a. Korku, a
Munda language), about 9% of Nahali words are Dravidian (e.g. the
numerals 2, 3 and 4, whereas 5 and higher are Indo-Aryan), and some
25% are of unknown origin. Because of the high proportion of Munda
loans Nahali has also been erroneously classified as a Munda language
or even a dialect of Kurku. 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."
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/cybalist/message/13915
Quotes fromG. van Driem, _Languages of the Himalayas_, Leiden-Boston-Köln,
Brill, 2001, Vol. I, pp. 248 to 253 are excellent and support the
questions raised in our Protovedic monograph.
Is Kurku north-Munda or north-Dravidian? Has enough investigation been
done on the relationships between Munda and Dravidian?
How can a language such as Nahali be assumed to be a language isolate
when the glosses contain a fair representation of language x,
indo-aryan, munda and dravidian? Does language X used for many
agricultural terms of all bharatiya languages make them all language
isolates? The question is: is it possible to isolate the layers which
are relatable to Paleolithic, Mesolithic, Neolithic and chalcolithic
periods with particular reference to cultural underpinnings: say,
words for flora and fauna, words related to organized farming, words
related to social group, words related to smithy or mint, buildings,
bricks, plaster, tools and weapons. If there is a clear progression in
artifacts realized through archaeological investigations of many sites
in Bharat, going back to Paleolithic times, it should be possible to
start naming these artifacts in the local languages, such as Nahali,
Hemacandra des'i, Sauraseni, apabhrams'a, Ardhamagadhi, Pali, Tamil,
Oriya, Telugu, Konkani. This is precisely, the reason why the
suggestion has been made that there should be more intensive and
extensive investigations of the linguistic area of Bharat, the Indo-
in the Indo-European.
The logical deduction seems to be that a proto-indic can be
postulated; this we have called proto-vedic in interaction with
dravidian and austric in a linguistic area, the saptasindhu region.
There seems to be a consensus that saptasindhu region was the locus
for Rigveda. As for neolithic and chalcolithic periods, With the
cumulative knowledge of archaeological discoveries, it is now possible
to define this region including the delineation of interaction areas
as Kenoyer has done in his, Ancient Cities of the Indus Valley (2000),
OUP. The epicenter was the Sarasvati river basin with over 2000 of the
2600 sites of the civilization sited on this river basin extending
from Lothal to Ropar.
S. Kalyanaraman
M. kelkar