--- In
cybalist@yahoogroups.com, "mkelkar2003" <smykelkar@...>
wrote:
> --- In cybalist@yahoogroups.com, "Francesco Brighenti"
<frabrig@... wrote:
>
> > Does Sergent really speak of an Austroasiatic > > ***invasion***
of the Indian subcontinent? [N.B. This, and only this, was the issue
at stake.]
>
> <http://koenraadelst.voiceofdharma.com/reviews/sergent.html>
>
> Again, I quote from links posted already in earlier posts.
>
> "Sergent claims that the oldest Homo Sapiens Sapiens racial type
of > India, now largely submerged by interbreeding with immigrant
> Dravidian, Austro-Asiatic and IE populations, is the one preserved
in > the Vedda and Rodiya tribes of Sri Lanka. While the purely
black skin > is associated (by Sergent) with the population
which "brought" the > Dravidian languages, the Veddoid traits are
found to an extent among > tribal populations in south India and as
far north as the Bhils and > the Gonds."
First of all, I want to point out that Bernard Sergent is considered
a representative of the French _Nouvelle Droite_ in the field of
Cultural Anthropology. After this precisation, I still see no
suggestion of an Austroasiatic 'invasion' of South Asia in Sergent's
arguments as summed up by Elst. An invasion is an organized act of
war involving the mass migration of the 'winners', and there were
no 'wars' in the commonly accepted sense during the Neolithic period.
The validity of Sergent's old-fashioned racial classifications,
dating back to B.S. Guha's times (1930's), is generally not
confirmed by current genetic research. "Black skin", for instance,
cannot be taken as a genetically inherited physical character. That
is a phenotypical character influenced by adaptation to a tropical-
equatorial environment. What we are discussing is a dynamics of
*language* transfer which, according to my views, may have occurred
when, during the Neolithic period, Austroasiatic languages were
introduced into the Indian subcontinent from areas situated further
to the east.
This language shift process may have occurred through:
1. actual migrations of Austroasiatic speakers;
2. the adoption of Austroasiatic languages by older South Asian
human populations belonging to a "race" differing (from the
phenotypical, but not necessarily from the genetic point of view!)
from that of the original Austroasiatic speakers;
3. a mix of the two processes (the most likely hypothesis given
that 'Mongoloid' traits are noticed among certain Austroasiatic-
speaking tribes of eastern India as well as IA-speaking populations
of the Bengal-Assam region).
In any event, this language transfer process is unlikely to have
left some detectable traces in the *genetic* record of the concerned
human populations. By admission of geneticists, DNA studies among
Austroasiatic-speaking tribes of India are still at the preliminary
stage:
http://www.ias.ac.in/jbiosci/jun2003/507.pdf
> "Bernard Sergent traces practically all Indian language families to
> foreign origins. He confirms the East-Asian origins of both the
> Tibeto-Burmese languages (Lepcha, Naga, Mizo etc.) and the
> Austro-Asiatic languages (Santal, Munda, Khasi etc.). Though many
> tribals in central and southern India are the biological progeny of
> India's oldest human inhabitants, their adopted languages are all
of > foreign origin. To Sergent, this is true of not only Austro-
Asiatic > and Indo-Aryan, but also of Dravidian."
In this case I agree with Sergent.
> So the cradle of all non African humanity (Oppenheimer 2003) either
> resembled the moon or was occupied by mutes not very long ago
> according to the French Indologist Bernerd Sergent.
South Asia did not resemble the moon at all before any of the above
language shift processes occurred because it was inhabited by
prehistoric populations who left a trace of their existence in the
various substrates still discernible, e.g., in the Nahali language
of Central India, the IA dialects sporen by the Veddas of Sri Lanka,
the Gangetic "Language X", the Kusunda language of Nepal etc.
In a private correspondence dating from last year, Paul Whitehouse,
a collaborator of Merritt Ruhlan, wrote me:
"I have always assumed that the homogeneity of present-day South
Asian languages is an aberration while the extreme diversity found
in the New Guinea area is normal. On this basis I would expect that
the languages of pre-agricultural India probably exhibited at least
the same degree of diversity as is found in New Guinea, and would
have included languages that aligned with those of New Guinea (i.e.
Indo-Pacific)."
With which -- barring the unfalsifiable assertion of Indo-Pacific
languages being spoken in prehistoric South Asia -- I agree. (N.B.
Greenberg and Ruhlen's 'Indo-Pacific' macro-phylum is not recognized
by many historical linguists.)
Regards,
Francesco