Re: Substrate language which contributed sarSapa to Indo Ar

Dear Richard,

The issue here is that our dear south Indian friends do not understand the "time-depth" of dravidian words and what do their ancient grammars say about word formation.

Tolkappiyam states that no words can start with palatal "ca" while Nannul many hundred years later has no such rule. All Dravidian words starting with "ca" are loan words.

I am very surprised to hear that Gujarat has Dravidian place names. Can you please point them out? I am sure you know that Kanya Kumari (place), Andhra (place), Madurai (place), Pandya (dynasty) even the word Tamil etc. are all Sanskrit words.

Best,

Shivraj

---In cybalist@yahoogroups.com, <cybalist@yahoogroups.com> wrote:

In cybalist@yahoogroups.com, Shuivraj wrote:

> The initial claim made by jyothibabu that mustard or sarSapa is a loan from Dravidian to Sanskrit is not possible because of multiple reasons:

> a) As I have demonstrated that Tamil looses /s/ from the words it borrows from Sanskrit. If you look at the Telugu form of mustard: "AvAlu", you will observe similar elision of the sanskrit /s/. On the other hand Sanskrit loan for mustard into Kannada "sasuve" and Tulu "sasive" is closer to the parent form.

If you look at the original post, http://groups.yahoo.com/neo/groups/cybalist/conversations/topics/71461 , you'll see 'Initial c> s > zero happened in some of the Dravidian languages (eg. Tamil/Malayalam) (Krishnamurti, 2003)'.

Note the word 'some'.

> b) Top producers are: Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh, Haryana, West Bengal, Uttar Pradesh, Gujarat, Assam, Bihar and Panjab.

> All these states are non dravidian states.

But Gujarat hasn't always been non-Dravidian! Some of the coastal place names in Gujarat are reported to be Dravidian!

The biggest difficulty I see with the proposed etymology is 'Rule 14 of Krishnamurti (2003) (Palatalization of velars) k > c occurs under different environments in different Dravidian languages. However such change is rare when ‘k’ is before vowel ‘a’ and is more difficult before long vowel ‘A’.' To me that says the closest we can get to the Sanskrit is *karSapa.

Richard.