Tamil Paleo Linguistics

Directions for Tamil Paleo Linguistics

Anyone  who glances at what goes on as Dravidian linguistics can see a huge vacuum- absence of any studies related to SumeroTamil, Elamite the Meroitic and other Egyptian and Nubian languages. 

There are comparative studies with Sanskrit but only to show  lexical borrowings from IndoAryan and so forth. The distinction between Dravidian and IndoAryan introduced by the Europeans still seems to hold  sway and contrary to the view of Tolkaappiyar where he saw the Prakirit (and Sanskrit?) languages as Koduntamil, deviant forms of Tamil.

We are now in the of beginning of what can be called  Tamil Paleo Linguistics, a field that recognizes the TAMIL character of many ancient languages that are coeval with the birth of human civilization as such. 

Towards giving a sense of direction for this field, I am proposing the following guidelines (to be revised later):

1. Of paramount importance in such studies is that of SumeroTamil studies, the literature of which is really vast and most of them quite freely available in the internet. The productive period stretches at least a thousands years 3000BC-2000 BC with outstanding treatises that are quite well preserved like Suruppak’s NeRi and so forth. We can see the archaic form of Tamil, the original phonology, grammatical features and so forth. By general consensus it is identified as AGGLUTINATIVE and therefore non-IndoAryan and so forth. This language must be studied intensively with comparison with all the Dravidian languages including the tribal to ascertain further that it is Archaic Tamil and possibly the base form of all the Dravidian languages. Related to this are studies of Elamite and other languages like Akkadian with which SumeroTamil coexisted for millenniums only to give in around 2000BC.

2. Now related to this is the study of literature in Sumerian but after the Sumerian times where it survived as the language of religion and culture till around 500 BC or so. During the Old Babylonian period we have literature that original Sumerians composed during the Classical Period or even later. From this period we have many INCANTATION texts that seem to be related to the Tamil Siddha tradition.

3. Such studies must also incorporate the study of such languages as Meroitic, the Linear A language of Cyprus, Aramaic and such other ancient languages of the Middle East, which seem to be also Tamil in character. And going to the Far East we must also study the Japanese,  Korean, Mongolian, Ural-Altaic, Turkish and so forth. Most of these languages remain essentially agglutinative or forms developed  from an earlier agglutinative structure.

4. Now coming  home is the study of Rigkrit and Sanskrit and recovery of the BASE language where it is essentially Tamil most often close to SumeroTamil than C.Tamil. It is this discovery that I was fortunate enough to be blessed with and which has revolutionary implications for a proper understanding of the genesis of Indic Cultures. 

If this line of investigation firms and becomes scientifically well established then it would follow that almost all the Indian languages are Tamil or transformed forms of primitive Tamil. Now in relation to Rigkrit this will also establish that the culture of the Vedas is in fact something that was developed by  a branch of ancient Tamils who are probably a splinter group of the Sumerians or Egyptians or a combination of both. 

The best way to proceed here is NOT to rely on dictionaries, modern and ancient but to study actual SAMPLES of Texts- the slokas of Vedas, Bagavath Gita, Upanishads and so forth and pay attention not only to the LEXICON but also to the IlakkaNam, the grammatical processes that go into determining the Grammatical Coherence of the language.  It is only such studies that will disclose that SumeroTamil, Rigkrit, Sanskrit, and C.Tamil and so forth all share the SAME IlakkaNam, the grammatical processes and which are typical of the agglutinating languages.

5. Here it is very imperative that we throw away as almost useless the lexico-statistical method of Indo-European (IE) linguists who fail to investigate the IlakkaNam but only the lexicon and which can all be borrowed from one common parent language for e.g. SumeroTamil. 

As far as I can see languages like Latin, Greek and so forth DO NOT share the same IlakkaNam with Rigkrit and so forth- they are NOT the agglutinating kind of languages with case suffixes, verbal prefixes, infixes and so forth. In view of this we have to study in greater depth Tolkaappiyam that outlines Process Grammar, and which discloses the various kinds of TRANSFORMATIONAL processes that can help us to describe scientifically how one language evolves from another e.g. Rigkrit and C.Tamil from SumeroTamil etc. The lexico-statistical method of IE linguistics with overemphasis of phonological processes and blindness towards others,   does not have the resources for explaining  how, over time one kind of language can evolve from another and so forth. In that way they are also incapable of describing the COGNATENESS of languages, how a number of languages can be considered of the SAME family. In terms of Process Grammar such as that of  Tolkaapiyam and its extension,  we can see two languages with an identity of their own  to be cognate if one of them is a TRANSFORM of the other like Rigkrit in relation to SumeroTamil and so forth.

6. Now another consequence of looking at these matters in terms of Process Grammar that accommodates TG processes is that we do not look for protoforms of common words but rather the ROOT forms of the lexical times. This goes along better with the Evolutionary Nature of languages. In Process Grammar we seek out FOSSILS of the languages and study the ROOT form of words so that the whole enterprise remains scientific - with avoiding unnecessary and misleading hypothetical constructions that do not hold the possibility of being encountered in the world and remain  forever fictional.

Loganathan @ Ullaganar  2004, (revised 17-7-10)

{Comments are invited from interested scholars to further improve the suggestions}