Tamil Brahmi inscriptions and other archaeological finds

[ramraghav]

http://www.thehindu.com/2006/05/01/s...0101992000.htm

http://www.thehindu.com/2006/05/01/s...0112670100.htm

P.S.: If there is a relevant thread already dedicated to such stuff, would the moderators please move it there? Thanks

[F.S.Gandhi vandayar]

Very good, Ramraghav sinthu valley language is tamil. People's migration happened from South to North.

More archeological sites of Tamil Nadu and south India have to be explored much.

Indian Ocean studies should be also started. After Russian Alexandar Gondarav 30 years ago, no single exploration misssion is started up in Indian Ocean.

Tamils Ancient history shall be the world ancient history.

f.s.gandhi

[devapriya]

Friends,

It is an excellant link given, but Irawatham Mahadevan has made clear that reading of Those Pictograms from Right to Left as a Forgery and Sanskrit Traddtion is the Cotinuity of Indus Civilisation.

The Find, was said in Garden and not in Depth along with other materials, could have been a preserving of a Family Collection,and after intial claims from Aadichanallur - no Carbon14 dated proofs came, let us wait.

Devapriya.

[bis_mala]

Sanskrit Traddtion is the Cotinuity of Indus Civilisation.

False claim!!

[kannannn]

It is an excellant link given, but Irawatham Mahadevan has made clear that reading of Those Pictograms from Right to Left as a Forgery and Sanskrit Traddtion is the Cotinuity of Indus Civilisation.

I reproduce the actual views of Iravadham Mahadevan as given in "The Hindu":

Mr. Mahadevan commented that the latest discovery was very strong evidence that the Neolithic people of Tamil Nadu and the Indus Valley people "shared the same language, which can only be Dravidian and not Indo-Aryan."

But that said, one of my friends is of the view that the number of signs is too small to arrive at any conclusion. Can anyone throw more light on this? Or perhaps, should we wait for more evidence to surface..?

[mahadevan]

Hi Moderators
Is there any way we can reduce the noise, intentional forgery of literature, just plain blabbering, verbose filth with no stuff, false claims with no evidence that is being produced by devapriya ?
I sincerely feel that the quality of the forum is going down by the articles of such clowns.

[devapriya]

Friends,

Let me thank for Mahadevan showing his self fully open.

I shall give Verbatim of Iravatham Mahadevan's Interviews Shortly.

Friends we need to understand Tamil Wrting method evolved from Sanskrit and this is confrimed by Tholkappiyam to 19th Century writing method.

Let us wait for more details.

Devapriya

[bis_mala]

riends we need to understand Tamil Wrting method evolved from Sanskrit and this is confrimed by Tholkappiyam to 19th Century writing method.

From "puujyam" came a "raajyam". This was a theory espoused by theologians.

Now it looks like you can apply it to linguistics too.

Sans had no script. From no script came the Tamil script??

Yes yes!! apply the puujyam - raajyam theory, you can get your argument through.....!!

shall give Verbatim of Iravatham Mahadevan's Interviews Shortly.

Let's have it quickly. Were you the compere?

[aravindhan]

Nacchinarkiniyar suggests that the forms of the letters of the ancient Tamil script were derived entirely from geometric objects, such as the square, the circle, and the cross, which were combined with each other, and modified with other lines, to form the old script which the Tolkappiyam describes.

...in which context, some of you might find this article interesting:

The Structures of Letters and Symbols throughout Human History Are Selected to Match Those Found in Objects in Natural Scenes

Mark A. Changizi, Qiong Zhang, Hao Ye, and Shinsuke Shimojo.

ABSTRACT: Are there empirical regularities in the shapes of letters and other human visual signs, and if so, what are the selection pressures underlying these regularities? To examine this, we determined a wide variety of topologically distinct contour configurations and examined the relative frequency of these configuration types across writing systems, Chinese writing, and nonlinguistic symbols. Our first result is that these three classes of human visual sign possess a similar signature in their configuration distribution, suggesting that there are underlying principles governing the shapes of human visual signs. Second, we provide evidence that the shapes of visual signs are selected to be easily seen at the expense of the motor system. Finally, we provide evidence to support an ecological hypothesis that visual signs have been culturally selected to match the kinds of conglomeration of contours found in natural scenes because that is what we have evolved to be good at visually processing.

available at:
http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/AN/...1010/41010.html

[FloraiPuyal]

It is an excellant link given, but Irawatham Mahadevan has made clear that reading of Those Pictograms from Right to Left as a Forgery and Sanskrit Traddtion is the Cotinuity of Indus Civilisation.

I reproduce the actual views of Iravadham Mahadevan as given in "The Hindu":

Mr. Mahadevan commented that the latest discovery was very strong evidence that the Neolithic people of Tamil Nadu and the Indus Valley people "shared the same language, which can only be Dravidian and not Indo-Aryan."

But that said, one of my friends is of the view that the number of signs is too small to arrive at any conclusion. Can anyone throw more light on this? Or perhaps, should we wait for more evidence to surface..?

Though I dont agree with Mahadevan completely on this, it makes some sense to think of Indus script to be tamil or some archaeic form of tamil. If we analyze the morphology of both tamil and sanskrit, we can find that both these languages have followed some unique pattern in word formation - tamil adding letters to right of root word and sanskrit left of root word. Of course we find some words that have the roots in middle. These could have been borrowed or could have been the result of combining two words.
If we see the growth of these languages, complex words have been added later in an uniform manner. So I assume that the primitive form should have consisted only monosyllabic roots. I notice that these monosyllabic roots, may be by coincidence, are actually sounds related to their meanings - like the sounds made by animals or by nature.
Primitive humans should have named things he saw by the sounds related to them. Then as their need for words grew, they could have started forming complex words. The first words should have been nouns and the others should have formed much later.
Tamil is noted for having multiple words meaning the same. So a primitive word could have had a lot of meanings and the language should have been spoken with the help of nouns - like "stone food" could have actually meant "kill the food (animal) with a stone tool" or something like that. The words for stone and food could have been like - kal, un. Since the vocabulary in this state is minimal, we dont need to invent any syllables or alphabets and can be represented by X - kal, Y - un. This could have actually been the root of all languages - later developing into different languages based on the people's practices and need - some could have continued monosyllabic words like chinese(analytic), some could have evolved agglutative like tamil and sanskrit, some could have developed into fusional languages like most languages.
About the word order, it could have been in both ways, though I guess right to left to be more probable. Most people are right handed. Right handed people normally hold the chisel with their left hand and hammer with right. So, it is a lot easier for a right handed person to chisel from right to left than from left to right. This also suggests that the earliest writing could have been from right to left till formation of some complex words. Then, at some point of time, some people could have started reading these from left to right and started creating new words based on these, leading to a new language. This new language could have been prakrit, which could have been quite messy since some words would have not been meaningful. So they could have cleaned their new language, creating sanskrit.

So, it is possible that the indus script is a script indeed and could be morphemes, comprising only of nouns.