‘Dravidian lingo had no impact on Aryan tongue’
There is a theory that the change in Indo-Aryan language over the years has been due to the influence of ancient Dravidian literature.
But Dr Hans Henrich Hock, Professor Emeritus of Linguistics, Germanic Languages and Literatures, Russian, East European, and Eurasian Classics at the University of Illinois, who presented a discussion at the English and Foreign Languages University (EFLU) on Friday, questioned the same combining principles of linguistics and anthropology.
Claiming that both these ancient Indian languages had a time difference of 1500 years, he buttressed his argument on this huge time gap, citing it as a period too long to measure similarities between two ancient languages.
“Converbes and quotatives”, said Dr Hans, “are the noticeable changes in Indo-Aryan language. During the period when Rig Veda was written in Sanskrit (an Indo-Aryan language), the influence of Subject-Object-Verb usage was 65 per cent but now it has become 95 per cent. Even though such a syntactic structure influence on Indo Aryan language is noticed, it cannot be safely assumed that Dravidian language was responsible for it." He added, “The wide distribution of the syntatic and phonological features in South Asia is unlikely to be the result of chance."
"The widespread shared contrast which exists is evident of numerous contacts, in different places at different times. And so it is highly unlikely a single language is responsible for the contrast,” he explained.