Opinion Korean, Hebrew and Tamil: There is no evidence of a shared origin

The AIT (Aryan Invasion/Immigration Theory) is a regular feature of politicised historical discourse in India and in India-related historical writings in the Western academic world and media. I have shown in my books and articles, on the basis of a complete study of the linguistic, archaeological and textual evidence, that the original homeland of the Indo-European family of languages was in North India, and that there was no “Aryan” invasion of, or migration into, India. But this article is not the place to discuss or debate that issue. Suffice it to say that the article emphatically reiterates the AIT: “During the colonial period, British and other European scholars had established the connection between Sanskrit, which the Aryans had brought to the subcontinent, and major European languages”.

In the process, he asserts that there was a “pro-Aryan” bias in historical studies in India even among Western colonial scholars. The subtitle of his article is: “The Vedic stream dominated academia during the colonial period. That bias has limited the understanding and scholarship around Dravidian history, language and people”. The article even suggests that the colonial rulers and scholars stopped excavations in the Indus sites after the sites failed to produce “Aryan” evidence: “When the remains of a glorious urban civilisation were found at Mohenjo Daro in Sind, the British Indian authorities instinctively assumed it was the work of people of the Aryan stock. The excavations yielded much valuable material. But there was nothing that indicated an Aryan connection. The excavations were then abandoned.”

But the DIT that the writer seeks to promote in his article, suggesting that the Dravidian languages originated in West Asia, has no basis in fact at all. The AIT at least has the point that Indo-European languages are found far outside India, but the DIT does not even have this point in its favour: The fact is that no trace of any Dravidian language has ever been discovered anywhere outside India, and the whole construct is a purely hypothetical and fictional one.

His basis for connecting Dravidian with Hebrew in particular is based on three words, the words for “father”, “mother” and “rice”: 1. Father: Ebba (Hebrew), Appa (Tamil). 2. Mother: Emma (Hebrew), Amma (Tamil). 3. Rice: Riz (Hebrew), Ariss (Tamil)”. That the words for rice in a large number of languages to the west outside India were actually taken there from India along with rice itself in the ancient past is a well-known fact which does not appear to be known to him.

And about words for “mother” and “father”, most languages of the world have words containing the labial sounds “m” and “b/p/f” because parents (especially the mother) are the first and most intimate persons or earthly objects encountered by a new-born child. Labial sounds are often the first sounds to be uttered. The Arabic words are “al-umu” and “al-ab”, and the Chinese words are “mu-qin” and “fu-qin”. No historical linguistic connection is needed for these similarities. Usually “m” and “mother” are associated (since they are the first sound uttered and the first and closest person in life respectively), but the opposite can sometimes prevail: in Tulu, amme means “father” and appe means “mother”. Two other claims in the article are uninformed or outdated. One, he claims, “The Korean language, like Japanese, has a pictorial alphabet”. Actually, both have phonetic alphabets of two totally different kinds, although Japanese in particular makes liberal use of Chinese “pictorial alphabet” signs as well.

Second, he says, “Before the arrival of the Aryans, the Dravidians lived in the northern region. The Brahuis moved into the area at that time. They interacted with their Dravidian neighbours and picked up their language. When the Dravidians moved south under pressure from the Aryan migrants, the Brahuis stayed put and they continued to use the language they had acquired from them”. Unfortunately for this claim, almost all major Western scholars associated with Indo-Aryan and Dravidian language studies (including strongly pro-AIT scholars like Michael Witzel and Hans Henrich Hock) have now accepted that Brahui is in fact a migrant to the north-west from South India.

Although the theory of a West Asian origin for the Dravidian languages has always been present in the background, it never became a serious idea simply because, despite various individual writers suggesting links between Dravidian languages and other language groups in other parts of the world (including Korean in eastern Asia, Finnish-Hungarian in eastern Europe, and Elamite in ancient West Asia), all these were purely speculative and unsubstantiated theories based on little evidence and plenty of wishful thinking. Apart from the fact that there is no trace of any Dravidian language anywhere outside India, the oldest Dravidian traditions speak of an ancient Dravidian civilisation extending to the south of India in a land now lost to the sea.

The writer is a scholar who has studied the Aryan Invasion Theory through an examination of the Vedic texts, linguistic linkages and usage.