Relationship To Other Language Families
Scholars have not shown a systematic relationship between the Dravidian languages and any other language family. Comparisons have been made not just with the other language families of the Indian Subcontinent (Indo-European, Austro-Asiatic, Tibeto-Burman, and Nihali), but with all typologically similar language families of the Old World. Dravidian is one of the primary language families in the Nostratic proposal, which would link most languages in North Africa, Europe and Western Asia into a family with its origins in the Fertile Crescent sometime between the last Ice Age and the emergence of proto-Indo-European 4–6 thousand years BC. However, the general consensus is that such deep connections are not, or not yet, demonstrable.
On a less ambitious scale, McAlpin (1975) proposed linking Dravidian languages with the ancient Elamite language of what is now southwestern Iran. However, despite decades of research, this Elamo-Dravidian language family has not been demonstrated to the satisfaction of other historical linguists.
Nonetheless, while there are no readily detectable genealogical connections, Dravidian shares strong areal features with the Indo-Aryan languages. Dravidian languages show extensive lexical (vocabulary) borrowing, but only a few traits of structural (either phonological or grammatical) borrowing, from Indo-Aryan, whereas Indo-Aryan shows more structural features than lexical borrowings from the Dravidian languages. The Dravidian impact on the syntax of Indo-Aryan languages is considered far greater than the Indo-Aryan impact on Dravidian grammar. Some linguists explain this asymmetry by arguing that Middle Indo-Aryan languages were built on a Dravidian substratum.
Read more about this topic: Dravidian Languages
Famous quotes containing the words relationship to, relationship, language and/or families:
“... the Wall became a magnet for citizens of every generation, class, race, and relationship to the war perhaps because it is the only great public monument that allows the anesthetized holes in the heart to fill with a truly national grief.”
—Adrienne Rich (b. 1929)
“We think of religion as the symbolic expression of our highest moral ideals; we think of magic as a crude aggregate of superstitions. Religious belief seems to become mere superstitious credulity if we admit any relationship with magic. On the other hand our anthropological and ethnographical material makes it extremely difficult to separate the two fields.”
—Ernst Cassirer (1874–1945)
“English general and singular terms, identity, quantification, and the whole bag of ontological tricks may be correlated with elements of the native language in any of various mutually incompatible ways, each compatible with all possible linguistic data, and none preferable to another save as favored by a rationalization of the native language that is simple and natural to us.”
—Willard Van Orman Quine (b. 1908)
“Being dismantled before our eyes are not just individual programs that politicians cite as too expensive but the whole idea that society has a stake in the well-being of children down the block and the security of families on the other side of town. Whether or not kids eat well, are nurtured and have a roof over their heads is not just a consequence of how their parents behave. It is also a responsibility of society—but now apparently a diminishing one.”
—Richard B. Stolley (20th century)