Origin and Development of Language in South Asia:

Phylogeny Versus Epigenetics?

Citation
Witzel, Michael E. J. Origin and development of language in South Asia: Phylogeny versus
epigenetics? Paper presented at Darwin and Evolution, mid-year meeting of the Indian Academy
of Sciences, Hyderabad, India, July 3, 2009.

Permanent link
http://nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:HUL.InstRepos:8554510

Terms of Use
This article was downloaded from Harvard University’s DASH repository, and is made available
under the terms and conditions applicable to Other Posted Material, as set forth at http://
nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:HUL.InstRepos:dash.current.terms-of-use#LAA

Share Your Story

The Harvard community has made this article openly available.
Please share how this access benefits you. Submit a story .

Accessibility
 2
Origin and development of language in
South Asia:
Phylogeny versus epigenetics?
MICHEL WITZEL
Department of Sanskrit and Indian Studies,
Harvard University, 1 Bow Street,
Cambridge MA 02138, USA
Email: [email protected]

Summary

T his presentation begins with a brief overview of opinions on

the origin of human language and the controversial question
of Neanderthal speech. Moving from the language of the ‘African
Eve’ to the specific ones of the subcontinent, a brief overview is
given of the prehistoric and current South Asian language families
as well as their development over the past c. 5000 years.
The equivalents of phylogeny and epigenetics in linguistics
are then dealt with, that is, the successful Darwinian-style
phylogenetic reconstruction of language families (as ‘trees’),
which is interfered with by the separate wave-like spread of
certain features across linguistic boundaries, even across language
families. A combination of both features leads to the emergence
of the current South Asian linguistic area (sprachbund). This
development has made the structure of Indo-Aryan, Dravidian or
Munda similar to each other but it could not eliminate most of

16
 Symposium on Evolution

their individual characteristics.

1. Introduction
We should increasingly look beyond the narrow confines of our
respective disciplines, as discoveries in one field of science have
important bearings on other fields --- and this jubilee meeting
devoted to Charles Darwin’s memory is a welcome opportunity to
do so. As announced, this ‘Symposium [is] to analyse the concept
of evolution or change as understood in various disciplines, and
if possible with an Indian context in mind’. I will restrict myself
to talking about the linguistic and cultural aspects of South Asian
humanity, but this automatically involves taking a look into other
fields such as archaeology and genetics, not to speak of ancient
texts and belief systems.
Just as in biology, changes in language occur in very small steps:
the steps are ‘random’ (i.e. occur in no specified direction); they
can be passed on from one generation to the next, almost always
from parent to offspring. And finally, though not immediately
visible to the casual observer, if their outcome happens to be of
advantage to the individual in whom they occur, they spread in
the population for reasons of prestige, etc. (which, ultimately
due to societal pressures, also creates a reproductive advantage).
Language development agrees with what Theodosius Dobzhansky
wrote in 1973: ‘nothing in biology makes sense except in the light
of evolution’. Language is, after all, an epiphenomenon of the
behaviour of the human and some other kinds of apes, some of
whom now appear to have some primitive forms of vocal signs that
amount to rudimentary speech with syntax (see below), something
that has so far been thought to be restricted to humans.

2. Origins?
The origin of language has been discussed at least since the
Egyptian pharaoh Psammeticus (664–610 BCE) who, according
to Herodotus II 2, isolated two children with a shepherd from the
time of birth and concluded, from the first word (bekos ‘bread’)
they spoke to each other, that the original language of all humans

17
 Authors?

was Phrygian, an Anatolian language.1 This is of course as wrong

as the idea of some that all languages of India – or even of the whole
world – are derivatives of Sanskrit. A 16th century Dutchman has
claimed that honor for his mother tongue, Dutch. We have older
speculations of that kind in the oldest Indian text, the Rigveda.2
We do not know about ultimate origins of language, but
speculation has been rife, so that the Linguistic Society of Paris
forbade discussion on this point in its meetings in the mid-
nineteenth century. Nonetheless, people have gone on discussing
this point, and there are strong opinions, some allied to the
American linguist Noam Chomsky,3 some not. Chomsky maintains
that language faculty is inborn in newborn babies, including even
a General Syntax – that is the way words in a sentence are ordered.
They would not have to learn such features from their parents.
Others such as Philip Lieberman (2006, 2008) maintain that
language developed over time, like any other human trait, and that
the development of speech in babies follows a gradual pattern, just
as they develop other skills. In short, there is no ‘inborn’ universal
grammar.
Apart from the fact that the 6000 or so remaining human
languages have developed a large variety of possibilities of arranging
individual words or their close collocations/synthetic units, the
case has not been made that there is an underlying universal
grammar. Many diverse types of grammar exist, for example,
some without the familiar word classes such as nouns (Hopi) or
with tense-based adjectives (Japanese), all which is obvious if one
compares Indo-European with Chinese, Eskimo (Inuit), Hopi or
Polynesian. An underlying universal grammar is also not found
in pidgins and creoles that have evolved more recently: they are
based on one dominant language at the time of formation, such as
Portuguese, English or others such as Amerindian, in the Chinook
jargon4 of northwestern America.

1 Obviously, bek- is close to what the Greeks and many other people think
sheep ‘say’: bé-bé (or mé-mé), so there is no wonder that these children said bé-
2 RV 1.164.45 catvāri vāk parimitā padāni (also in Patañjali’s Mahābhāya)
3 Bickerton 1990
4 It is based on northwestern American Indian words and became a contact
language in a very varied geographical and linguistic area, with participation of

18
 Symposium on Evolution

Lieberman and others5 trace the origin of language to the

development of certain neural bases in the brain, not in one
region (Broca’s area) as was thought in the nineteenth century,
rather, in ‘circuits’ connecting different parts of the brain. This
is now generally agreed to by neurologists. These circuits govern
motor control of the body, but also cognitive processes in humans,
including input from hearing and producing language. Lieberman
thus investigates the development of speech and motor control in
human ancestors and draws a clear distinction between even the
great apes and humans.6
However, humans and the great apes differ in the development
of speech faculty. Apes generally do not proceed beyond the
abilities of a 2–3-year-old infant when using sign language. They
can acquire a passive vocabulary of several hundred (or even more)
words (signs), without an obvious syntax, the word order within
a given sentence that is universally found in all human speech.
Conversely, most recent research has indicated that Campbell
monkeys may indeed possess syntax in their vocal exchanges in
the wild, combining six basis calls in various ways, as the occasion
requires.7
The question of the original development of speech is one
of selection advantage, see Darwin (1859): ‘structures that were

a dozen languages and families.

5 Lieberman & McCarthy: Summer 2007:
http://penn.museum/documents/publications/expedition/PDFs/49-2/
Lieberman.pdf; longer paper in Science Direct: CORTEX 44, 2008, 218-226 .
6 This is also seen in the FPXP2 gene = that is, however, not a ‘language gene’,
see later on.
7 From the Summary: http://www.pnas.org/content/106/51/22026.
abstract?etoc ‘Adult males produced six different loud call types, which they
combined into various sequences in highly context-specific ways. Callers
followed a number of principles when concatenating sequences, such as
nonrandom transition probabilities of call types, addition of specific calls into
an existing sequence to form a different one, or recombination of two sequences
to form a third one. These primates have overcome some of the constraints of
limited vocal control by combinatorial organization. The Campbell’s monkey
call system may be the most complex example of “proto-syntax” in animal
communication known to date’ - We need to study whale and dolphin signals
more closely than has been done so far. (see: however, http://www.dichotomistic.
com/mind_readings_dolphin_speech.html).

19
 Authors?

initially adapted to control one function take on new “tasks” in

the course of evolution’. What then about our closest relatives, the
Neanderthals?

3. Neanderthals
In Europe, these early humans are known as Neanderthals
or as Homo neanderthalensis that developed from Homo
heidelbergensis and existed by 370 000 BCE, while archaic Homo
Sapiens sapiens (AMH) first appeared in African fossil remains
some 160 000 years ago and in Europe only at c. 40 000 BCE.
In recent years, Neanderthal DNA has been extracted; it shows
comparatively little genetic variation with Homo sapiens: both
are 99.5% identical, though the remaining 0.5% may still result
in large differences, as is clear when comparing humans with
their close, 98% identical Chimpanzee relatives (Marks 2002).
However, Neanderthals are not identical with modern humans,
and Neanderthal DNA does not survive in ours, if interbreeding
had indeed taken place.8 If so, their descendants must have died
out.
For the present purpose, the Neanderthal faculty of speech,
if any, would be of some interest.9 While modern humans and
Neanderthals already share 99.5% of their genes, Neanderthal
anatomy suggests to my colleague Ofer Bar-Yosef10 that
Neanderthals could speak: a skeleton excavated in an Israeli
excavation at Kebara II in 1983 (60 kya),11 has a hyoid bone that
is necessary for human-like speech. This bone (with attached

8 However. survival of Neanderthal genes in us has recently been claimed

by Pääbö et al., based on old Neanderthal genetic materials. For lack of genetic
evidence see Schmitz 2003; s. Schrenk & Müller 2005: 110; cf. Culotta 2007;
Noonan 2006.
9 Lieberman 2006, 2007, Schrenk and Müller 2005. For an update on
Neanderthal speech, see:
http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn13672-neanderthals-speak-out-after-
30000-years.html?DCMP=ILC-hmts&nsref=specrt10_head_Neanderthal%20
talk.
10 Harvard Magazine Sept./Oct. 2001, http://www.harvard-magazine.com/
on-line/09016.html.
11 See preceding note, and cf. Schrenk and Müller 2005: 81.

20
 Symposium on Evolution

muscles) allows the tongue to modify the space in the throat that
is needed for proper articulation.
The question of Neanderthal speech, however, rests on the
specifics of the Neanderthal larynx, which has not survived in
fossils.12 Available skeletal remains indicate that it apparently was
not in the right position to produce our type of fully vocalized
human speech. This would agree with Lieberman’s position,13
who points out that Neanderthal neck lengths are too short for
a 1:1 relationship of SVTh::SVTv (supralaryngeal vocal tract –
horizontal::vertical). But, the position of the larynx he posits for
Neanderthals seems very close to AMH to me, as it did to Boë
et al. (2001) who have pointed out that ‘the potential Neandertal
vowel space was as large as that of modern humans’. Also note that
a hyoid Neanderthal bone has been found in an Israeli excavation
in 1984.14 The hyoid bone is necessary to keep the tongue in a
position that allows production of human-like speech.15
Another factor that has been brought up repeatedly in the
discussion is the so-called, or rather mis-called ‘language gene’”
FOXP2.16 But, this gene is linked to many functions and only

12 For an update on Neanderthal speech, see:

http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn13672-neanderthals-speak-out-after-
30000-years.html?DCMP=ILC-hmts&nsref=specrt10_head_Neanderthal%20
talk; Lieberman 2006; Schrenk & Müller 2005, Junker 2006: 99 sqq.
13 Repeating what he and Crelin had already stated in 1971. See Lieberman &
McCarthy: Summer 2007:
http://penn.museum/documents/publications/expedition/PDFs/49-2/
Lieberman.pdf, and in Cortex 44, 2008, 218-226 (in answer to Daniel Bub’s
review of his 2006 book “Toward an evolutionary Biology of Language.” Bub is
a Chomskian, who believes in pre-recorded syntax in babies.)
14 Arensburg et al. 1989: ‘dating from about 60 000 years BP. The bone is almost
identical in size and shape to the hyoid of present-day populations, suggesting
that there has been little or no change in the visceral skeleton … during the past
60 000 years of human evolution. We conclude that the morphological basis
for human speech capability appears to have been fully developed during the
Middle Palaeolithic.’
15 Cf, Callaway 2008.
16 Enard W. et al. 2009, referenced in Science Daily: http://www.sciencedaily.
com/releases/2009/06/090624093315.htm.

21
 Authors?

marginally to speech development.17 Then, there is the recent18

discovery of a primate variant of the FOXP2 gene in ancient
Neanderthal DNA.19 Both this and our own FOXP2 variant, then
only points to general speech ability.
Indeed, Maria Agnes Solymosi et al.20 point out that (a)
FOXP2 is preserved among mammalians: chimp, gorilla, rhesus
have identical FOXP2, and one amino difference from the mouse,
but two from human protein. Orang Utan has two differences
from mouse, and three from humans. (b) Only humans have two
different amino acid substitutions.21 This would indicate that
the single human substitution alone is insufficient for acquiring
speech and language, between c. 200 kya–100 kya.
However, Neanderthal genomics now indicate that they had
our FOXP2 variant. This change had occurred already at 300–400
kya ago, with the common ancestor of Neanderthals and ANM
humans. Could Neanderthals then speak like we do?
Indeed, there was apparent trade exchange between Homo
sapiens sap., who entered Europe from the Near East about 40 kya,

17 It is not ‘the language gene’ but one of many involved in speech, and it has
been present in mammals for 70 million years, such as in mice or bats, just as in
the great apes, all of which do not use spoken language. FOXP2’s relevance for
speech is now questioned even by its co-discoverer, Simon Fisher (2006) who
denies a ‘language gene’: ‘Genes do not specify behaviours or cognitive processes;
they make regulatory factors, signaling molecules, receptors, enzymes, and so
on… much of the data on FOXP2 from molecular and developmental biology
confounds any expectations that one might have for a hypothetical “language
gene”.’ Alec MacAndrew (2002) sums up that the development of language did
not rely just on a single mutation in FOXP2 and that many other changes were
involved, such as anatomical ones of the supralaryngeal tract. He stresses that
all of this did not occur over just 100 000 years. Further, it ‘involved many more
genes that influence both cognitive and motor skills ... Ultimately, we will find
great insight from further unraveling the evolutionary roots of human speech –
in contrast to Noam Chomsky’s lack of interest in this subject.’
18 For a recent discussion of the FOXP2 gene, see Solymosi et al. 2007; for the
emergence of anatomically modern human behaviour in S. Asia, see H. James
in Petraglia and Allchin 2007: 204 sqq.
19 Krause 2006, Trinkhaus 2007
20 Solymosi et al. 2007
21 Threonine to asparagine at position 303, and asp. to serine at 325. Other
mammals and one bird tested have a FOXP2 variant (threonine asparagine
subst.) with exc. of carnivora (dog to sea lion) at 303, 325.

22
 Symposium on Evolution

and Neanderthals. It is seen, for example, at Vindija in Croatia.22

Such exchanges may require rudimentary speech but one can also
think of silent exchanges, as has been typical for initial human
contact between two mutually alien groups, such as is still seen in
the Andamans (Sentinel Islanders).
Some remnants of Neanderthal rituals found in graves23 also
point at symbolic thought that is necessary for speech. Neanderthal
burials in Shanidar (N. Iraq) indicate a clear perception of death
and the intention to preserve the ‘life force’ of the deceased by
putting ochre colour (though not flowers!) on the body.24 These
and a number of widely dispersed other finds point to some
Neanderthal religious or mythical concepts of an afterlife.
Leaving aside the Neanderthals, Lieberman25 maintains that
even anatomically modern humans did not possess full vocalized
speech until c. 50 kya. The owner of the ANM Shkul (Israel)
skeleton of 90 kya was, in his opinion, not fully able to speak as
we do. I find this and some of his statements26 hard to swallow,
suppressed larynx or not. The same applies to his statement,
following the fact that a baby’s tongue gradually descends into the
pharynx, continuing until they are 6–8 years old: ‘At this point
we are able to produce the quantal vowels [a] [i] [u]’ and ‘without
them speech would still be possible but less effective’.27 However,
babies can clearly pronounce [a, i, u] even before they are 2 years

22 Schrenk and Müller 2005: 112. However, other forms of contact, such as
in silent trading, or exchanges based on very limited faculty of speech, may also
have taken place.
23 Schrenk & Müller 2005: 96 sqq, 108.
24 The insertion of flowers into Neanderthal graves is a modern myth. The
famous Shamidar grave in N. Iraq was contaminated: the pollen of flowers
found there has been brought down to these levels by rats. (Schrenk & Müller,
2005: 80). On the other hand, .there certainly was Neanderthal ritual, such as
the bear cult and their death ceremonies bear out.
25 Lieberman and Robert McCarthy’s’ Articles in Museum U. Penn., cf.
http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn13672-neanderthals-speak-out-after-
30000-years.html?DCMP=ILC-hmts&nsref=specrt10_head_Neanderthal%20
talk; in detail Lieberman 2006.
26 Cf. Bub 2008: 20.
27 Lieberman and McCarthy 2007/2008: 18/20.

23
 Authors?

old.28
In sum, we are left with the fact that both Neanderthals and
early AMHs had the physical capability to produce human-like
speech.

African Eve
As all humans on this planet are closely linked genetically and
in fact go back to a single woman in Africa, the ‘African Eve’ (and
similarly to a male ancestor), we may try to make some statement
about their speech. Over the past two decades, population genetics
has increasingly indicated that the story of the spread of humans
is one of migration out of Eastern Africa. Second, that several
bottlenecks were faced by our early ancestors: the original African
exodus by some 2–10 000 people, reduction by the second last cold
period around 50 kya, and worse during the Last Glacial Maximum
at 25 kya that separated humans basically into African, South(west)
Asian, and East Asian groups that each share a certain number of
traits (to avoid the outdated and unscientific designation ‘race’).
Europeans derive from SW/S. Asian and Amerindians from E/NE
Asians. However, we all go back to Africa.29 Then, the question
may be raised what original African speech was like.30

Linguistic reconstruction
In the absence of written records, this question may seem
impossible to answer. Our written records are only some 5000
years old, starting with Mesopotamia and Egypt. They are followed

28 Like my then 20-month-old son did in Nepal, taking a look around from
a mountain pass: “so many blue mountains / Himalaya-yama”. Most of us will
have our own experiences of this ability of small children.
29 In spite of some residual resistance from a few paleontologists and
geneticists pleading multilocal origins in rear-guard skirmishes.
30 M. Ruhlen’s reconstructions (1994a) of early Homo sapiens’ language
and his global etymologies, however, are still rejected by most linguists. They
maintain that it is impossible to reconstruct a language that long ago. However,
the assertion by traditional linguists that the comparative method is incapable
of dealing with data before c. 6000–8000 years ago, which is an assumed and
unproven time frame, is easily contradicted by the early dates for the generally
accepted Afro-Asiatic (‘Hamito-Semitic’) family.

24
 Symposium on Evolution

by other cultures centuries or even millennia later.

However, there are a few methods in historical comparative
linguistics and, as I have recently proposed,31 also in historical
comparative mythology, which allow us to approach this distant
period. As Darwinians may readily understand, the comparison
of available modern skeletons or of ancient retrieved materials
quickly leads one to set up a palaeontological scheme that looks
like a family tree of one’s relatives and ancestors, in other words,
a phylogenic tree.
In biology, this shows how humans, apes and other mammals
are interrelated and how they are related to other beings such as
reptiles and fish, and beyond. Obviously, this involves a recurrent
undertaking of detecting the last common ancestor of the various
subgroups (species, etc.) involved, a particular ancestor that
caused the shared innovation(s) found in all descendants. Further,
it involves showing how various respective common ancestors are
interrelated in still earlier times, even if the earliest forms of life
may no longer be resolvable in tree-like fashion (Woese 1998).
The same procedure can used for the establishment of the
history of other human traits such as their genetic make-up,
and for human cultural products such as languages, religions,
rituals, myths, folktales, gestures, music, art, tools, and the like.
Even manuscripts of certain texts (such as the Mahābhārata
or Rāmāyana) can be studied, and their ‘family’ relationships
(stemma) discovered – which one has been copied from another
(with transmission mistakes as in genetic copying) – a field of
study that has been perfected over the past 200 years in philology
but is now being automated by computer, following biological
precedents.
In this way, we proceed in the historical study of language.
This proposal of comparing languages has been tried and tested
for more than 200 years by now (William Jones 1786, Bopp 1816).
We can compare, for example, some modern Indian languages
and will quickly notice that some are closely related, while others
are not.
In doing so, we can compare the array of sounds used, syllable
and word structure, individual words, grammatical forms of

31 Witzel 2010 (in press); earlier: 2001: 45–62.

25
 Authors?

verbs or nouns, or the word order within a sentence (syntax).

Some of these items are more useful for comparison than others.
Mere similarity of words (and their meanings) across languages
is commonly used initially to discover rough groupings (see table
below); in other words, to suggest language families. However, due
to many chance similarities (like Greek theos, Aztec teo ‘god’), this
is not enough to firmly determine the existence of a language family
and to show their intricate internal relationships. For this, we also
have to establish regular correspondences between the sounds and
the grammatical forms of the languages compared (described in
some detail below). Both combined indicate common descent, a
true phylogeny. On the other hand, comparisons merely of sound
systems or word order does not help much in establishing language
families as these features are easily borrowed, something that was
understood early on in European languages. Indeed, regardless
of origin, virtually all languages of S. Asia have the same word
order in sentences (and share most of their sounds) now, but some
(like Munda) did not have these features from their beginnings.
Similarity of such features rather indicates mere past proximity,
not patterns of inheritance from a common ancestor.
As an example of clearly visible patterns of unbridgeable
differences that can be detected immediately by any one, note
those of the numbers 1–10 in the three language families: Indo-
European (Sanskrit, Hindi), Dravidian (Tamil), and Austroasiatic
(Mundari).
Sanskrit Hindi Tamil Mundari
1 eka ek oru, ōr miya’d
2 dvau, dvi do iraṇṭu, reṇṭu bar-ia
3 trayaḥ, tri tīn mūṉṟu, mūṇu api-a
4 caturaḥ/catur cār nāl(u), nāṉku, nālku upun-ia
5 pañca pāṃc aintu, añcu mōñē-a
6 ṣaṭ cha āṟu turui-a
7 sapta sāt ēṛụ e(i)a
8 aṣṭau āṭh eṭṭu iral-ia
9 nava nau oṉpatu, ompa/ōtu arē-a
10 daśa das pattu, paḵtu gel-ea

26
 Symposium on Evolution

It is immediately clear that these numbers are unrelated in the

four languages tabled here (except for the Skt–Hindi connection).
The same non-relationship holds for their close relatives, e.g.
respectively, Marathi or Bengali for Indo-Aryan, Telugu or
Kannada for Drav., Santali or Sora for Munda, etc. Similarly,
various fish, reptiles and mammals, or on a more recent level,
the orang utans, chimpanzees and anatomically modern humans
appear quite similar to each other, but are quite different once an
informed biological comparison is carried out.
The rest, thus, is for the linguists to figure out: how the
individual languages are interrelated and how they are related to
their ancient ancestors, such as preserved in India in Vedic Sanskrit
(of c. 1500 BCE) or the earliest Tamil inscriptions (of c. 150 BCE)
recently published by Iravatham Mahadevan in collaboration
with HOS.32
Early on, one has done such a comparative study for European
numbers and could determine the families involved even before
William Jones’ Calcutta speech in 1786 (cf. Lord Monboddo,
1773–1809) announcing the Indo-European family. Since then,
and especially since Franz Bopp (1816), we have refined the Indo-
European relationship at great length, so that if I were to meet an
ancient Indo-European, he or she would wonder about my strange
accent but would understand me; the same holds, of course, for
the reconstructed Proto-Dravidian languages of south and central
India.
It is useful to briefly evoke the method used in reconstructing the
taxonomic tree of Indo-European, Dravidian etc. One of the first
securely established items of Indo-European mythology, ‘Father
Heaven’, is a good case in point (nominative and accusative):
Sanskrit dyāus pitā(r), pitaram
Greek zēus patēr paterem
Latin iu-ppiter patrem
Germanic tiu (+ Goth. fadar), Engl. Tues-(day), ( + father)
thus: in reconstructed33 Indo-European:
PIE *diēus ph2tēr, *ph2terem
Here certain sounds of Sanskrit, Greek, Latin, Germanic are

32 Mahadevan 2003.
33 Reconstructed words are marked by an asterisk, thus *diēus.

27
 Authors?

found in a regular relationship (p/f, e/a, etc.) that is normally

met in (nearly) all other words of the languages involved. Such
lautgesetze occur in a particular word of the same meaning in each
of the related languages involved.
Superficial similarity of some words (like Greek theos, Aztec
teo) does not constitute proof at all. (On the contrary, Armenian
hair, Irish athir, English father, have fairly little in common when
compared with the more ‘regular’ Latin pater [French père], Greek
patēr, Sanskrit pitā(r) and Tocharian pācar/pacer, but they all are
closely related by regular sound correspondences.)
Two similar-looking words such as English heart and Sanskrit
hṛd ‘heart’ or German kaufen and Japanese ka(f)u ‘to buy’ are
historically unrelated. It has often been said that one can find 50
words in any two languages of the world, which look somewhat
similar and have a similar meaning. This is not proof of genetic
relationship. Another archaic example:
‘he/she/it is’ ‘they are’
Indo-Eur. *h1és-ti *h1s-énti
Sanskrit ás-ti s-ánti
Greek es-ti -- (eisin)
Latin es-t s-unt
French es-t s-ont
German is-t s-ind
English is -- (are)

The proof of the pudding is not just this pervasive regularity

(as we also see in biological reconstructions) but the fact that
many of the more refined reconstructions of the later nineteenth
century have subsequently been reconfirmed by missing links.
This is similar to the famous archeopterix that is situated between
reptiles and birds. For example, the reconstructed laryngeal sound
h2 in ph2ter ‘father’ that was not attested in any Indo-European
language was later on, in the early twentieth century, discovered
in written form(!) in documents in tablet form, when a previously
not deciphered language, Hittite, was first understood. There, this
sound, otherwise lost in all other Indo-European languages, is
now seen as actually written. There are other cases, such as in the
recently (1948) deciphered Mycaenean Greek that has preserved
some pre-Homeric sounds. As in biology, each new discovery

28
 Symposium on Evolution

brings about more filling in of the available reconstructions.

The result of such systematic comparison is the establishment of
the ancestral Proto-Indo-European vocabulary and grammar. The
vocabulary provides, via linguistic paleontology, some data about
the life and time of the people speaking Proto-Indo-European:
they already knew about the ‘red’ metal, copper, and had oxen-
drawn wagons with full, heavy wheels. The combination of both
facts points to the late fourth millennium for the parent language.
There was some agriculture (barley, oats) but they heavily relied
on pastoralism (horses, cattle, sheep, goats). Cattle (pek’u) was a
term for riches (Latin pecunia). Grammatical analysis tells us that
the horse is a relatively new acquisition (as indeed it is, c. 4000 BCE
in Kazakhstan), and there was no horse-drawn spoke-wheeled
chariot yet (invented only in c. 2000 BCE). The features of nature,
plants and animals point to a homeland area with a temperate
climate, close to a sea, with snow, birch (‘the white one’), oak,
wolf, bear, beaver, honey bees and their product, honey and mead.
One therefore has thought of a location in the Eurasian steppe
belt, perhaps in the Ukraine or Southern Russia but the exact
location remains uncertain. Early loan words from neighbouring
languages (Sumerian: copper, Caucasus languages: wine) point
in the same direction. Tropical plants (palm tree, bamboo) and
animals (tiger, lion) are absent.
If we then go on comparing the other (c. a dozen) major
language families across the globe and try to establish their
interrelations, we would ultimately reach the long lost language
of the African Eve. Irrespective of the lost languages of her ‘sisters’
and of many of her direct descendants which have all disappeared
without a trace due to bottlenecks in human descent and spread,
some similarities in all surviving language families point in that
direction (see below, for ‘milk’ and ‘finger’).
However, that work has not been done, and will not be done for
a long time, even with the help of powerful computers, because of
the complexities and huge amount of data of the c. 6000 languages
to be evaluated. There is no computer program that can do so,
yet, due to the ambiguities in meanings. English queen just means
‘woman’ in Gothic (qvino), and English hound means ‘dog’ in
German (Hund), while English dog means ‘hound’ in German
(Dogge), etc. So, we merely get ‘some kind of female’, ‘some kind of

29
 Authors?

dog’ – and these are the easy cases.

Long-range and deep-level comparison is actually opposed by
‘traditional’ comparative linguists who maintain that the noise-to-
content ratio in going back further and further in time is too great
to retrieve reliable information. Curiously, their time limit, some
6000 years, agrees with the limit set for Proto-Indo-European. We
will see what can be established.
African and extra-African languages diverged after the exodus
of early humans from East Africa at c. 75 000–65 000 years ago.
This is a common feature in language development occurring
when two communities are no longer in regular contact (such as
the Dutch/Flemish and the South African (Afrikaans) version of
Dutch, or even British and American English). Both the African
and extra-African branches further developed in time, resulting
in the currently assumed 12 major languages families, comprising
some 6000 surviving languages. New Guinea alone has about a
thousand, mostly little-studied languages, and India, depending
on where one sets the bar between languages and dialects, can
easily compete.

4. The language of the African Eve and Pan-

Gaean mythology
Starting out from an unknown African language c.150 kya
ago, there are some language groups in Africa that may be modern
descendants: such as Bantu, a part of Greenberg’s Niger-Congo
group, or Nilo-Saharan, and especially the archaic click languages
of South Africa and a remnant in Tanzania (Hadza, Sandawe),
whose genetic haplogroups, incidentally, are among the earliest in
the pre-Exodus period.34
John Bengtson, Vaclav Blažek and M. Ruhlen have actually
proposed worldwide etymologies for a few35 truly ancestral words.
However, they could not and did not attempt the reconstruction
of a complete language that would reflect this ancient most human
linguistic inheritance. Examples include *maliq’a ‘to suckle, nurse,
breast’ (Engl. milk), *tik ‘index finger, to point, one’ (Engl. in-

34 S. Tishkoff 2007
35 See summary in Ruhlen 1994

30
 Symposium on Evolution

dex, in-dicate, Skt. diś, etc.), pal ‘2’ (Mundari bar-ia), or kaka ‘a
relative’ (Hindi kākā),36 etc.
The non-African rest of the world’s languages then must
go back to the early emigrants of c. 75–65 kya which are attested
archeologically as well (Tamil Nadu c. 75 kya, Australia 40–60 kya,
etc.). Their language has not yet been reconstructed either, as this
would depend on a clear description and individual reconstruction
of all Eurasian and Australian (Sahul Land) languages, from which
we still are a long way off.
However, there is an additional counter-argument, going much
beyond the protests of the traditional comparativists. According
to some scholars, it is not yet altogether clear when early Homo
sapiens sap. could actually produce syntactically arranged proper
speech.
Lieberman, for example, holds that this was possible only after
c. 50 000 BCE.37 But this applies only to fully vocalized speech.
It is much too late if we accept that Australians moved into their
continent between 40 000 and 60 000 years ago but already brought,
as I have shown elsewhere, a particular ‘Southern’ (Gondwana)
style mythology with them, as an offshoot of the out-of-Africa
movement at c. 65 000 BCE (or according to some, even at 77 000
BCE). We have recently learned that even our ape relatives can

36 See Bengtson and Ruhlen 1994: Global etymologies shttp://www.

merrittruhlen.com/files/Global.pdf
37 Lieberman 2006. He maintains that early humans and Neanderthals could
not produce basic vowels (such as a, i, u), but just the rather undifferentiated
schwa vowel (ə) that is heard in the pronunciation of a in about, the e in bulletin
or the i in ‘tangible.’ This clearly overlooks the fact that there are languages
that use also other vowels than [a,i,u], such as r in Croatian Krk and Sanskrit
vṛka, or l as in English bottle (and that Kabardian in the Caucasus has been
alleged to have no vowels, probably wrongly). One can produce words of the
‘Clingon’ type tkx (with the vowel x), Croation krk, Czech vlk, which is enough
for regular communication. If indeed early humans could only pronounce
ə, that early language could transmit their thoughts and mythology just as
well as current languages. Early human language thus may have looked quite
different (for example, involving clicks) from the one Lieberman assumes
for periods before 50 kya, though he thinks ‘that fully human syntactic and
cognitive abilities were also present’ (Lieberman 2006: 59). This would indeed
have been necessary for the development of both the Gondwana and Laurasian
mythologies (Witzel 2010). For the emergence of anatomically modern human
behaviour, see H. James in Petraglia and Allchin 2007: 204 sqq.

31
 Authors?

produce syntactically arranged sounds.38

This argument of a late appearance of speech cannot simply
be undone by pointing out some early cultural artifacts like tools,
which could even be made without ‘proper speech’. However, the
emergence of complex art using symbolic representation – the so-
called artistic explosion of c. 40 kya – was not as sudden as usually
maintained.39 Symbolic use of art actually goes back to at least
90 kya (in Algeria, S. Africa).40 Most importantly, the appearance
of the closely related African and Australian mythologies speaks
against such a scenario: how was it possible to transport the same
original, complex (Pan-Gaean) myths out of Africa around 75
kya and onward to Australia at c. 60–40 kya, without proper
speech? The ‘family tree’ of genetic haplogroups, languages and
mythologies would look as shown in the following, abbreviated
table.

Original African
Genetic lineages Language families Mythology
types
mtDNA L1–3 Nilo-Saharan Gondwana
NRY A, B Niger-Congo mythologies:
Khoi-San/Hadza, Sandawe African
mythologies;
Khoi-San
mythologies
AFTER THE
EXODUS, c. 75–65
kya

38 See above, note 7:

http://www.pnas.org/content/106/51/22026.abstract?etoc.
39 An important study of cultural evolution, focusing on the symbolic
explosion that occurred ca. 45K years bp:
http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/abstract/324/5932/1298.
Overview account in Science Daily:
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/06/090604144324.htm.
40 James Harrod, 2006; in detail: Researching the origins of art, religion and
mind. http://www.originsnet.org/glossmeth.html.

32
 Symposium on Evolution

Gondwana:
Andamanese,
mtDNA L3  M, N  R Andamanese, Tasmanian, Papua/
Tasmanian, Papua/ Melanes.;
NRY D, C Melanesian; Australian
Australian languages mythologies
Expansion North-
ward, c. 40 kya

‘Borean’ = Dene-
Caucasian
(Basque, N. Caucas.,
Burushaski,
Ket, Na-Dene (Apache Laurasian
etc.); mythologies of
Nostratic/Eurasiatic; most of Eurasia,
Austro-Thai; exc. for some
mtDNA Austric: Austronesian, Gondwana
Austro- refuge areas (Toda,
Asiatic; Tibeto-Burman, Semang, Aeta, etc.)
NRY *F (F-S) etc.

Immigration to
the Americas

Laurasian
Amerind languages; mythologies of
NRY ABCD Eskimo-Aleut the Americas

5. Borean and Nostratic

The original African and the ‘Exodus language’ split up in
the course of time (after c. 60 kya) and this has led to about a
dozen major language families, most of them outside Africa. The
well-established language families included, by the mid-twentieth
century:
• Nilo-Saharan (in the Sahel and Sahara belt of N. Africa)41
• Niger-Congo (including Bantu in Central, East and S. rica)42

41 Bender 1996, Heine et al. 2000; Ehret 2001

42 Wiliamson and Blench 2000, Nurse and Philippson 2003

33
 Authors?

• Khoi-san in S. Africa and their distant relatives in

Tanzania (Hadza, Sandawe)
• Afro-Asiatic, (or Afrasian, Hamito-Semitic) in the
northern half of Africa and the Near East43
• Indo-European in Europe, Armenia, Iran, N. India, Sri
Lanka 44

• Uralic (including Finno-Ugrian) in Northern Europe and

Siberia45
• Dravidian (S. Asia)
• Altaic (Turkish, Mongolian, Manchu, Ewenki, including
now also Korean and Japanese)46
• Sino-Tibetan47 (Tibeto-Burmese/Burman and Chinese)48
• Austric49 (including Austro-Asiatic and Austronesian)50 in
Central and E. India, Nicobar Islands, Burma, Malaya, Cambodia,
Viet Nam; Malayo-Polynesian/Austronesian in Taiwan, the
Philippines, Indonesia, Madagascar and the Pacific;51 in addition,

43 Ehret 1995
44 Beekes 1995
45 Décsy 1990
46 Scholarship tends to fluctuate between the two extremes every few decades;
after the unifying positions personified by N. Poppe and S. Starostin vs ‘splitters’
in the sixties (G. Clauson and G. Doerfer), some have now started to doubt the
very existence of the Altaic family again, see A. Vovin, in Osada and Vovin,
2003. Proof for Altaic is given by Robbeets 2005.
47 Now called Tibeto-Burman by some, notably van Driem (2005, 2006)
48 For a brief overview see van Driem 2006; his ‘Tibeto-Burman’ includes
Chinese as a northern outlier. For a discussion of current views, see Sagart et al.
2005, Thurgood and LaPolla 2003/2007.
49 For Austric see van Driem 2007; Cf. also Benedict’s proposal of a Japanese-
Austro-Tai family 1990. For Austro-Tai see Benedict 1975, for its relationship to
Austroasiatic see Benedict 1976.
50 For a brief overview see van Driem 2006; Anderson 2001a,b (http://www.
fas.harvard.edu/~witzel/Andersonaamorph-rtf.pdf), 2007, Diffloth 1976, 1994,
2001, 2005; on related genetics see van Driem 2006: 173 sq
51 Also including, according to some, Miao/Hmong and some other
languages in S. China, such as Tai-Kadai, which includes Thai in Thailand. For
their classification, see J. Bengtson 2006, Benedict 1976, and the multifaceted,
divergent recent discussions in Sagart et al. 2005 (by Ostapirat, Reid, Sagart,
Starosta).

34
 Symposium on Evolution

Tai-Kadai52 or Austro-Tai
• Papuan (with some 700 largely still unexplored languages
in New Guinea) and Melanesian53
• Australian54
• Amerind55 (N. and S. America, excluding: the Na-
Dene56 languages of Alaska, Yukon and the Navajo-Apache of the
southwestern US).
Only a few languages remained totally isolated, such as
Basque,57 the extinct Etruscan,58 and Kusunda in the mountains
of S. Asia; Ket59 in Central Siberia, Ainu60 in Japan and Sakhalin,
the E. Siberian Chukchi-Koryak and Kamchadal,61 the Inuit
(Eskimo)62 in N. America, etc.
The intervening stages between the assumed Exodus language
and these families are yet to be established. Little work has been
done on the Southern Eurasian/Australian groups and its later
northern ‘Borean’63 extensions, as these themselves still are in the
process of reconstruction by a handful of Long Range linguists.

52 Diller, Edmonson and Luo 2008. In India (Assam) we have: Ahom, Phake
and Khamti.
53 See the recent update by Black 2006, Whitehouse 2006; Wurm 1972, Foley
1986, Pawley and Ross 1995.
54 Wurm 1977, Dixon 1980, 2002, Clendon 2006
55 Greenberg 1987
56 Enrico 2004
57 Hualde & de Urbina 2003
58 Bonfante 2002
59 Vaijda 2004
60 Vovin 1993
61 Fortescu 2005
62 Spalding 1992, 1998. Eskimo has been linked by Greenberg to the Eurasian
(~Nostratic) family.
63 Sergei Starostin, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Borean; cf. H. Fleming,
http://greenberg-conference.stanford.edu/Fleming_Abstract.htm.

35
 Authors?

6. Indo-European, Dravidian, Austroasiatic,

etc.
In the Indian subcontinent, there are three major, or rather six,
language families.64 The three most important current language
families of South Asia are Indo-European (here represented by
Sanskrit and Hindi), Dravidian (Tamil), and the Munda group of
Austro-Asiatic (here Mundari of Jharkhand), further Burushaski,65
the relative of some Caucasian languages (not Georgian,66 but
Cherkes, Chechen, etc.67), as well as Kusunda68 and Nahali.69
There also are Tibeto-Burmese and some small languages:
Burushaski and Andamanese, and some residue languages such as
Nahali, Kusunda and Vedda. A listing of their numbers for 1–10
immediately shows that these languages are not related (cf. list
given above).
These three language families are ‘genetic’, just like Darwins’s
phylogenetic ones, based on shared characteristics that lead back
to a common ancestor for each of them which developed the
typical Indo-European, Dravidian, Austro-Asiatic characteristics
in question, as mentioned earlier.
The common ancestor of Indo-European can be reconstructed
for c. 3000 BCE (with the use of bronze, oxen-drawn wagons).
Similarly, Proto-Drav., with a corresponding time (use of metals),70
and Austro-Asiatic, probably of a similar time frame, if we take into
account the settlement of SE Asia by their linguistic relatives whose
subdivisions include the Munda, Khasi, Mon, Nicobarese, Khmer,
Asli, and Vietnamese.71 The subdivisions of the Munda family are
subject to continuing discussion, just as similar refinements are

64 For an account of the language families of South Asia and their development
as well as substrates, see Southworth 2005.
65 Berger 1998, Tiffou and Morin 1989.
66 Hewitt 1995
67 Nikolayev and Starostin 1994
68 Watters 2005
69 Kuiper 1962
70 See Krishnamurti 2003
71 http://www.ling.hawaii.edu/austroasiatic/AA/pinnow-map.jpg

36
 Symposium on Evolution

still being made to the intra-family relations of Indo-European,

especially the somewhat anomalous situation of Germanic (i.e.
English), or the ‘western’ style (called Kentum) languages such
as Tocharian, found far in the easternmost Indo-European area
(Xinjiang), and Hittite and its close relatives in Anatolia.
Incidentally, the frequently heard opinion (in India, that is) that
the Dravidian languages (Telugu, Tamil, etc.) belong to the same
‘Aryan’ language group as the North Indian languages (Hindi,
Marathi, etc.) is based on the medieval fiction that regarded all
languages of India as derivatives of Sanskrit, some closer some less
close, with deśī (or mleccha) words interspersed. It is now also
being pushed by those who regard the split between northern (IE)
and southern (Drav.) languages as a ploy of British colonialism.
This division is rather obvious to linguists and to objective
observers everywhere (see the list of numbers, given above).
If it is then pointed out that the ‘southern’ languages share the
same words as the ‘northern’ ones, this is certainly true but is due
to cultural exchange, and not due to genetic inheritance from their
parent languages (Proto-Indo-European and Proto-Dravidian).
In other words, if we want to use the biological terms: it is due to
something like epigenetic influence, not common (phylogenetic)
descent. The epigenetic property shared in these cases includes
certain words, spread of certain ‘South Asian’ sounds (such as
retroflexes: ṭ, ḍ, ṇ), word order, etc. (discussed later on).
As cases in point, words such as dharma, karma, or recent
ones like viśvavidyālay, ākāśvāṇī, dūrdarśan are derived from the
common Pan-Indian ‘cultural’ language, Sanskrit, and they are
not native in the languages concerned. These words, in fact, are
not even ‘native’ in modern Indo-Aryan languages, where Vedic
dharma became dhrama in the northwestern Dardic languages;
Old Beng. has dhāma ‘religious conduct’; Hindi has kām-dhām
‘work, business’; Old Singhalese has dama ‘religion’, cf. also Sindhi-
Kacchi a-dham ‘tyranny’. In short, the form of modern dharma is
a direct medieval loan from Sanskrit and not derived from the
natural development of the Indo-Aryan languages concerned. In
the same way, it has been loaned into Dravidian languages.
Similarly all over Europe, we find medieval and modern loan
words derived from Latin or Greek, like university, religion, radio,
television. They are entirely non-native in modern Indo-European

37
 Authors?

languages just as they are in the Uralic languages Finnish, Estonian

or Hungarian, languages that are entirely unintelligible to the
majority of neighbouring Europeans, just as Dravidian is to Indo-
Aryan speakers.
In sum, the three major language families of S. Asia have their
own separate origins and their own individual development,
continuing to this very day. The situation is again comparable
to Europe, where we mostly have Indo-European languages but
also a strong area of Uralic and an old remnant language, Basque,
as well a few more recent newcomers: Maltese (Arabic), Turkish
(Altaic) and Kalmyk on the lower Volga (Mongolian, e.g. Altaic).
Nevertheless, most or all of the peoples speaking these languages
regard themselves as Europeans and share most of the common
European culture. Similarly, this is the case for India.
However, there are a number of residue languages that do not
belong to these three major families.

7. Residues: a complex prehistory

To begin with, it has to be understood that every language that
we speak retains earlier stages of its individual development, in
quasi-archaeological layers, much as humans retain some feature
of stages in the past, such as the appendix or tailbone.
To give a well-researched parallel: in English, these layers
include, first, the recently acquired Indian terms (guru, pandit,
yoga, bungalow, verandah, curry, punch, pajama, etc.). Below that
level there are Dutch sailors’ words (boss, mate, dike, etc.) then
the ever-increasing multitude of ‘learned’, originally humanistic
Graeco-Roman words of the Renaissance. Before that, the equally
numerous Norman French words (after 1066 CE, like river,
mountain, forest, ville, court, castle, army, royal, grand, beauty,
etc.), and some Viking Old Norse words (egg, -vik, -by, etc.). Only
then we get to the layer of ancestral Anglo-Saxon words that form
the core of English (words like father, mother, water, horse, cow,
milk, to go, to do, numbers and particles). They have come over
from northern Germany and western Denmark with the Saxons,
Angles and Jutes. Even before that, the western Germanic language
Old Saxon had experienced a strong Roman input (street, mile,
cellar, castle, etc.). But there is also a non-Indo-European residue of

38
 Symposium on Evolution

some 30% of the Saxon (and Germanic) vocabulary that belongs to

a pre-Indo-European, unknown ‘North Sea’ substrate, with words
like sheep, eel, roe, boar, sour, lentil, land, delve, prick.72 We can
detect similar subsequent historical levels in Indian languages.
In addition, it must not be forgotten that Old English (Anglo-
Saxon) is clearly an ‘invaders’ language’ and we therefore find
remnants of substrates preceding them in Britain: local British
Romance/Latin (-chester/-cester, channel, etc.), Insular Celtic
(dune, London < Lugdunum), and even of an unknown northern
British substrate (Pictish). The same situation obtains within the
earliest Sanskrit, that of the Ṛgveda, which has some 380 substrate
words73 from unknown language(s).74
Further, we can well reconstruct the subsequent developments,
say from Indo-European and Vedic to Classical Sanskrit, and then
onward to Hindi/Bengali, etc., for example (*asterisk indicates a
reconstructed form; > indicates ‘developing to’, < ‘derived from’,
~ ‘related to’):
Vedic hasta ‘hand’ > Pali hattha > Hindi hath
Vedic akṣi ‘eye’ > Pali akkhi, acchi > Hindi āṅkh
Ved. Skt. hṛdaya > Pali hadaya, Prakrit/Old Hindi hiaa (now: ​
Persian dil < Avestan zard ~ Ved. hṛd-)
IE *k’erd > śrad in śrad-dhā ‘to put your heart into something’
= ‘to trust’, derived from another word for ‘heart.’
Still, we always come across some words that stand out from this
general IE/IA scheme as they do not reflect the expected, regular
forms. For example, in Hindi, Tamil, or English for that matter, you
do not expect a modern word like Mfume (an African American
politician) Mbow (the name of the former Director General of
Unesco), or Nkrumah (the name of the first president of Ghana)
as mf-, mb- or nk- are not allowed as the beginning of words. The
same applies to dialect words imported from neighbouring areas
that do not fit the local language (Vedic Sanskrit).
The same pattern as observed above in English loan words from
Dutch, Celtic, French, Latin, etc. can be seen in the influences of
loan words in South Asia. This process has been going on at least

72 For these ‘North Sea area’ words cf. Witzel 2003.

73 Kuiper 1991
74 Witzel 1999

39
 Authors?

since the Persian conquests of the Greater Panjab in 530 BCE: bandī
(not bandhī), karša (not *karṣa), pustaka (not *puṣṭaka!) now are
common Skt. words. Later on, Greek words were taken over after
Alexander’s invasion: melā, kalama, horā, jamātar; and still later,
Turkic/Mongolian ones: bahadur, begum, horse terms ending in
–āha such as khoṅgāha (< Turkic qoṅgur ‘red’), innumerable Persian,
Arabic, English and some Portuguese (kamiz, sabun) words, and
now sushi and kungfu… There also is the multitude of early loans
from Dravidian and Munda.
A list of loan words in Indian languages is given below,
from modern times down to the oldest forms of Sanskrit (and
also Dravidian). It roughly follows the many historical levels of
‘foreign’ and substrate influences; for illustrative purposes, a list
of the (sometimes corresponding) levels of loan words in English
is juxtaposed.

TABLE COMES HERE

40
Symposium on Evolution

41
 Authors?

However, though the study of such loans is very important for

cultural history, all of this deals, in the end, only with incidental
influences on Indo-Aryan. Instead, taking seriously the pre-Indo-
Aryan remnant (substrate) words, found from the Ṛgveda onward,
like the c. 30% in English, we can detect a growing number of
words that go back to none of the major language families of S.
Asia, such as Indo-European, Drav., Munda etc., which we are in
the process of collecting, at our SARVA website.75
Indeed, South Asia is a very complex area, with 5 or more
language families and a lot of inferred remnants of lost languages
and families, which is not surprising. For comparison, in Europe,
we have clear data on languages that precede the Indo-European
ones: not just Basque, but a whole array of fragmentary languages
from Spain to Turkey, and from Scotland to the Alps.76
The obvious corresponding ones in India are: Burushaski in
northernmost Kashmir, just below the Pamir passes in Hunza.
Usually it is treated as an isolate, a remnant of a lost family that has
no relatives left anywhere else. However, some more ‘adventurous’
linguists, such John Bengtson, have shown that it is related with
Northern Caucasus languages and Basque (on the French/Spanish
border). This Macro-Caucasian language family reflects the
remnants of the early move out of western South Asia/Iran into
West Asia and Europe at c. 40 kya.
A similar case is that of Andamanese, spoken on some islands
such as Great Andaman, Little Andaman and Sentinel. A few
groups remain: Andamanese, Jarawa, Önge, (the still unstudied)
Sentinel, and the neglected Shompen on the Nicobar Islands. They
were regarded as isolated until the late J. Greenberg united them
in a new language family (Indo-Pacific) along with Papuan and
Tasmanian. Recently, and rather surprisingly, another language in
the hills of Nepal has been added.77 This is Kusunda, the language
of one of the hunter-gatherer groups in Central and Western Nepal.

75 http://www.aa.tufs.ac.jp/sarva/. This is a long-term project undertaken by

F. Southworth, M. Witzel and D. Stampe. It is hosted by the Institute for the
Study of Asian and African Languages and Cultures of the Tokyo University of
Foreign Studies.
76 Sverdrup 2002: 117, and other contributions in this volume
77 Whitehouse et al. 2004

42
 Symposium on Evolution

Long pronounced dead, it was recently rediscovered by my friend

B.K. Rana,78 and has been described by him, and more recently in
great detail by the late D. Watters (based on three speakers!)79

An overview of substrates
We have by now inferred substrates that are not directly attested,
unlike the still spoken languages Andamanese, Kusunda (Nepal),
or Vedda80 (Sri Lanka). Substrates include those found New Indo-
Aryan languages: Khowar (Chitral in NW Pakistan);81 a strong
substrate in Kashmiri (some 25%)82 along with strange vowels
and an aberrant syntax; Tharu in the Siwalik Himalayan foothills
of India and Nepal,83 inscriptional evidence in the Kathmandu
Valley,84 materials relating to the Indus period of the Greater
Panjab85 and Sindh (Meluhhan),86 many agricultural words of the
Ganges Plains (‘Language X’),87 words in Bhili88 and some 25% of
the Nahali vocabulary (Central India),89 Vedda of Sri Lanka, and
in some Nilgiri hill languages.90
There will be many more, but such substrates have not been
discovered as little work has been done to investigate them. Who
knows what may still be discovered in the nooks and corners, in the
mountains and jungles of the subcontinent? There is much work to
be done before many of these ‘tribal, jungli’ languages disappear.

78 Rana 2002
79 Watters 2005; his dictionary is found at http://www.aa.tufs.ac.jp/sarva/
materials_frame.html.
80 de Silva 1962, Witzel 1999
81 Kuiper 1962
82 L. Schmid 1981
83 Witzel, unpublished pilot study
84 Witzel 1999
85 Witzel 1999, Kuiper 1991
86 Witzel 1999
87 Masica 1979
88 Koppers 1948
89 Kuiper 1962
90 Zvelebil 1990

43
 Authors?

The Indian Institue of Language Studies in Mysore (http://www.

iils.org/) and the Indian Anthropological Survey (http://www.
ansi.gov.in/default.htm) do some of this work, but there is need
for much more. These languages are precious testimonies to early
human history, and each language lost is a loss for all of humanity.
Political and administrative hurdles should not be a bar.91
However, a so far almost completely overlooked field is that of
the external relationships of Dravidian that covers all of South
and much of Central India. Many historians and some linguists
assume that Dravidian has ‘always been present in India’, especially
so in the southern subcontinent. Some assume a relationship with
Uralic. However, Vaclav Blažek (Brno, Czech Republic) has recently
pointed out a promising number of words in Dravidian that seem
to stem from a lost Australian substrate92 in India. Applauded by a
specialist in Australian Languages (Paul Black, at our 2006 Round
Table),93 Blažek has derived from Australian the numbers 1, 4, and
words for eye, tooth, neck, shin, knee, feces and urine, etc. All of
them belong to the basic vocabulary of any population (Swadesh
list).
If his comparison holds up, we would have a very deep substrate
in Southern India (and beyond?) that existed before the movement
of Proto-Australian into the Australian continent. This must have
been the case well before the Ice Age (c. 20 kya), possibly as early
as c. 65 kya: note their otherwise rare retroflex sounds, below, and
new, concurring archaeological and genetic finds in Tamil Nadu
(Petraglia et al. 2007; Wells 2002; Majumder & Balasubramanian
2009; Friese 2009). Proto-Australian speakers would then have
been present in India during the initial Out-of-Africa settlement,
moved along the shores of the then exposed Indonesian Sunda
Land subcontinent and crossed over by boat from Timor, and
entered Australia by c. 50 000 BCE when the first human remains
are found at Mungo Lake.

91 See now the various promising international projects to record such

languages (and texts): Hans Rausing Foundation, U.K. (http://www.hrelp.org/
languages); on oral traditions see (http://www.oralliterature.org/); cf. Witzel
2010
92 See Blažek 2006
93 Cf. Black 2006

44
 Symposium on Evolution

This is important: it would indicate, again, that South Asia has

seen many levels of languages and their populations ever since the
immigration from Africa, some 75 kya. The Australian substrate
in Dravidian is obviously expected, as it has been found in genetic
evidence as well.94 However, the Australian connection and
other substrates in Dravidian have hardly ever been researched
seriously.95
It must also be pointed out that, due to pathway inheritance
from the Middle Ages and as early as by Patañjali (150 BCE), there
has been the prominent idea of ‘local’ deśī and ‘barbarian’ mleccha
words in Sanskrit; due to this pathway dependency, virtually no
work has been done in India on substrate languages, and even
historical comparative linguistics as such is little developed in
India.96

However, in order to understand more of early South Asian

history, we need such studies. There is a pressing need to get young
Indian graduate students into this field and, first of all, to produce
etymological dictionaries of the major languages of S. Asia. So far,
we only have the exhaustive and up-to-date scientific etymological
dictionary by M. Mayrhofer (Vedic and Classical Sanskrit), the
merely descriptive New Indo-Aryan one by R. Turner (1966,
CDIAL) and the equally descriptive Dravidian one by Th. Burrow
and M. Emeneau (1960/1984, DEDR). Both the latter are not of a
high standard as they do not discuss individual word formations
(Turner) and do not even provide reconstructions (DEDR).
Instead, they provide just lists of words somehow related to each
other. Further, generally the Tamil form is taken as being close to

94 Wells 2002, in collaboration with Dr Ramasamy Pitchappan, who studied

the NRY of three populations in the Madurai region, where he found a person
with ‘pre-Australian’ genetic traits (in: Wells et al. 2001; Friese 2009). Note
also the PBS film: The journey of man: a genetic odyssey; see: http://www.
shoppbs.org/product/index.jsp?productId=1402989. See now Majumder and
Balasubramanian 2009.
95 Nothing in Krishnamurti; see, however, for a handful of words in the
Nilgiri languages (Zvelebil 1990) that seem to be of unknown origin.
96 Such as in the off-mainstream writings of Misra 1992 and in Bryant &
Patton 2005, all of this after a promising beginning by scholars such as Suniti
Kumar Chatterji (1926, 1974) and others.

45
 Authors?

Proto-Dravidian, due to its frequently archaic form.

There are only rudimentary etymological dictionaries for
Bengali97 and Marathi98 that do not go back beyond Sanskrit and
merely list deśī words; there also is major recent one for Tamil.99
Obviously, linguists studying the substrate words could do useful
work alongside geneticists and archaeologists (e.g. for Nihali,
Kusunda), but this is just not happening.

While all these additional and substrate language families are

genetic ones in their own way, just like Darwins’s phylogenitic
ones, they cannot be brought into any simple Indo-European-
Dravidian or expanded Indo-European-Drav.-Munda-Tibeto-
Burmese scheme. Instead, they reflect other, wider families, such
as Macro-Caucasian (Burushaski), Indo-Pacific (Andamanese,
Kusunda), and beyond, which are lost families.
I still wonder about the linguistic connection between the
isolated languages Nahali (in Central India) and Ainu100 (in
northern Japan and Sakhalin). Both share very similar words for
‘fire, dog, monkey’, among others. This connection may eventually
also be reflected by the ancient genetic NRY chromosome
haplogroup D that has so far been spottily found in N. and S.
India, but not yet among the Nahals. This would again reflect the
early settlement of much of S. and E. Asia. The Nahali language
has some of the earliest substrates in India, some 25%, below Indo-
Aryan, Drav. and Munda levels. Haplogroup D has been driven
into the nooks and corners of the continent by later spreads. It still
occurs in Tibet, the Andamans, Japan and in some Indian tribes,
the Rajbamshi on the India Bengal/Nepal border, the Kurumba in
the Nilgiris.101
The substrate languages mentioned earlier have exercised a
certain amount of influence on all later-arrived or later-derived
Indian languages. Notable is the curious case of the ancient retroflex

97 Sen 1971
98 Tulpule 2000
99 The multi-volume one Ñānamuttan Tēvanēyan et al. 1985-, however,
includes many fanciful derivations.
100 Witzel 1999; Kuiper 1962; Bengtson 2006
101 Thangaraj 2003

46
 Symposium on Evolution

consonants (as in kūṭa, iṣṭa, heḍa, piṇḍa, daṇḍa, gaṇa, see below).
Unexpectedly, they are most prominent in the Hindukush/Pamir
area but have affected languages in the rest of the subcontinent,
even Munda. Curiously, retroflexes also are typical of aboriginal
languages of Australia.
A few words are in order about the historical development from
the early forms of the ancestral IE/IA, Dravidian and Austro-
Asiatic ‘mother tongues’ down to their modern forms, such as
Hindi, Tamil or Mundari.

8. Developments from Vedic Skt. to Middle and

New Indo-Aryan
Old Indo-Aryan includes Vedic, Classical and Epic Skt.; Vedic
developed to the more popular Middle Indo-Aryan languages
(Prākṛt, Pāli, Ardha-Magadhī, Māharāṣṭrī, etc.). These, starting in
mid-first millennium CE, gradually developed into the current
New Indo-Aryan (NIA) languages. Starting in the Northwest we
have Dardic (Kashmiri, Kalasha, Khowar, Kohistani, etc.), Panjabi,
Dogri and Sindhi, the multitude of Pahari languages (including
Garhwali, Nepali, etc.), the eastern branch with Maithili, Bengali,
Assamese and Oriya; the central languages (Bhojpuri, Awadhi,
Hindi/Urdu, Braj, various Rajasthani languages, etc.), and finally,
Gujarati, Maharashtri with Konkani, and Sinhala in Sri Lanka.
There have been regular developments from the ancient
form of Indo-Aryan (Vedic Skt.) down to the modern languages.
They follow certain patterns, such as simplification of double
consonants, as seen in hasta ‘hand’ > Pali hattha > Hindi hath, or
in akṣi ‘eye’ > Pali akkhi, acchi > Hindi āṅkh. Usually, single initial
consonants are retained while those in the middle of words are
‘weakend’ (from -t- > d >ð> zero, etc.) and finally disappeared, as
in hṛdaya ‘heart’ > Pali hadaya > Maharashtri, Old Hindi hiaa.
However, some Indo-Aryan areas have very different, ‘strange’
developments, such as guru > Kashmiri gōr, genetive gur’s, or
Vedic aṣṭau ‘8’ that is retained in the conservative Kalasha aṣṭ
(Chitral, NW Pakistan), while in the same Dardic group, it became
Kashmiri öṭh, which is closer to Hindi āṭh.

47
 Authors?

Other major developments include the complete restructuring

of the Skt. nominal and verbal system, from a flectional system
(guruḥ, gen. guroḥ) to a quasi-agglutinative noun declension
(guru-kā, ke, kī), and Skt. asti / MIA *asati ‘he is’ > Hindi hai, or
cal-thā < cal- + sthitakaḥ , etc.
Except for the frequently archaic northwestern (Dardic)
languages, most New Indo-Aryan languages follow these patterns,
so that modern words and noun or verb forms no longer resemble
the Skt. ones, the frequent loans from Skt. (like dharma, karma,
dūrdarśan) obviously excepted.

9. Development of Dravidian > Tamil, etc.

Similarly, regular developments can also be observed in the
other Indian language families.
The Dravidian family is usually divided into three branches: a
northern one with Brahui (in Baluchistan), Kurukh (Oraon) and
Malto; the southern central one with Gondi, Telugu; a central one
with a host of small languages (such as Kolami or Parji); and a
southern one with Tamil, Malayalam, Kannada and Tulu.
Most developments from PDrav. to the individual languages
are regular, such as Drav. p > Kannada h which occurred, as
the inscriptions show, only around 900 CE. The Old Tamil of
the Sangam texts and inscriptions (from c. 2nd century BCE
onward)102 too has changed considerably over time, in spite of
the relative conservative nature of Tamil consonants, vowels and
word forms. For example, the sound h, a glottal fricative, is still
preserved by the Old Tamil āytam, but soon disappeared in all of
Drav. Or, the alveolar consonant ṯ changed in many languages into
a continuant, the trilled ṟ.
Further, the reconstructed Proto-Dravidian and Old Tamil
have only word-initial tenues (voiceless, surd) consonants (k, t,
p) that can become ‘weakened’ in pronunciation to h/x, etc. in
internal positions.103 However, some languages such as Kannada
and Telugu have them at the beginning of words,104 and this is

102 See Cardona and Jain 2003

103 Mahadevan 2003
104 Krishnamurti 2003: 144 sqq.

48
 Symposium on Evolution

even reflected in old Sanskrit loan words (such as in Skt. (bāhu-)

daṇḍa ‘arm’, Malayalam taṇṭa, or Skt. gaṇḍa ‘joint’,Tamil keṇṭai ‘ankle,’
Kannada gaṇṭu ‘knot of cord’, Tulu gaṇṭů, gaṇṭu, Telugu gaṇṭu, gaṇṭa.
This raises the question as to exactly which branch of Drav. the
early Vedic loans derive and when the change from k > g took
place in some Drav. languages. Among other typical features of
Drav. are the three types, clearly distinguished, of dental, alveolar
and retroflex consonants (such as n, n and ṇ).
In this language family, too, there are ‘strange’ local
developments, especially in some of the smaller languages such
as Toda that is spoken high up in the Nilgiri Hills. Here, the
development of *p has gone one step further, it has disappeared
at an unknown point in time: Toda ïṇ ‘the dead,’ ïṇṛ ‘the world
of the dead’ (nṛ ‘place’), ïṇ ṭo.w ‘the god of the dead’ belongs to
the following Dravidian words: Tamil piṇam, piṇaṉ ‘corpse, carcass,
disembodied soul, devil, spirit’; Malalayalm piṇam ‘corpse, dead
body of animals’; Kannada peṇa, heṇa ‘corpse, carcass’; Tulu puṇa
‘corpse, dead body; dead, inactive; peṇa ‘corpse.’105
The aggregate effect of many such local Toda developments
is best visible in complete sentences, such as: aθkoyš üz,θiŁṣ,
pïs,ït ïyi ‘For that reason one should do the bow ceremony in
the fourth month (of pregnancy)’ – which remains unintelligible
and undecipherable for all other Dravidian speakers. But, as is
obvious from the example of ïn ‘dead’, these words too are regular
developments from older forms of South Dravidian.
The oldest states of Dravidian, the reconstructed Proto-Drav.,
can supply interesting insights into the thought and culture of
that period. For example, ‘pestle’ ul-akk-, uram-kal may be a
compound of DEDR 665 ur ‘to grind’ and 1298 kal ‘stone,’106 as
seen in DEDR 672: Tamil ulakkai ‘pestle’, Malayalam ulakka
‘pestle for pounding rice’, Toda was̱k ‘grainpounder’, Kannada
olake, onake, onike ‘wooden pestle for pounding rice and other
things’, etc. The word may have been loaned early into Vedic
Skt. as ulūkhala- ‘mortar’ (in late107 Ṛgveda, 1.28, where it is made,

105 Statistical discussion by Krishnamurti 2003: 132 sqq.

106 And Kor. hina id., Telugu pīnũgu, pīngu ‘corpse, dead body, carcass,’ Ga.
pīnige ‘corps’, Konḍa pīngu, id. Kuwi pīliŋū, pīnugu, pinugu id.
107 Krishnamurti 2003: 8

49
 Authors?

however, of wood).108
On the other hand, in establishing Proto-Drav. etymologies,
one should steer clear of items such as king, state, palace, fortresses
surrounded by moats, etc. at c. 3000 BCE in a Neolithic, pre-
agricultural and pastoral society.109 To do so would be to commit
the same, well-known mistake as when reconstructing ‘emperor’
from the modern Romance languages (empereur, imperatore,
etc.) for their ancestral language Latin, when Classical Latin
imperator still had the earlier, republican meaning ‘army leader,
commander’.110
Among the typical characteristics of Drav., different from Indo-
European/Indo-Aryan, are the following. Unlike the inflection
of Indo-European (change of word stem, ‘fused’ endings and
stem of words), Drav. is an agglutinative, that is the endings are
merely added to the word in question; prefixes (as in IE/IA) and
infixes (as in Munda) are not allowed. Unlike the three genders
of Indo-European (male, female, neuter), there originally were
probably four: singular: male human, non-male human, animate
non-human, non-animate (which resembles Burushaski, below);
the details of reconstruction, however, are still under discussion
(Krishnamurti 2003: 210 sqq). For example in Proto-South
Dravidian I, we have: *awan ‘he’, *awaḷ, ‘she’ *atu ‘it’, *awar ‘they
(m.)’, *away ‘they (f., non-human)’. The pronoun ‘we’ has inclusive
(‘we all’) and exclusive (‘we, our group’) forms, for example:
Tamil/Malayalam nāṃ, Telugu manamu, Kannada nām, ‘we all’ ::
Tamil yām, Telugu ēmu, Kannada ām ‘we, our group’.
Verbs originally distinguished between past and non-past, and
all such verb forms also have negative forms. A single verb was
positioned at the end of a sentence; however, in more complex
sentences, it was preceded by non-changeable gerunds ‘having
done this, having done that, …’ (like Skt. –tvā, -ya).

108 RV 1.1-50 and book 10 are late additions to the corpus.

109 See Turner, CDIAL 2360, (further H.-P. Schmidt, EJVS 16, 2009).
110 As reconstructed by Krishnamurti 2003: 7-8

50
 Symposium on Evolution

10. Development of Munda, Tibeto-Burmese,

Burushaski, etc.
Munda
Munda languages represent a difficult case, as we have word lists
and texts only for the past two centuries or so, and only a few words
from Sanskrit texts of earlier periods.111 Their close relationship
with SE Asian languages112 leaves an Indian or a southeastern
Asian origin open. However, Patricia Donegan and David Stampe
have recently argued that the SE languages diverged from the
Indian Austroasiatic type (Munda) and changed structures, due
to sentence accent which favoured either preservation of the initial
or final sounds of a word and, while retaining the old prefixes, also
originated the development of suffixes.
Similarly, Northern Munda (Santali, Mundari, etc.) diverged
from the more archaic but little studied S. Munda (Sora, Gta, etc.).
N. Munda was heavily influenced by the surrounding Indo-Aryan
languages. It changed word order and individual structures.113
As we have written sources for this language family only for the
past 200 years, the ancient forms of words and grammar and their
historical developments are only accessible by reconstruction.
Unlike in IA/IE or even in Drav., this is a work in progress.114
In addition, some of the more conservative Southern Munda
languages such as Gta have hardly been described115 and closer
comparison with the relatives of Munda in S.E. Asia (Mon, Khmer,
Vietnamese) is required, a little found scholarly expertise. However,
our reconstructions are sometimes borne out by attestations of
single words in the older texts of South Asia. Thus, the Saora tribe
is known in Skt. and even in late Vedic Sanskrit116 as Śabara.

111 In his draft, Krishnamurti even had ‘emperor’, until we (F. Southworth
and I) alerted him. The other ahistorical assertions (above), however, remain.
112 For overviews, see http://www.ling.hawaii.edu/austroasiatic/
113 First in a detailed comparative study of Kharia, by Pinnow 1959.
114 See P. Donegan and D. Stampe: http://www.ling.hawaii.edu/austroasiatic/
AA/rhythm2004.pdf.
115 Pinnow 1959; Anderson 2001, 2007, many details on the website of David
Stampe: http://www.ling.hawaii.edu/austroasiatic/
116 Overview now in Gregory Anderson, The Munda languages 2008

51
 Authors?

The Munda languages are divided into a Northern and a

Southern branch. The first is found in Jharkhand and surroundings
(Bengal, Orissa): Santali, Mundari, Ho, Asuri, etc. with an outlier,
Korku much farther west along the upper Tapti River; the Southern
branch (Kharia, Saora, Gutob, Gta etc.) covers the border of Orissa
and N.E. Andhra.
The linguistic character of this family differs entirely from the
IA/Drav. ones. Originally, words were not formed by suffixes but
mainly by prefixes and by infixes; that is, a consonant (mostly –n-)
was inserted to change the form and meaning of a root. Though
IE/IA also makes prolific use of prefixes (as in English be-have, be-
get, be-moan, fore-go, for-get), this is most typical of Munda (but
not found in Dravidian).
A number of prefixes are still actively used in Munda and
Khasi, such as ab-/ob-, dī-, etc., for example, Kharia su’d ‘to be
wet’, o-su’d ‘to wetten’, Sora jum ‘to eat’, ab-jum, ajjum ‘to feed’,
Khasi asam ‘to drill’, k-sam ‘to insert nails’.
Most prominent are the actively used infixes, such as n-, –b-,
-p-, which form nouns or causative/reciprocal verbs: Santali dapal
‘to cover’, da-na-pal ‘cover’, Sora gad ‘to cut’ gə’-na-d-ən ‘piece’,
Santali dal ‘to beat’, da-pa-l ‘to fight each other’, Sora batoṅ ‘to
fear’, ba-b-toṅ ‘to frighten’.
We thus get the following words for ‘bird’: Kharia khon-theḍ
‘bird’, Sora on-tid-ən, tid-ən, which has been loaned into Skt. as
śa-kuntaka, Śa-kuntalā ‘little bird’; śa-kuna ‘bird’ (Ṛgveda), Kunti,
Kuntī, Śa-kuni (tribe and person).
Munda sentence structure is even more complex,117 in part
caused by falling sentence accent with the original word order
(subject-verb-object [SVO]) preserved in Sora əd-məl-tiy-da-iṅ-
da-e ‘he (-e) does not (əd) want (məl) give (tiy) rice (dar) to me (iṅ).’
As in Drav., there is an inclusive and exclusive pronoun ‘we.’
As mentioned earlier, the character of Munda has shifted,
due to sentence accent or perhaps also under the influence of
Indo-Aryan and Drav.(?) remarkably, for example, from an SVO
word order in a sentence (as in Kashmiri) to a SOV word order.
This would hardly be visible if one would only compare Munda
materials: one has to take into account also the other Austroasiatic

117 Donegan and Stampe 2004

52
 Symposium on Evolution

languages: Khasi (Shillong hills) and the S.E. Asians ones, from
Nicobarese to Vietnamese.118

Tibeto-Burmese
This is a very large family of some 250–300 languages spoken in
S.E, Central and East Asia.119 The ones of interest here are all along
the Himalayan belt: in northern Kashmir the very conservative
Ladakhi, various other southern Tibetan dialects (including
Sherpa, and Dzonkha of Bhutan); Central Himalayan languages
such as Magar, Gurung, Tamang, Newari, Rai, Limbu and Lepcha;
and further east Bodo, Naga, Meitei (Manipuri), etc.
The earliest source of the Tibeto-Burmese language family
is generally held to be Old Tibetan (along with Zhang Zhung).
However, one has to take into account many names in the
Kathmandu Valley, some nouns and names recorded in Sanskrit
inscriptions, c. 450–750 CE. They are clearly of Tib.-Burm. type,
though they do not represent a predecessor to current or medieval
Newari.120 The latter is first recorded in a land sale of c. 1000 CE.121
Tibetan is recorded a few centuries earlier, from the seventh c.
onwards.122 Also, there are texts in pre-Hindu time Manipuri (in
Meitei, c. 17–18th c. CE),123 as well as Naga, Bodo, etc.
A reconstruction of Tib.-Burm., though attempted in the
1970s124 is still in progress – due to the ‘compressing’ factors at
work, resulting in monosyllabic words. For example, Old Tibetan
brgyad ‘8’ (fairly well preserved in modern Ladakhi rgyat) has
now become (g)yɛ in Lhasa Tibetan.
Several models for Proto-Tib.-Burm. and also for the original

118 Pronouns at the head of a sentence; see Donegan and Stampe 2004
119 See Sino-Tibetan Etymological Dictionary and Thesaurus (STEDT)
project, http://stedt.berkeley.edu/html/STfamily.html#TBlg.
120 Witzel 1980
121 Kölver and Śākya 1985
122 Note especially the non-canonic Dun Huang documents.
123 Unfortunately, many original manuscripts were burned recently, along
with the Imphal library, due to political strife.
124 Benedict 1972; Matisoff 2003

53
 Authors?

homeland have been proposed.125 The original form of this

language family seems to have had a much more complex verbal
system (with multiple suffixes) that is in part preserved in some
Eastern Nepalese languages;126 the few verbal affixes used in Old
Tibetan point to another set of formations.127
Tib.-Burm., however, has been spoken in areas bordering the
northern parts of S. Asia since the Atharvaveda (c. 1000 BCE).
One stanza mentions, in passing, the Kirāta girls collecting herbs,
much as they do today in the Nepalese hills, and living in caves.128
The term Kirāṃt nowadays refers to the eastern Nepalese tribes,
the Rai and Limbu. However, the Nepalese Goplarājavāṃśāvali
chronicle129 of c. 1380 still refers to them as former inhabitants and
kings of the Kathmandu Valley; before the arrival of the Licchavi
dynasty in early CE. The Atharvaveda and the Maitrāyaṇi Saṃhitā of
the Yajurveda necessarily place them still further west,130 in the
H.P. area. Though we cannot be sure about the language these
Kirāta spoke then, this western location reinforces the idea that
the Himalayan belt may have been the homeland of this language
family.

Burushaski
Burushaski, spoken in Hunza in northermost Pakistan, made
its entry into linguistic and general consciousness very late. The

125 See summary by van Driem 2005, 2006 (including also genetics).
126 Originally thought to have been borrowed from the Munda languages,
Benedict showed that these inflectional forms were part of the Proto-Tib.-
Burmese structure.
127 Hill 2003
128 kairatikā kumarikā Paippalāda Saṃhitā 16.16.4, Śaunaka Saṃhiṭā 10.4.14,
kailāta 8.2.5; VS 30.16 has them as living in caves; cf. also the popular form
Kilāta (Pañcaviṃśa, Jaiminīya, Śatapatha Brāhmaṇa)
129 See Bajracharya and Malla 1985
130 A location still further west, in the Kashmir area, is seen in Hsüan Tsang’s
Hsiyuki (c. 600 CE), who knows of them as Kilito, as a people in Kashmir who
had their own king shortly before his time. The –ta/ṭa- suffix is common in
many North Indian tribal names such as in Maraṭa, Araṭa, (K)ulūta (Witzel
1999).

54
 Symposium on Evolution

first detailed grammar is in the 1930s131 and we do not have

texts earlier than that. Nevertheless, this small language is of
great linguistic interest as it has now been shown to be related
to the northern Caucasus languages (Cherkes, Chechen, etc.)
and Basque on the French/Spanish border, with which it shares a
number of unusual characteristics (below). It seems to represent
the Indian remnant of the movement out of S.W. Asia to Europe
at c. 40 000 years ago. The ancestral language, Macro-Caucasian,
can be reconstructed,132 though this is, again, pursued by very few
linguists and remains controversial with many others.
Beyond the recent collections of oral literature, we also have
some – unstudied – names in early manuscript colophons and
inscriptions of the first millennium CE133 (such as prūṣava and a
Sanskritzed puruṣa as local self-designation Burusho).134 There
also are some translations of Sanskrit titles of Buddhist texts into
Old Bur. and, parallel, into Tibetan. They have almost completely
gone unstudied.135 Unfortunately, these translations seem to
be only general paraphrases of the Skt. titles,136 and they need
much more study. The same is true for early place names in the
Northwest, and also for inscriptions along the Indus river, as well
as in Buddhist manuscripts and modern geographical names.
However, the Bur. language is actually very old in this area. A
few Bur. words occur already in the Ṛgveda, such as kilāla ‘biestings’
– the first milk of a cow after giving birth. Much more is to be
expected on closer study137 when etymologizing the data of the
existing dictionaries.138
Though a small language in a marginal area, Burushaski is

131 Lorimer 1935–38

132 Bengtson 1990, 2001, 2003
133 O. von Hinüber 1980, 1989
134 Tibetan Bru-ža, and as I assume, even RV mūja- (in maujavata) and in
Avestan mūža, as the name of a mountain and people in the area.
135 Poucha 1959
136 For those that I have studied; see the earlier note by Poucha 1959.
137 See an initial list in Witzel 1999; Tikkanen 1988 on the Burushaski (and
other) substrates of the Northwest.
138 Such as Berger 1988, Tiffou 2004, Tiffou and Morin 1989 Grammatical
description by Berger and Anderson (forthcoming).

55
 Authors?

of great linguistic and historical interest. For example, its nouns

have four genders, one more than Indo-European: human and
divine masculine, human and divine feminine, countable objects
and uncountable ones (as in their putative relatives, the northern
Caucasus languages). This division also influences the suffixes
for the numbers: singular/plural/countable/indefinite. Nouns
frequently must have a possessive prefix, especially for body parts
or relatives. Similar to its putative relation to Basque and reflection
in French, the numerals are based on a pattern of twenties (20, 40
as 2x20, etc.).
The verb has three basic stems: past, present and consecutive;
the latter functions as a gerund (as in Skt., Dravidian), which
makes this a pan-Indian feature. Curiously, a verb can have four
prefixes and six suffixes, such as for the subject, object, person,
for negative forms, etc. As in modern NIA languages, the verb
has both nominative and ergative syntax. The latter stresses the
performer of an action (agent) of a verb, and marks it, for example,
in Nepali by the case ending -le, as in mai-le garyo/gareko ‘It was
done by me’ = ‘I have done’ (with transitive verbs), as opposed
to ma gayo’I have gone’ (with intransitive verbs). The intransitive
verbs mark just the subject or object, while transitive verbs mark
both the subject and the object separately.

Kusunda and Andamanese

Kusunda, too, has some very unusual features.139 It has
recently been connected with Andamanese and the New Guinea
languages.140
Its sound system is unusual as its pattern neither agrees with
that of the surrounding Indo-Aryan/Nepali nor of that of the Tib.-
Burmese languages. Consonants are much more varied and include
a retroflex series, a pan-Indian feature (but also a retroflex ç as in
Dardic). These sounds are, however, not phonemic but interchange
with dentals, etc. There also is a uvular series (contrasting with k,

139 Watters 2005, whose description is based on 3 speakers. There are, however,
as B.K. Rana informs me, some 20 speakers left, dispersed over Central Nepal,
while the total population, according to the recent census is 156.
140 Whitehouse, Usher and Ruhlen 2004

56
 Symposium on Evolution

g, ṅ) and a glottal stop.

There are the standard 5 vowels [a i u e o] plus [ə]. As in
Kashmiri, there is some interchange between [i/e] and [u/o], as well
as [ə/a]. The vowels can appear, unlike in most S. Asian languages,
in diphtongs [ui, eo] etc., three sequential vowels [aio, iuə] etc., and
even as double diphtongs such as [iuəa] in kiwəatn ‘I pinched it’,
[iuəə] in piwəēgo ‘peel it’!
As in Burushaski, nouns can be prefixed with possessive
pronouns, and they are sometimes lexicalized by their third
person pronouns.
The verb has a system of tense-aspect-modality distinction.
Pronominal prefixes are also necessary in the verb system, and are
different for transitive and intransitive verbs; however, they are
additionally suffixed as well. Except for the unrelated Burushaski,
this is unlike any other S. Asian language.
While there are some gerund-like suffixes, they are more
complex than in other S. Asian languages and do not necessarily
imply subordination, but another kind of parataxis.

Andamanese
The various Andamanese languages are better known as early
British administrators took interest in the islanders and their
languages. Recently, New Delhi linguists have taken up the slack,
and have begun to describe the few remaining languages (Great
Andamense, Önge, Jarawa), while Sentinel remains unknown.
After a few, unsuccessful trials at contact, the latter island has been
put under quarantine in 2004 – perhaps the only way to sustain
this small group of people: it is well known that upon contact
with modern civilizations, such isolated tribes quickly die out:
only some 40 Great Andamanese and some 90 Önge are left, plus
maybe 250–300 Jarawa. These have recently chosen to establish
limited contact with the S. Asian settlers on the Great Andaman
Island, and their language can now be studied in some depth.141
Like the other languages of the Indian subcontinent,142

141 Abbi 2006, Sreenathan 2001

142 With the exception of Proto-Munda, which has however a *ḍ.

57
 Authors?

Andamanese languages143 have a set of retroflex consonants, which

strengthens (with Australian) the substrate theory (see above).
Like Burushaski, they also have personal prefixes, especially for
body parts and relatives. Like Dravidian they have an inclusive/
exclusive pronoun. They also share the pan-Indian feature of
gerunds.
All of the above underlines the fact that the current Dravidian-
Indo-Aryan picture of Indian languages is myopic. In the distant
past – as is still visible in a few fragments – the subcontinent had
a large variety of languages and language families. They can tell
us much about its prehistory – if only these ‘additional’ small
tribal languages would be studied by more than by the handful of
scholars per language family who are now active in the field.

11. Epigenetics: the South Asian linguistic area

So far, we have discussed current languages, their ancestors
and their linguistic families by making use of the trees of ‘family’
relationships, in other words, of a cladistic and phylogenetic
arrangement, like Darwin’s scheme in The origin of species. There
is more to it.
I have already referred to the ‘interactions’ between languages.
As mentioned, languages and language families have interacted in
South Asia for the past c. 3000 years of known linguistic history,
and of course before that.
The first appearance of anatomically modern humans in S.
Asia (straight out of Africa, via Arabia), dates back to around 75–
65 kya. They now seem to be attested in Tamil Nadu at c. 74 kya.144
This automatically means that the predecessors of all later Indian
languages and their linguistic families have interacted ever since
that early period.
We may call such ‘superficial’ mutual influences of neighbouring
languages as well as, importantly, of earlier now lost languages,
‘epigenetic features’.

143 See now Abbi 2006 and cf. Usher 2006

144 Though only by stone artifacts, not by skeletons; they may belong to the
previous Homo erectus; see however, Petraglia, Michael D. et al. 2007.

58
 Symposium on Evolution

In recent times,145 epigenetic influences have underlined the

study of the inheritance of certain genetic materials, as opposed
to Darwinian cladistics and family trees. These are non-genetic
variations that individuals, human or not, acquire during their
lifetime and unexpectedly pass on to their descendants by
epigenetic inheritance. Obviously, this trend interferes with the
purely genetic (chromosomal, autosomal) inheritance from both
one’s father and mother. However, the new data show that epigenetic
inheritance is ubiquitous, from bacteria to plants and animals.146
‘Incorporating epigenetic inheritance into evolutionary theory
extends the scope of evolutionary thinking and leads to notions of
heredity and evolution that incorporate development.’147
This concept of the passing on of acquired features is close
to the old one of Jean-Baptiste Lamarck (1744–1829). According
to him (1809), an animal could acquire certain useful traits over
several generations, such as the gradual lengthening of the neck
in giraffes that allowed it to forage on higher trees. Inheritance
according to Lamarck is not due to the pressure of selection and
eventual disappearance of the lineages of individuals that did
not inherit a specific beneficial mutation, but due to straight and
immediate inheritance acquired by a parent that was passed down
the line of children and grandchildren.148
However, instead of throwing out the Darwinian baby with
the Lamarckian epigenetic bathwater, it has to be observed that
such changes only occur in very specific locations on the genes,
and therefore the general phylogenetic tree, the stemma, remains
unchanged up to that point. It also remains to be seen whether
the new traits are persistent enough to be transmitted beyond a
few generations. For our current undertaking, this development is
exciting but not fatal.

145 Cf. http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/05/090518111723.htm

146 Epigenetic inheritance has been explained by four mechanisms so far, for
example, DNA methylation: methyls attach to the DNA and cause genes to be
active or inactive, without changing the inherited DNA. If external influences,
for example, chemicals, change the current methyl configuration, the new trait
can be inherited.
147 Jablonka et al. 2009
148 Cf. http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/05/090518111723.htm

59
 Authors?

If we then study similar effects in language, we can in fact

detect both the equivalents of phylogeny and epigenetics in
linguistics. The phylogenetic ‘familiy tree’ is obvious as even the
simple comparison, shown earlier, of numbers in Hindi, Tamil and
Munda indicates. This is not that, say Telugu or Tulu, suddenly
pick up Hindi numbers,149 nor everyday words or general features
of grammar (endings, prefixes, infixes). Neither does Marathi
use Kannada numbers, nor does Mundari use Oriya or Telugu
or Kurukh (Drav.) ones. The same applies to Tibeto-Burmese,
Burushaski, etc.
However, the successful (Darwinian style) phylogenetic
reconstruction of language families (by ‘trees’, clades) is interfered
by the separate wave-like spread of certain restricted features
within a dialect area of one language and, importantly, across
language boundaries, and even across those of language families.
This is actually easy to understand. If we think of modern
English in Britain and the USA, etc. these varieties now have
words such as jungle, bungalow, pajama, yoga, or the financial(!)
guru or the (political) pandit. The latter two words indicate well
the incipient changes in meaning of borrowed terms.
How did this influx of Indian words occur? Obviously, due to
the Indian epigenetic influence on English, while British speakers
of English were residing in India. As we know, the opposite,
from English to local languages, has occurred in most modern
Indian languages. One merely has to listen to a filmy dialogue in
Bollywood Hindustani, with its occasional insertions of ‘thank
you’, etc. by Hindi-only speakers.
What we have here is the superficial influence by an unrelated
language on Hindustani, Tamil, etc. that like epigenetic traits
is ‘inherited’ by the children, grandchildren etc. of those who
first took over these new words. However, just as in epigenetics,
such influences do not necessarily last forever. For example, my
mother tongue, German, was full of French words between c. 1650
and 1900, but many, if not most of them, have since been lost and
Germans have acquired new loans. The language now is full of
English words – frequently for quite unnecessary concepts. The

149 Though we see that occurring, for example, in the Newari of Kathmandu,
in marketplace situations, where numbers are taken from Nepali.

60
 Symposium on Evolution

same is found in Japanese, where we have had a number of foreign

words150 (written in a special syllabary, Katakana), but where over
the past 20 years, a host of new English words have appeared,
like ‘«point, topic, news, member, maker (of cars, products)’ – for
which older Japanese terms existed – (many of them often coined
by using old Chinese loans, just was we do in English with Graeco-
Roman words, as with auto-mobile instead of car).
In South Asia, this trend has been going on since the Persian
conquests of the Panjab and Sindh in 530 BCE: as we have seen
earlier, first Old Persian, then Greek, followed by Turkic, New
Persian/Arabic, Portuguese and English words, and now sushi and
kungfu. However, all of this remains only superficial.
There also is another, more serious, continuous influence, by
local (Indian) languages, across language boundaries and families,
on each other that has been going on ever since we have recorded
Indian languages.151 Again, this is not surprising.
The matter of deep mutual influence was first studied in
the Balkan area of SW Europe in the twentieth century, where
a number of languages have heavily influenced each other. This
concerns languages such as Rumanian, modern Greek, Albanian,
Bulgarian, Macedonian, Serbian and the Gypsy language Romani.
In other words, languages from five different sub-families of Indo-
European that are not mutually understandable at all: Romance
(Latin), Greek, Illyrian (Albanian), Slavic, and Indo-Aryan
(Romani).
These people have been living together in the same villages
or towns for many centuries and thus have acquired a working
knowledge of their individual neighbours’ language(s). However,
not just vocabulary but also syntactical structures have been
borrowed across language families, such as the Rumanian
postpositioned article –ul, which echoes the Bulgarian one in –yat:
they are two quite different suffixes that carry the same meaning:

150 Such as mesu ‘knife’, trappu ‘staircase’, garasu ‘glass’ from Dutch, or
kopfschmerz, neurose, sairu, ‘rope,’ hyutte ‘cabin’ from German.
151 Similarly, one can often translate sayings, collocations, concepts easily
between western European languages (but less so with eastern European ones),
and certainly not easily at all with other Indo-European ones in Iran and India
or with those of other language families.

61
 Authors?

‘the’. This feature is unusual in the Balkans otherwise,152 but

shared here by two neighbouring languages that belong to the
Latin (Romance) and Slavic families. There are other features that
cover all Balkan languages, such as the avoidance of the infinitive
or future tense formation. We call this the Balkan linguistic area,
or Sprachbund.
In the Balkan cases, the innovations have indeed been inherited
by all succeeding generations of speakers, turning an epigenetic
trait into a permanent feature of the local language in question.
From a phylogenetic point of view, such a change may be called an
unexplainable mutation.
In South Asia we have the same kind of clear influence,
interference and convergence between Indo-Aryan, Drav., Munda
and the rest, leading to the South Asian linguistic area, first
mentioned by Emeneau in the 1960s.153 As we have seen, such
influences extend to syntax. Similar developments can be observed
in South Asia.
Leaving aside the mutual borrowing of words across language
boundaries, there now is the same word order in the Munda
(Austro-Asiatic), Indo-Aryan, Dravidian, and Burushaski
languages: subject–object–verb (SOV). This order is quite
common in Eurasia, but not so in Kashmiri or Chinese (SVO), or
in modern W. European languages which earlier had an SOV, nor
in Semitic (VSO). Importantly, the Munda SOV word order differs
substantially from the original Austroasiatic one,154 indicating
the influence of neighbouring languages (IA, Drav.?), on Munda
through three thousand years of interaction.
There also are clear indications of the influence of neighbouring
languages on the syntactic features, appearing already in our
oldest available text, the Ṛgveda. The three most obvious ones were
highlighted by the late F.B.J. Kuiper of Leiden in the 1960s.155

152 Curiously it has been introduced, after the Old Norse period, into the
Scandinavian languages, but how remains unclear, cf. William A. Craigie 2008
The outlook in Philology.Transactions of the Philological Society 43:12–27
153 Emeneau 1956; Kuiper 1967
154 P. Donegan and D. Stampe 2004, at: http://www.ling.hawaii.edu/
austroasiatic/AA/rhythm2004.pdf).
155 Kuiper 1967 http://www.springerlink.com/content/tl306hw646806112/

62
 Symposium on Evolution

1. iti as a quotation marker at the end of a direct speech, like

Bengali …bole (boliyā) Nepali bhanne…, Marathi … mhāṇun
‘having said’, asa ‘thus’; Old Tamil (Puranānūru) enru-, more
common: ena; modern Tamil enru-, ani, Kannada endu, Telugu
ani ‘having said’. Cf. also the parallel occurrence in Japanese …
to, etc. This is also seen in Munda (Santali, Mundari: mente, gamle
‘having said’), but this probably is only a new formation under the
influence of Indo-Aryan (and Drav.); notably, it is missing in the
related Khasi language of the Shillong Hills.
2. -tvā/ -ya, two suffixes marking the so-called absolutives
‘having gone…’, etc.. They are seen in Skt. gatvā, sam-gam-
ya, which are echoed by two formations in Dravidian: Tamil
(etc. South Drav. I) - tu, -ntu, -ttu; South Drav. II: *-cc-i, etc.156
However, such forms are also found in Burushaski, etc. (as well as
in Indo-Aryan, in Nepali –era). The appearance in Bur. points to
a possible early spread of this phenomenon in the Northwest. On
the contrary, probably new formations occur in Munda: Santali
sen-kate ‘having gone’, Mundari hiju-akan-te ‘having come’,
Korku hadir-en-ten ‘having arrived’, as well as in Kharia col-kon
‘having gone’, Sora jum-le ‘having eaten’, Gorum suṅu-ḍu ‘having
fallen’. Again, the formation is not found in Khasi.
3. Retroflexes are consonant sounds that are produced with
‘bending the tongue backward’ as in ṭ, ḍ, ṇ, ṣ. They are found in
most Indian languages, but were originally lacking in Tib.-Burm.
and in Munda (here, with exception of ḍ). Generally, they are
supposed to have been taken over from Drav. (also by Kuiper), as
if they always had been part and parcel of that language family.
If commmon origin of Dravidian, Indo-European, Uralic, Altaic,
etc. (as Nostratic) is accepted, they must be an innovation in
Dravidian. The source may very well have been the very ancient
Australian substrate in Dravidian, described earlier. Australian
languages have them and sound, to the untrained ear, quite like
Dravidian.
Further, it is remarkable that the heaviest concentration of
retroflexes is found not in South India but in the Northwest,
where the palatals c, ch, j, jh and even vowels(!) have a retroflex

fulltext.pdf
156 Krishnamurti 2003, section 7.7.1

63
 Authors?

variety. Vedic Skt. yakṣa is Kalash j.ač. or Kalasha pụ~ < pūrṇa-,
for the Fall festival. Retroflexion is found in all northwestern
language families, be they Indo-Aryan, Nuristani, Iranian (Pashto,
Khotanese Saka) or Burushaski. In other words, retroflexion has
impacted everyone coming into the subcontinent and some closely
neighbouring areas, such as Khotanese Saka (in SW Xinjiang) or
the eastern (not the western) dialects of Baluchi, a late immigrant
language from western Iran, arriving only after 1000 CE.
In sum, retroflexion is a regional NW and only then a pan-
Indian feature. Dravidian may have acquired it upon arrival in the
subcontinent; when is another question.157
Other markers, such as those highlighted by the late M.
Emeneau158 include the ubiquitous ‘expressives’ for onomatopoetics,
peculiar actions, etc. In Indo-European we mostly find substitutes
by regular verbs such as murmur, or the occasional splish-splash.
But they are extremely common in much of Asia (especially in
Japanese), though they are rarely listed in our dictionaries.159 My
impression of their types in South Asia is that Indo-European,
Drav. and Munda are different in this respect. Indo-European now
has the bal-bal::kara-kara::roṭi-śoṭi types. The first two are found
in Vedic texts.160 The bal-bal type seems to be of Indo-European
vintage, and such collocations have remained unchanged through
history, while other words have changed:161 bal-bal ‘sound of
emptying a water vessel’ is still bal-bal today in Hindi, etc. while it
should have become something like balla or rather bāl. The second
type is typical for Dravidian:162 Tamil kara-hara, while the third,

157 Their linguistic ancestors, may have come with the Borean speakers (see
above), straight out of Africa, via Arabia. If Dravidian indeed formed part of the
Nostratic super-family, it will have split off from it somewhere in the Greater
Near East, along with Uralic, with which is often linked.
158 Emeneau 1956; B. Krishnamurti 2003: 39
159 Emeneau 1969
160 Hoffmann, Karl. Wiederholende Onomatopoetika im Altindischen.
Aufsätze zur Indoiranistik, Wiesbaden 1987/1991 [=Indogermanische
Forschungen 1952, 60, 254–264]
161 The same is true of Japan: peko-peko ‘sound of a hungry stomach’, which
should have become *heko-beko, due to the development of modern Japanese,
but has stayed at the Old Jpn. level of development.
162 Also in Drav., see Krishnamurti 2003: 131, 136 sq. with examples such as

64
 Symposium on Evolution

the roṭi-śoṭi type, is typical for Munda: Mundari maṇḍi-uṇḍi ‘food

and the like’, jaldi- paldi ‘quickly’; Kharia: ṅo ṅiga ‘eat up’!, Sora:
duṅ duṅ ‘thud, thump’, mandīn tadīn ‘plates’ (mandīn dish), brəiṅ
bərāṅ ‘to dazzle’.163
What we see in all these features is a certain amount of
convergence between neighbouring languages and language
families, due to long term adjacent habitation, resultant social
interaction, and bi- or trilingualism. In other words, the successful
(Darwinian style) phylogenetic reconstruction of language families
receives interference by the separate wave-like spread164 of certain
features across linguistic boundaries. The S. Asian language
families have increasingly become more similar to each other over
the past few millennia. Their shared, common traits have been
inherited since the original contact, even if they are expressed by
the individual means of the language in question.
It seems, in the footsteps of Darwin, that these changes have
been mutually beneficial. Due to common features, one can shift
more easily from one language’s system into that of the other,
without having to reconfigure or ‘reorder one’s brain’, as one has
to do when one shifts from Hindi or Tamil to English and vice
versa. One can easily see this when one tries to translate a complex
sentence with relative clauses or indirect speech back and forth.
This means quicker and easier communication with
neighbours, people from other villages, in the marketplace, and
so on. Or even in the same household, like many South Asians,
I had 5 languages spoken in my house at Kathmandu back in the
1970s.165 The advantage is thus one of serendipity, or ‘laziness’: one
can stay in one ‘mold’ and continue speaking – as we know in S.
Asia – while changing the language even within one and the same

*guḍV-guḍV ‘gurgling sound’ > Kannada gudū-guḍu, Telugu guḍa-guḍa, etc.

163 Anderson 2008
164 Something actually studied, for Indo-European dialects, since the 1870s,
first by Johannes Schmidt (his Wellentheorie = ‘wave theory’ 1872, as opposed
to August Schleicher’s Stammbaumtheorie = phylogeny, 1853/1860)
165 That is, incidentally, why speakers of Japanese learn Hindi, Nepali
or Tibetan very quickly as these unrelated languages have a grammatical
(syntactical) structure similar to Japanese.

65
 Authors?

sentence.166
What we witness here is a gradual convergent development
of South Asian languages, based on the gradual shift from their
respective Indo-European, Drav., Austro-As. parent languages
to their various modern forms, belonging to three major family
trees, next to the Tib.-Burm., Macro-Caucasian (Burushaski),
Indo-Pacific (Andamanese, Kusunda) ones on the rims of the
subcontinent. The result was the South Asian Sprachbund.167
In sum: a combination of both the phylogenetic and the
epigenetic features lead to the emergence of the current South
Asian linguistic area (sprachbund). This development has made
the structure of Indo-Aryan, Dravidian or Munda increasingly
similar to each other, but it could not eliminate most of their
individual characteristics.

Misinterpretations and outlook

Nowadays, the South Asian sprachbund feature has been
misinterpreted by some who are not necessarily specialists in
linguistics. There is a pervasive feeling that every native speaker
‘is a language specialist’. However, you still cannot understand
Tamil if you are a Panjabi or Bengali speaker, and a Munda speaker
cannot understand Hindi or Malayalam in the same rough way
that a Hindi speaker may understand Marathi or Nepali. This
is abundantly clear from the list of numbers from 1 to 10 given

166 To give an example from personal experience: in my own multilingual

family (Japanese–German–English), we do not only switch between languages
but have even created our own Creole, based on pidginized German, with
heavy Japanese grammatical influence and a little English adstrate, especially
in vocabulary: open syllables (ending in vowels, which mean, for example,
feminine adjectives) are preferred, the article is dropped, only two tenses
(present/past) are used, etc.
167 If all these languages had been isolated from each other, we would
now have results such as that seen in the isolated Icelandic compared to
Scandinavian, or Maori compared to Hawaiian, Lithuanian compared to other
European languages, Toda compared to Tamil, Kalasha and Khowar compared
to the other Dardic languages like Kashmiri and the neighbouring Indo-Aryan
language, Panjabi. However, most S. Asian languages have been close neighbours
of each other, often in the same villages, like the isolated Nahali and the Munda
language Korku on the Tapti river. They thus have heavily influenced each
other.

66
 Symposium on Evolution

earlier, or basic words like ‘to go’ or ‘hand’ that remain separate
and mutually unintelligible even today.168

Engl. hand eye

Hindi hath āṅkh
Tamil kai kaṇ
Korku & tī me’d
Mundar ī

In sum, even some 3000–5000 years of geographical and

physical neighbourhood of the South Asian language families
involved could not erase the inherited ‘genetic’ characteristics of
the various Indian languages. Therefore, the talk of being ‘pro-
Aryan’ or ‘pro-Dravidian’ or anti-x, -y, -z is just political talk.�
The language, religion, rituals of the earliest texts, or the cline of
genetic features from South to North indicate that South Asia is a
region well defined vis-à-vis the rest of Asia, but is one with many
remaining, clear internal differences, a fact that should not really
perturb anybody today.169
Instead, as scholars, we should rather investigate the overlaps
of our respective fields, if any, and see where a particular language
and its historical and contemporary spread has a clear correlation

168 This is not unlike the position of Finnish, Hungarian or Basque in Europe:
it is immediately visible that they belong to different families. But they are fairly
easily translatable into/from other W. European languages due to the same,
several thousands of years old cultural background. So is Telugu/Hindi.
169 To compare the European situation again: speakers of Finnish, Hungarian
and Estonian, which do not belong to the Indo-European but to the Uralic
language family, are just as good Europeans as the rest as they have shared a
common culture for one or more millennia. This also includes the non-Indo-
European speakers of Basque, of Maltese (speaking a variety of Arabic), the
Muslim Albanians and Bosnians, the Caucasian-speaking Georgians, and the
Indo-European Armenians. Due to complex historical and cultural reasons,
it is more difficult to be accepted as a speaker of an Altaic language, such as
Turkish with a Near Eastern Islamic culture (but contrast the Slavic-speaking
Muslim Bosnians or ‘Illyrian’-speaking Albanians), or the Mongolian-speaking
Buddhist Kalmyks in S. Russia. Both only marginally share pan-European
culture, and that is crucially important, irrespective of religion and language.
In the same sense, all of South Asia is one region that includes Pakistan, India,
Nepal, Bangladesh, Bhutan, Sri Lanka and the Maldives, but significantly not
Afghanistan, Burma or other neighbours.

67
 Authors?

in archaeology, human paleontology, population genetics,

linguistics, texts, etc. It is this that we have been studying at
Harvard Round Tables dedicated to South and Central Asia since
1999, and we have reached some consensus.
However, this kind of interdisciplinary conversation and the
ensuing comparison of data of the natural and social sciences
and of linguistics, religion, ritual, mythology still is weak in the
subcontinent. These fields of the humanities should be developed
just as archaeology and human population genetics have been in
South Asia over the past decades. All of them contribute in telling
us a facet of where we have come from, what we have retained
from earlier periods, and thus, who we are today.
For, we are complex beings and, in order to understand ourselves,
we must achieve this kind of scientific cooperation. Again, the
present conference was a good opportunity to underline this
principle. Normally, we all are engulfed in the detailed, specialist
work of our professions, and that is certainly necessary. But we
should also look beyond these narrow confines. If we can establish
multidisciplinary and multinational cooperation between our
various fields, wherever possible, that would be a most beneficial
outcome of this Jubilee meeting.

References
Abbi, Anvita. Endangered Languages of the Andaman Islands.
Munich: Lincom, 2006
Anderson, Gregory D. S. “Recent Advances in Proto-Munda and
Proto-Austroasiatic Reconstruction.” Paper presented at the 3rd Harvard
Round Table on the Prehistory of Central and South Asia, Cambridge,
MA. (May 2001)
---, A New Classification of South Munda: Evidence from Comparative
Verb Morphology. Indian Linguistics Poona: Linguistic Society of India
62, 2001: 21–36
----, The Munda verb: typological perspectives. Berlin, New
York: Mouton de Gruyter, 2007
---, The Munda languages / edited by Gregory S. Anderson. London
; New York : Routledge, 2008
---, Burushaski. In Language Islands: Isolates and Microfamilies of
Eurasia, ed. by D.A. Abondolo. London: Curzon Press (forthcoming)
Arensburg B., et al. A Middle Palaeolithic human hyoid bone. Nature.

68
 Symposium on Evolution

1989, Apr 27;338, (6218), 758-60

Bajracharya, Dhanavajra, The Gopālarājavaṃśāvalī. [edited and
translated by] Dhanavajra Vajrācārya and Kamal P. Malla. Wiesbaden,
GmbH: Franz Steiner Verlag, 1985
Beekes, Robert S.P. Comparative Indo-European linguistics: an
introduction, Amsterdam, Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 1995
Bender, M. Lionel. The Nilo-Saharan Languages: A Comparative
Essay. München: Lincom Europa, 1996
Benedict, Paul K. Sino-Tibetan, a conspectus [by] Paul K. Benedict.
Contributing editor: James A. Matisoff. Cambridge, University Press,
1972.
---, Austro-Tai: Language and Culture, with a Glossary of Roots.
New Haven: HRAF Press 1975
---, “Austro-Thai and Austroasiatic.” In: Austroasiatic Studies, Part
I, ed. Philip N. Jenner, Laurence C. Thompson, Stanley Starosta, 1-36.
Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 1976
---, Japanese/Austro-Tai / Paul K. Benedict. Ann Arbor: Karoma,
1990
Bengtson, John D. “An End to Splendid Isolation: The Macro-
Caucasian Phylum.” Mother Tongue [Newsletter] 10 (April 1990) ??
[cf. http://www.nostratic.ru/books/(220)bengtson%20-%20macro-
caucasic.pdf]
---, “Genetic and Cultural Linguistic Links between Burushaski and
the Caucasian Languages and Basque”. Presentation at the 3rd Harvard
Round Table on the Ethnogenesis of South and Central Asia, 2001.
ht t p: // w w w. no s t r at ic . r u / b o ok s /(29 9)b e n g t s on%2 0 -%2 0
BurshRoundtable.pdf
---, “A Multilateral Look at Greater Austric.” Mother Tongue XI,
(2006) 219-258
Bengtson, John and Merritt Ruhlen. Global etymologies. 1994 http://
www.merrittruhlen.com/files/Global.pdf
Berger, Hermann Die Burushaski-Sprache von Hunza und Nagar.
Vols. I-III. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz 1988
Bickerton, D. Language and Species. Univ. of Chicago Press 1990
Black, Paul. Outside relationships of Australian languages. Mother
Tongue XI, 2006, 259-261
Blažek, Vaclav. “Was there an Australian Substratum in Dravidian?”
Mother Tongue XII (2006): 275-294
Louis-Jean Boe et al. The potential Neandertal vowel space was as
large as that of modern humans. Journal of Phonetics 30, 2002, 465–484
doi:10.1006/jpho.2002.0170. http://www.idealibrary.com
Bonfante, Giuliano & Larissa Bonfante. The Etruscan Language: an
Introduction. Manchester: University of Manchester Press 2002

69
 Authors?

Burrow, Thomas and M. B. Emeneau, A Dravidian Etymological

Dictionary. Oxford: Clarendon Press 1960
Bryant, Edwin & Laurie Patton. The Indo-Aryan controversy
: evidence and inference in Indian history / edited by Edwin F. Bryant
and Laurie L. Patton. London & New York : Routledge, 2005
Bub, Daniel. Reflections on language evolution and the brain. Review
of Phillip Lieberman’s Toward an Evolutionary Biology of Language.
Cortex 44, 2008, 206-217
Callaway, Ewen. Neanderthals speak out after 30,000 years. New
Scientits, 15:00 15 April 2008.
<http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn13672-neanderthals-
speak-out-after-30000-years.html?DCMP=ILC-hmts&nsref=specrt10_
head_Neanderthal%20talk>
Capell, Arthur. “History of Australian Languages.” In Australian
linguistic studies, ed. Stephen A. Wurm, 419-619. Canberra: Dept. of
Linguistics, Research School of Pacific Studies, Australian National
University 1979
Cardona, George and Dhanesh Jain (eds.). The Indo-Aryan languages.
London; New York: Routledge 2003
Chatterji, Suniti Kumar. The origin and development of the Bengali
language. With a foreword by Sir George Abraham Grierson. Calcutta:
Calcutta University Press 1926
---, Kirāta-jana-kṛti = The Indo-Mongoloids, their contribution to
the history and culture of India. Rev. 2d ed. Calcutta: Asiatic Society
1974
Clendon, Mark. “Reassessing Australia’s Linguistic Prehistory.”
Current Anthropology 47, 2006, 39-61
Culotta, Elizabeth. “Ancient DNA Reveals Neandertals With Red
Hair, Fair Complexion.” Science 318, Oct. 25 2007, 546-547
Décsy, Gyula. “The Uralic Protolanguage : a Comprehensive
Reconstruction. Etude descriptive générale du proto-ouralien et glossaires
proto-ouralien-anglais.” Ural-altaische Jahrbücher 62 (1990) 9-147
Diffloth, Gérard. An appraisal of Benedict’s views on Austroasiatic
and Austro-Thai relations. Kyoto: Center for Southeast Asian Studies,
Kyoto University, 1976 [Discussion paper (Kyoto Daigaku. Tonan Ajia
Kenkyu Senta) no. 82]
---, The Lexical Evidence for Austric, So Far. Oceanic Linguistics,
33, 1994, 309-321
---, “Tentative Calibration of time depths of Austroasiatic branches.”
Presentation at the Colloque “Perspectives sur la Phylogénie des Langues
d’Asie Orietales” at Périgueux, France, 30 August 2001
---, The contribution of linguistic palaeontology to the homeland
of Austro-asiatic. In: Sagart, Laurent, Roger Blench and Alicia Sanchez-

70
 Symposium on Evolution

Mazas (eds.). The Peopling of East Asia: Putting Together Archaeology,

Linguistics and Genetics. RoutledgeCurzon 2005: 79–82
Dillon, Anthony V.N., Jerold A. Edmondson, Yongxian Luo. The
Tai-Kadai Languages. London/New York 2008
Dixon, Robert M.W. The Languages of Australia. New York:
Cambridge University Press, 1980
--- Australian Languages. Their Nature and Development.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2002
Donegan, Patricia and David Stampe. Rhythm and the synthetic
drift of Munda. In: Rajendra Singh, ed., The Yearbook of South Asian
Languages and Linguistics. Berlin and New York: Mouton de Gruyter:
2004, 3-36, http://www.ling.hawaii.edu/austroasiatic/AA/rhythm2004.
pdf)
Ehret, Christopher. Reconstructing Proto-Afroasiatic (Proto-
Afrasian). Vowels, Tone, Consonants and Vocabulary. Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1995
---, A Historical-Comparative Reconstruction of Nilo-Saharan.
Köln: R. Köppe-Verlag 2001
Emeneau, M. B. India as a linguistic area. Language 32, 1956, 3-16
---, Onomatopoetics in the Indian linguistic area. Language 45,
1969, 274-299
---, and Th. Burrow, Dravidian Borrowings from Indo-Aryan.
Berkeley : University of California Press 1962
Enard, W. et al. A humanized version of FOXP2 affects cortico-
basal ganglia circuits in mice. Cell 137, 2009, 961-71. doi:10.1016/j.
cell.2009.03.041.
Enrico, John. Toward Proto-Na-Dene. Anthropological Linguistics
46, 2004, 229 – 302
Fisher, Simon. Tangled webs: Tracing the connections
between genes and cognition. Cognition. 101, 2006 Sep, 270-97..
doi:10.1016/j.cognition.2006.04.004; http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/
pubmed/16764847
Foley, William A.. The Papuan Languages of New Guinea. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1986.
Fortescue, Michael. Comparative Chukotko-Kamchatkan
Dictionary. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter 2005
Greenberg, Joseph Harold. Language in the Americas. Stanford:
Stanford University Press, 1987
Harrod, James. “Periods of Globalization over ‘The Southern Route’
in Human Evolution (Africa, Southwest Asia, Southern Asia, Southeast
Asia, and Sahul and the Far East). A Meta-Review of Archaeology and
Evidence for Symbolic Behavior.” Mother Tongue XI (2006): 23-84

71
 Authors?

---, Researching the Origins of Art, Religion and Mind. Available:

http://www.originsnet.org/glossmeth.html.
Heine, Bernd. African languages: an introduction; edited by Bernd
Heine and Derek Nurse. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2000
Hewitt, B. G. Georgian: a structural reference grammar. Amsterdam:
John Benjamins 1995
Hill, Nathan Wayne. An overview of the Tibetan verbal system.
Harvard PhD Dissertation, 2003
Hinüber, O. v. Die Kolophone der Gilgit-Handschriften, Studien zur
Indologie und Iranistik 5/6, 1980, 49-82
---, Brāhmī inscriptions on the history and culture of the upper
Indus valley. In: K. Jettmar et al., Rock Inscriptions in the Indus Valley.
Antiquities of Northern Pakistan. Reports and Studies, vol. 1. Mainz:
Philipp von Zabern 1989: 41-72
Hoffmann, Karl. Die alt-indoarischen Wörter mit ṇḍ. Ph. Diss.
München 1941
---, Aufsätze zur Indoiranistik. (ed. J. Narten, vols.1-2) Wiesbaden.
1975-76
---, Aufsätze zur Indoiranistik. (ed. S. Glauch, R. Plath, S. Ziegler,
vol. 3). Wiesbaden 1992
Hualde, José Ignacio & Ortiz de Urbina, Jon (eds.). A Grammar of
Basque. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, 2003
Jablonka, Eva et al. Transgenerational Epigenetic Inheritance:
Prevalence, Mechanisms, and Implications for the Study of Heredity
and Evolution. The Quarterly Review of Biology 84, 2009, 131 DOI:
10.1086/598822
James, Hannah V.A. “The emergence of modern behavior in South
Asia: A review of the current evidence and discussion of its possible
implications.” In The Evolution and History of Human Populations
in South Asia. Inter-disciplinary Studies in Archaeology, Biological
Anthropology, Linguistics and Genetics, ed. Michael D. Petraglia and
Bridget Allchin, 201-227. Dordrecht: Springer 2007
Junker, Thomas. Die Evolution des Menschen. München: Beck
2006.
Kölver, Bernhard and Hemrāj Śākya. Śrī Rudravarṇa Mahāvihāra
(Pātan, Nepal) Documents from the Rudravarṇa-Mahāvihāra, Pāṭan. Sankt
Augustin: VGH Wissenschaftsverlag 1985
Koppers, Wilhelm. Die Bhil in Zentralindien. Horn: F. Berger 1948
Krause, Johannes et al. “The Derived FOXP Variant of Modern
Humans was shared with Neanderthals.” Current Biology 17 (21), 2007,
1908-12
Krishnamurti, Bhadriraju. Comparative Dravidian linguistics :
current perspectives. With a foreword by Murray B. Emeneau. Oxford ;

72
 Symposium on Evolution

New York: Oxford University Press 2001

---,The Dravidian languages. Cambridge ; New York: Cambridge
University Press 2003
Kuiper, F.B. J. The genesis of a linguistic area. Indo-Iranian Journal 10,
1967, 81-102, http://www.springerlink.com/content/tl306hw646806112/
fulltext.pdf
----, Nahali, a comparative study. Amsterdam: Noord-Hollandse
Uitgevers Maatschappij 1962
Lieberman, Philip. Toward an evolutionary biology of language.
Harvard University Press, 2006
Lieberman & McCarthy, 2007:
ht t p://penn.museu m/docu ments/publ icat ions/ex ped it ion/
PDFs/49-2/Lieberman.pdf; Cortex 44, 2008, 218-226
Lorimer, D. L. R. The Burushaski language. Oslo: H. Aschehoug;
Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1935-38
Mahadevan, Iravatham. Early Tamil epigraphy from the earliest
times to the sixth century A.D. Chennai, India: Cre-A; Cambridge, MA
: Dept. of Sanskrit and Indian Studies, Harvard University. Distributed
by Harvard University Press, 2003
Masica,, Colin P. Aryan and Non-Aryan Elements in North Indian
Agriculture. In: Madhav M. Deshpande and Peter Edwin Hook (eds.),
Aryan and Non-Aryan in India. Ann Arbor: Center for South and
Southeast Asian Studies 1979: 55-151
Mattisoff, J. Handbook of Proto-Tibeto-Burman: system and
philosophy of Sino-Tibetan reconstruction. Berkeley : University of
California Press 2003
Mayrhofer, Manfred. Etymologisches Wörterbuch des
Altindoarischen. Heidelberg: C. Winter 1986-2001
MacAndrew, Alec. “FOXP2 and the Evolution of Language.” Nature
418, 2002,: 869-872
Misra, Satya Swarup. The Aryan Problem. A linguistic approach.
New Delhi: Munshiram Manoharlal 1992
Nikolayev, S., and S. Starostin. North Caucasian Etymological
Dictionary. Moscow: Asterisk Press 1994
http://starling.rinet.ru/
Noonan James P. et al, “Sequencing and Analysis of Neanderthal
Genomic DNA.” Science 314, Issue 5802, November 17, 2006, 1113 - 1118.
http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/abstract/314/5802/1113?etoc
Nurse, Derek and Gérard Philippson. The Bantu Languages. London,
New York: Routledge, 2003
Ouattaraa, Karim, et al. Campbell’s monkeys concatenate
vocalizations into context-specific call sequences.

73
 Authors?

Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 116, December 22,

2009, no. 51: 22026-22031. http://www.pnas.org/content/106/51/22026.
abstract?etoc
Pawley, Andrew and Malcolm Ross. “The prehistory of Oceanic
languages: A current view.” In The Austronesians: Historical and
Comparative Perspectives, ed. Peter S. Bellwood, James J. Fox, D. T.
Tryon. Canberra: Australian National University 1995: 39-74
Petraglia, Michael D. and Bridget Allchin, eds. The Evolution and
History of Human Populations in South Asia. Inter-disciplinary Studies
in Archaeology, Biological Anthropology, Linguistics and Genetics.
Dordrecht: Springer 2007
Petraglia, Michael D. et al. Middle Paleolithic Assemblages from the
Indian Subcontinent Before and After the Toba Super-Eruption. Science
317, 2007, 114-116
Pinnow, Heinz-Jürgen. Versuch einer historischen Lautlehre der
Kharia-Sprache. Wiesbaden, O. Harrassowitz 1959
Poucha, Pavel. “Bruzha -- Burushaski?” Central Asiatic Journal 5,
1959, 295-300
Powell, Adam et al. Late Pleistocene Demography and the Appearance
of Modern Human Behavior. Science 324. no. 5932, 5 June 2009, 1298 -
1301 DOI: 10.1126/science.1170165
http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/abstract/324/5932/1298.
[Overview story in Science Daily:
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/06/090604144324.htm]
Rana, Bhai K. New Materials on the Kusunda language. Paper
presented at the Fourth Harvard Roundtable on the Ethnogenesis of
South and Central Asia, Harvard University, May 11-13, 2002 http://
www.fas.harvard.edu/%7Esanskrit/RoundTableSchedule.html
Robbeets, Martine Irma. Is Japanese related to Korean, Tungusic,
Mongolic and Turkic? Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz 2005
Ruhlen, Merritt. On the Origin of Languages, Studies in Linguistic
Taxonomy. Stanford: Stanford University Press 1994a
---, The Origin of Language : tracing the evolution of the mother
tongue. New York: Wiley 1994b
http://www.merrittruhlen.com/files/Global.pdf
Sagart, Laurent (ed.) The Peopling of East Asia: putting together
archaeology, linguistics, and genetics. London: Routledge 2005
Schmid, L. Report on a survey of Dardic languages of Kashmir.
Indian Linguistics 42, 1981, 17-21
Schmitz, Ralph W. “Interdisziplinäre Untersuchungen an den
Neufunden aus dem Neandertal. Johann Carl Fuhlrott (1803 - 1877)
gewidmet.” Mitteilungen der Gesellschaft für Urgeschichte 12 (2003)
25. http://www.urgeschichte.uni-tuebingen.de/fileadmin/downloads/

74
 Symposium on Evolution

GfU/2003/gfu12_3.pdf
Schrenk, Friedemann, Stephanie Müller. Die Neanderthaler. Unter
Mitarbeit von Christine Hemm. München: Beck, 2005. [English trans.:
The Neanderthals, translated by Phyllis G. Gestice. London: Routledge,
2009]
Sen, Sukumar. An etymological dictionary of Bengali, c. 1000-1800
A.D. Calcutta, Eastern Publishers 1971
Southworth, Franklin C. Linguistic archaeology of South Asia.
London/New York: RoutledgeCurzon 2005
Spalding, Alex. Inuktitut: a Grammar of North Baffin Dialects.
Winnipig, Canada: Wuerz 1992.
---, Inuktitut: A multi-dialectal outline dictionary (with an
Aivilingmiutaq base). Iqaluit, NT: Nunavut Arctic College 1998
Sreenathan, M. The Jarawas : language and culture. Calcutta:
Anthropological Survey of India, Govt. of India 2001
Solymosi, Maria Agnes et al: A Window on the Genetics of Human
Speech: the Foxp2 Gene.
Journal of the Association for the Study of Language in Prehistory,
Issue XII, 2007, 135-142 www.mtakpa.hu/kpa/download/1209118.pdf
Stampe, David. [various papers on Austro-Asiatic]
http://www.ling.hawaii.edu/austroasiatic/
Sverdrup, Harald. A study of the Tartessian Script and Language. In:
Shervoroshkin, Vitaly and Paul Sidwell. Languages and their Speakers
in Ancient Eurasia. Canberra: Association for the History of Language
2002: 115-141
Tēvanēyan, Ñānamuttan et al. Centamilc corpirappiyal pērakaramutali.
Comprehensive etymological dictionary of the Tamil language. Cennai:
Centamilc Corpirappiyal Akara Mutalit Tiṭṭa Iyakkaka Veḷīyīṭu,
1985-
Thangaraj, Kumarasamy. “Genetic Affinities of the Andaman
Islanders, a Vanishing Human Population.” Current Biology 13, January
21, 2003: 86–93
---, et al., Reconstructing the orign of the Andamanese islanders.
Science 308, 2005, 996
Thurgood, Graham and Randy J. LaPolla. The Sino-Tibetan
Languages. London/New York: Routledge 2003
Tiffou, Étienne (ed.). Bourouchaskiana : actes du colloque sur le
bourouchaski organisé à l’occasion du XXXVIème Congrès international
sur les études asiatiques et nord-africaines (Montréal, 27 août-2
septembre 2002). Louvain-la-Neuve: Peeters 2004
--- and Morin, Yves Charles. Dictionnaire complémentaire du
Bourouchaski du Yasin. Paris : Peeters/SELAF 1989

75
 Authors?

Tikkanen, Bertil. On Burushaski and other ancient substrata in

northwest South Asia. Studia Orientalia 64, 1988, 303–325
Tishkoff, Sarah A. ”History of Click-Speaking Populations of
Africa Inferred from mtDNA and Y Chromosome Genetic Variation.”
Molecular Biolology and Evolution 10 (2007 Oct. 24): 2180-95
Trinkhaus, Eric. “Human Evolution: Neanderthal Geme Speaks
out.” Current Biology 17 (21), 2007, R917-R919
Tulpule, Shankar Gopal and Anne Feldhaus. A dictionary of Old
Marathi. Assisted by M.P. Pethe ; lexicographical consultant: Jayashree
Gune. Oxford ; New York: Oxford University Press 2000
Turner, R. L. A comparative Dictionary of the Indo-Aryan Languages.
London 1966 (CDIAL)
van Driem, George. “Tibeto-Burman vs Indo-Chinese: implications
for population genetics, archeologists, and prehistorians.” In The
peopling of East Asia: putting together archaeology, linguistics, and
genetics, ed. Laurent Sagart, et al. London: Routledge 2005: 81-106
---, “The prehistory of Tibeto-Burman and Austrasiatic in the light
of emergent population genetic studies.” Mother Tongue XI (2006) 160-
211
---, “Austroasiatic phylogeny and the Austroasiatic homeland in light
of recent population genetic studies”. Mon-Khmer studies: a journal of
Southeast Asian languages and cultures 37, 2007, 1–14
Usher, Timothy. Great Andamanese reconstruction underway. A
condensed handout with tentative remarks on Papuan and Australian
vis-à-vis external language families. Mother Tongue XI, 2006, 295-298
Vajda, Edward J. Ket. (2004) Munich: Lincom Europa 2004
Vovin, Alexander. A reconstruction of Proto-Ainu. Leiden ; New
York: E.J. Brill 1993
---, “Introduction.” In Perspectives on the origins of the Japanese
language, ed. Toshiki Osada and Alexander Vovin, with the assistance
of Kerri Russel.. Kyoto: International Center for Japanese Studies 2003:
421-428
Watters, David E. Notes on Kusunda grammar (a language isolate
of Nepal), with the participation of Yogendra P. Yadava, Madhav P.
Pokharel, Balaram Prasain. Kathmandu: National Foundation for the
Development of Indigenous Nationalities 2005
[Watters’ Kusunda dictionary at the SARVA website: http://www.
aa.tufs.ac.jp/sarva/materials_frame.html ]
Wells, Spencer. The journey of man : a genetic odyssey. Photographs
by Mark Read. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press 2002
Wells, Spencer et al: The Eurasian Heartland: A continental
perspective of Y-chromosome diversity. Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. USA 98,
2001, 10244- 9.

76
 Symposium on Evolution

Whitehouse, Paul. The “Lost” Paper: A Belated Conference Postscript.

Mother Tongue XI, 2006, 262-274
Whitehouse, Paul, Timothy Usher, Merritt. Ruhlen. “Kusunda: An
Indo-Pacific language in Nepal.” Proceedings of the National Academy
of Sciences 101, 15, April 13, 2004, 5692–5695. www.pnas.org_cgi_
doi_10.1073_pnas.0400233101
http://www.pnas.org/cgi/reprint/101/15/5692.pdf
Williamson, Kay & Roger Blench. “‘Niger-Congo’.” In African
Languages - An Introduction, ed. Bernd Heine, Bernd and Derek Nurse,
11-42. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2000
Witzel, Michael. On the location of the Licchavi Capital of Nepal.
Festschrift für P. Thieme (= Studien zur Indologie und Iranistik 5/6),
1980, 311-337
---, “Early Sources for South Asian Substrate Languages.” Mother
Tongue. Extra number. 1999 [cf. EJVS version, http://www.ejvs.
laurasianacademy.com/issues.html]
---, “Comparison and Reconstruction: Language and Mythology.”
Mother Tongue VI , 2001, 45- 62
---, Early Loan Words in Western Central Asia: Indicators of Substrate
Populations, Migrations, and Trade Relations. Linguistic Evidence for
Cultural Exchange in Prehistoric Western Central Asia. Philadelphia:
Sino-Platonic Papers 129, 2003; partial pdf: http://www.people.fas.
harvard.edu/%7Ewitzel/Sinttashta_Qu.pdf
---, The Origins of the World’s Mythologies. Oxford University
Press. In Press, Fall 2010
Wurm, Stephen A. Languages of Australia and Tasmania. The
Hague: Mouton 1972
---, New Guinea Area Languages and Language Study, Volume
1: Papuan Languages and the New Guinea Linguistic Scene. Pacific
Linguistics, Research School of Pacific and Asian Studies, Australian
National University. Canberra: Australian National University, 1977.
Zvelebil, Kamil. The descent of the Dravidians. International Journal
of Dravidian Linguistics 1-2, 1972, 56-63
---, Dravidian Linguistics: an Introduction. Pondicherry: Pondicherry
Institute of Linguistics and Culture 1990

77