Hindutva supporters on Twitter are furious about this Holi-themed Hindustan Unilever ad for Surf Excel which shows a Hindu girl helping her Muslim friend. They claim that it supports “love jihad”. Amazing how some people can find a message of hatred in an innocous ad for washing detergent.
Imagine being so sexually frustrated you just start pretending that the reason girls aren’t fucking you is because they are being ensnared in some international Jihad conspiracy.
Savarkarites have become such perfect caricatures of Islamists they used to mock, feels like we are all living in a poorly scripted movie ?♂️ #BoycottSurfExcel
Savarkarites have become such perfect caricatures of Islamists they claimed to despise, it is not funny any more ?♂️
When I saw the ad they were doing the #BoycottSurfExcel campaign against, seriously wondered for a moment if Congress SM had successfully executed a false flag attack to defame Modi followers. Apparently NOT.
That’s the thing about every form of extremism – once you (a powerful majority) are made to believe you are under attack by outsiders, once you buy into that assertion without aggressively questioning the data- only a matter of time before you will fall for transparently ridiculous things such as this campaign.
Slightly more sophisticated but equally dishonest and convoluted defense by Savrakarite intellectual (twitter thread):
All 'sides' are wrong about the #SurfExcel ad. Sadly, there is no critical thinking in the public sphere in India. What @HUL_News has done is promote an insidious message of victimhood/protection into a festival celebrated for thousands of years with unity and no conflict.— HindolSengupta (@HindolSengupta) March 10, 2019
Indophilus II
5 years ago
Why do the Urdu people still insist on using the word Aurat, given its extremely offensive meaning?
Most Urdu speakers are unaware of the Arabic meaning of Aurat. They also can’t pronounce A’in in Aurat correctly. (For that matter they can’t pronounce qaaf, swad, zwad a host of other Arabic sounds correctly either). Most Arabic speakers will laugh at their pronunciation of these beautiful Arabic sounds. However, they still insist on stuffing their language with Arabic words.
Naipual once observed in a deep insightful manner that Arabs must be the most successful colonizer of the world. Long after their rule ended, the conquered people faithfully bow in the direction of Arabia five times a day, and hanker after all things Arabic. European colonizers should learn something from them.
Urdu is a different language from Arabic. Our pronunciation of certain sounds differs. It is not a question of “correctness”. We are speaking our own language, not Arabic.
This reminds me of the whole Ramadan vs. Ramzan controversy which pops up every year. The Urdu word is Ramzan but more and more people insist on being like the Arabs and saying Ramadan. In my opinion, this is a complete non-issue.
“This reminds me of the whole Ramadan vs. Ramzan controversy which pops up every year. The Urdu word is Ramzan but more and more people insist on being like the Arabs and saying Ramadan. In my opinion, this is a complete non-issue. ”
But it is to some, if not most. On questions of pronunciation (Ramzan/Ramadan) I tend to agree with you. Speakers of a language get to decide themselves what the `correct’ way to pronounce something is. But Aurat is a loan word, with a specific meaning in the language from which it was loaned. Although, it may not be an issue to you, it takes conscious and conspicuous effort to divorce it from its original meaning.
It’s like the whole shahid/ veergati (martyr/ departed warrior) debate that’s recently been raging. Martyrdom is an Abrahamic concept not applicable to the fallen soldiers of a secular republic (or a Dharmic people as some here might state otherwise). One might justify its use by saying that it’s now a Hindi word with it’s own internally referenced meaning, but I think we can agree that that’s a stretch.
“Aurat” is simply the Urdu word for “woman”. I doubt many people know what it connotes in Arabic. I certainly don’t.
Karan
5 years ago
Santosh
Will keep the linguistic discussion on this thread.
I have looked at the DNA results of the South Central Dravidian (SCDr) tribal groups like the Gondi and the central Dravidian tribes. They are all enriched with AASI and have a much lower Iranian farmer component.
This strongly suggests that their predominant ancestry is not from the last IVC migration (post 1500 BC).
I suspect that the Gondi originally spoke CDr or another language, and then the more advanced Proto-Telugu/SCDr migrants imparted their language onto them post 1500 BC. This exchange probably also led to Telugu absorbing CDr features such as the numeral okaTi.
The loss of the root-initial voiceless palatal stop/affricate c in some etymons probably arose in Proto-South-Dravidian-Telugu (considering that the main speakers of these groups are closer in DNA and from the last IVC migration).
The tribal groups in South Dravidian areas also underwent language replacement following the post 1500 BC incursion.
Well, I also see that kind of an intriguing possibility myself Karan, but I don’t know the extent to which Central-Dravidian-substrate-in-South-Dravidian-II idea is plausible and attractive to Dravidian linguists. While an old-school belief is that Telugu-Kui is a subgroup of Central Dravidian, I personally believe that it is a branch of South Dravidian (the other subgroup within South Dravidian being South-Dravidian-I) (if not the above, then it could be a distinct group directly descending from Proto-Dravidian) as per the classification in the standard textbook by Bh Krishnamurti.
And apparently Gonds and other central Indian and Odisha tribes are very much like Austroasiatic speakers of the area genetically and Gond men even carry the relevant subclade of the O haplogroup in elevated percentages (I don’t know if I am right though; sorry if all this is wrong). The people of those areas may have been subjected to a series of language shifts.
But also, the relationship between South-Dravidian-I and the Telugu stream of language is quite curious. There are very sharp linguistic differences between the two but also some close commonalities here and there. Overall it seems people speaking South-Dravidian-II might have still maintained some kind of moderately strong connections with those speaking South-Dravidian-I in the beginning of their separation from the common Proto-South-Dravidian and Pre-Telugu people probably continued doing it in some ways after Proto-South-Dravidian-II split into Pre-Telugu and Pre-Gondi-Kui, as evidenced by the *c- –> *[null]- sound change that entered Pre-Telugu from South-Dravidian-I fairly recently (mid-late 1st millennium BC). I think the geographical contiguity of the Dravidian languages (and Indo-Aryan languages) makes it very easy for sound changes arisen in one language/branch to spread through diffusion to fairly distinct and distant neighbouring languages, probably beginning in some easy-to-recognise cognate words or something like that.
Tangential question: if the Munda are not native to Indian subcontinent but only arrived 3500-4000 years ago (not way before the Indo-Aryans did), should they be classified as Adivasi, as they currently are? What makes them indigenous people, as that term implies?
🙂 Good point. I am pretty sure this will become a demand from some quarters very soon. Adivasi literally means ancient dweller – an aboriginal. Mundas may soon find themselves on the Hindu upper caste side, fencing off attacks to snatch their job reservations and their sons of the soil claims.
“but adivasi is just a political/cultural term. nothing to do with antiquity”
Can you elaborate Razib? The term Adivasi is extensively used in the narrative literature of ancient Arya texts, especially ancient Sanskrit texts and ancient Sanskriti influenced languages texts.
[Telegu, Kannada and Tamil spiritual texts are full of Sanskrit loan words. Many tens of thousands at least. Maybe much more. In this sense I strongly suspect that the term Adivasi has found its way into their literature too. For example the Tamilian Kamban Ramayana. Note that I only read this text in translation. So I don’t know for sure if the word “Adivasi” appears in the original Tamil text.]
Many of the most important religious/spiritual/social/cultural/civilizational leaders of the Arya people are Adivasis. Including saint Valmiki, author of the Valmiki Ramayana and one of the most important characters in the Ramayana story.
In fact I had never heard about “Munda” before reading your work. It took me a long time to associate “Munda” with “Adivasi”. Assume this is a reasonable association?
This might be similar to how fairly distinct dialects within Early Indo-European continued to interact with each other and influenced each other while on the steppe. For example, Balto-Slavic and Indo-Iranian share this satem sound change though it seems they don’t have a common ancestor private to only them and might have each directly descended from Proto-Indo-European (I’m very sorry again if this view is incorrect according to the most current standard thinking in Indo-European linguistics). It seems that it is enough to have a sufficient amount of geographical contiguity and also some amount of close cultural interaction for two distinct language groups to come to share even intimate sound changes through diffusion. (Lol all this might seem so extraordinarily sophomoric to actual linguists; I must pick up some kind of textbook on the theory of comparative linguistics some day.)
What is Balto-Slavic? When it was created? Does BS alphabet exist? Which language was spoken in Europe in 5000BC? What is Proto-Indo-European and what is its relationship with Indo-Germaniche? Pls tell us one PIE word. Txs.
Yes language evolution in these situations is rarely just a simple tree diagram. The split of Tamil and Malayalam is a case in point.
Malayalam retains many of the common grammatical changes that Old Tamil underwent in its evolution into Middle Tamil, suggesting that Malayalam is mainly derived from a medieval western dialect of Tamil.
However, Malayalam also retains many archaisms that are not present in the oldest forms of classical Tamil (which was probably based on an artificial ‘high’ literary dialect of the Pandyan dynasty.)
Diglossia between the spoken and written dialects of Old and Middle Tamil varied throughout Tamilakam.
If i may ask are you really a S-Indian named Karan? Never met anyone with that name south of Vindhyas, always felt it was sort of a common N-Indian/Punjabi name
Spot on about the development of Malayalam! Malayalam’s most conservative features like the Proto-South-Dravidian nature of the initial palatal nasal in the pronoun for ‘I’, [nj]An, etc. were never recorded in the oldest known Tamil which means that technically Malayalam is a descendant of Proto-Tamil-Malayalam and not the Old Tamil known, but then Pre-Malayalam people also maintained intimate contact with the High language of the east called Old Tamil throughout the Old Tamil period into the Middle Tamil period and thus Malayalam has same innovations as the eastern dialects of that period too.
Santosh when do you think proto-Tamil_Malayalam or Old Tamil or ancient proto Malayali first came into contact with Sanskrit?
When do you think Tirumular might have lived? Or phrased differently when do you believe Tirumantiram was first composed? [Not the current edition, but the first draft.]
Agastyar is generally considered to be a much more ancient Tamil linguist . . . but some moderns consider him semi mythical.
AnAn, I don’t know much about Tirumantiram but it may have been composed sometime after 6th century AD possibly. Proto-Tamil-Malayalam was in moderately strong contact with Sanskrit and its ancestors beginning from Proto-Dravidian to Proto-South-Dravidian down to Proto-Tamil-Malayalam-Irula-Toda-Kota-Kurumba-Kodagu had also been in contact with Sanskrit and/or Old Indo-Aryan and Middle Indo-Aryan.
Wikipedia claims that Tirumantiruam was composed 1000 BC. [Which does not mean it is right! All ancient dates are difficult to place!]
Not arguing with you. Everyone has a right to interpret the data as they choose. Trying to understand your best estimates.
Saurav
5 years ago
I have a feeling we are entering a phase similar to the whole “1 term president obama” republican phase now for Indian election. Whoever going to win the next term the loser of the next election will not be emasculated enough ( Unlike 2009 ,2014)to accept defeat and this would create the whole “ block them at any cost”. The north vs south/east alienation would be complete. Not of the political parties but of people. The rise of the “ideological” camp, similar to republican/democrat camps in USA. Interesting times for India.
Deep Bhatnagar
5 years ago
How contestation starts & increases –
I am not trying to defend the Hindutva trolls but want to show how subtly society notices things which later leads to contestations & confrontations. In 2016 a Pakistani ad went viral in India & i checked it out.
I noticed the lack of any minority in the advertisement & replied –
‘Accha Video Hai par adhura hai, Kaash log dekh paate madad karna hi sacchi Insaniyat hai Ibadat nahi :(’
A person replied back – but in Islam any type of good deed is a type of “ibadat”….
Then i went into my typical mode of explaining –
Let me clarify here taking the above advertisement as an example –
Now change the religion of the person whose trolly got stuck & ask yourself if there would have been hesitation or not on part of other people {Other as they are divided by religion} ? & so in a way religion would have preceded over humanity even if it happens for a moment -_-
I know about Islamic theology too but I would rather talk about humanity than religions.
Now go & watch till Ramzan’s Surf Excel ads since, i have not yet seen minority representation in Pakistan’s Ramzan ad.
Secondly there are many other ways one can read the recent ad controversy like only majority must protect minority but minority does not have any burden of reconciliation.
Thanks for sharing the heart warming (Pakistani?) add. Loved it.
Saurav
5 years ago
I would love to live in a alternate reality where Kabir and Anan are my parents. ??
Also do Bengalis of Bangladesh share the same disgust (to put it mildly) of Marwadis/Gujratis that Indian Bengalis have? Or is it just a Calcutta thing.
my parents aren’t hateful, but they have told me that gujus are very stingy and would sell their grandmother down the river for $. but they express this with a mix of envy AND contempt.
I have long considered Marvadis and to a lesser degree Gujaratis to be India’s Jews.
Because they are criticized . . . I LOVE THEM. Gotta be doing something right 🙂
The Uganda genocide and ethnic cleansing 1972 was against Gujaratis. Gujaratis lost all their assets and wealth. Yet soon became rich again in Europe, other parts of Africa, America etc. Uganda went into a deep depression that Uganda still has not pulled out of.
Thomas Sowell often brings up this example and warns of the dangers of going after the successful and rich.
Saurav
5 years ago
Yeah so it means its a Bengali thing 😛
Always wondered why. I mean i have Bengali freinds who are totally far right and far left but they share this one thing. Specially towards Marwadis.
Read up Saswati Sarkar’s compilation on Indic mercantile collaboration with Islamist and European invaders.
At the grassroots I think many Muslim peasantries of the Indian subcontinent (common among Bengali and Punjabi) have a Baniya hatred because they’re like “you are the reason why we’re katbullah” and their fellow non Muslim peasants also retain some of that sentiment because they literally see the loss of fellow caste folks as loss of power for their own tribe, so Baniya had no skin off their own back because their own Hinduism stayed protected while commoner got sold off…
Bengali bhadralok are not lower caste but are oriented from early age to be pro poor pro nationalistic pro populistic. So that anti Baniya sentiment percolates up, and also ties in with remnant Brahminical anti Baniya sentiment as well.
1940s to 1980s Bengalis hated business people (baniya). I still can’t understand why.
notherlukerhere
5 years ago
bharatoshontan, saurav:
Jagat Seth was a Marwari Jain (not Hindu in the religious sense) and from my relatively small Rajasthani Jain community.
Saswati Sarkar has some valid points but has descended into ethnic hatred now. Discount what she says (not her facts but her analysis)
Her tweets etc have gone wacko lately, what with accusing Sangh and Swarajya magazine of anti Bengali bias etc using out of context statements. But her actual written work is decent.
Milan Todorovic
5 years ago
Alexander del Val in his book “Bosnia, Kosovo, Chechnya – wars against Europe” dedicated to French readers says that ‘the entire Western policy, the US and EU policies have intention of a complete physical extermination of Serbs’. Exactly – the verb was used that Serbs must be destroyed. Del Val gives an answer as to why this is so. This is, as he writes, due to the fact that America has an incredibly great interest in the Islamic world for which they have to satisfy the appetites of the Muslims. Therefore, in the Balkans, there is remarkable evidence that they can do something for the benefit of the Muslims is Serbia, precisely because it is a small and powerless country. And at the expense of Serbia, the appetites of Muslims can be satisfied. And the result of satisfying Muslims is the disappearance of Serbia.
Bharotshontan
5 years ago
Below is link to part 1 of the series on Indic merchant collaboration with Islamists and Europeans. If interested in understanding origins of resentment among eastern Bharat ethnic groups (including the peasantry that became Muslim), this is a good source to pore over: https://www.myind.net/Home/viewArticle/indic-mercantile-collaboration-abrahamic-invaders
Saurav
5 years ago
Yeah man. Just was curious though. I mean Marwari / Jain are rich in many parts of India. Perhaps the only other folks who can compete there is Punjabis. So there is some sort of latent envy or like soft caricature of them. But this seemed different. It actually was similar to the whole gujju – marathi tensions during the whole maharstrian state formation, of which we still have latent tensions in Mumbai. Never felt that marwadis are that powerful in Calcutta in my visits. Anyway shouldn’t descend into hatred.
Milan Todorovic
5 years ago
Another mission accomplished!
Americans forced to foil the tail: In secret negotiations with the Taliban agreed to leave Afghanistan. Occupied this country for 17 years and now they wrap the capitulation in diplomatic wrapping.
Washington has created a radical Islamist militarized Taliban movement and turned them against the Soviet Union. Later, they occupied Afghanistan and thus turned the Taliban against America, and in recent months they were forced to negotiate secretly with the Taliban and to give it up. The US Special envoy for Afghanistan, Zalmay Halilzad, has just announced that the negotiations – led in Doha – are crowned by the agreement that the Pentagon and US allies from NATO withdraw troops from Afghanistan! Of course, they will together continue the war against the terror and fight to eradicate the poverty in the world. Taliban currently control 60% of territory.
There is a major shooting war between the Afghan National Army and the Taliban (the military component of which is a proxy of the Pakistani Army)
Over 45,000 ANSF have died in combat in just 51 months. [only 72 soldiers from the entire rest of the world combined have died in combat during these 51 months.] The rest of the world isn’t that involved in the Afghan War.
The Afghans will fight the Taliban and what they see as Pakistani Army proxies regardless of any deal America makes . . . unless Afghans are party to it.
The Taliban controls areas where less than 10% of Afghans live. They control no major population centers.
A deal would involve the political leadership of Quetta Shura Taliban. If they flip to support the GIRoA and ANSF . . . it would be a larger version of Hekmatyur switching to support GIRoA and ANSF.
However, they have limited influence over the actual Taliban military formations–which are still heavily influenced or controlled by the Pakistani Army.
Will the Pakistani Army support a peace deal? Uncertain.
If they don’t all that happens is that the ANSF and most of QST civilian leadership ally with each other and jointly fight other Pakistani Army proxies and Daesh.
A peace deal while important does not mean peace in the short term.
However a peace deal would be very good news. Post peace deal the Taliban will likely want long term foreign aid and ANSF capacity building on the part of the international community. However several large Taliban militias would be formally incorporated into the ANSF. The Taliban will also want some of their Majors, Colonels and generals added to the ANSF as senior officers. They will likely demand that a few Taliban be added as generals in the ANSF.
From the Afghan perspective the worst deal will be if the US decides to back the Taliban and Pakistani Army against Afghanistan and the ANSF. And if the US cuts off all economic and military aid to Afghanistan and the ANSF.
I think that since she was born an English national (assuming this is true) the UK has to take her back and try her for crimes against humanity, hate crimes and any other crimes she committed. It would be immoral for the UK to not take her back and let her harm any more foreigners. She has already done enough harm to the rest of the world.
Her child should probably be taken from her (unless she can demonstrate that she has truly reformed) and raised by the UK state. The UK owes her child that much.
There is no excuse for joining Daesh and helping them knowing they are organizing genocides against “lesser muslims”, “fake muslims” and nonmuslims.
Her one possibly redeeming grace is she joined Daesh in Syria when she was young (maybe only 15) and perhaps she deserves leniency for that.
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Anish Kapoor is odd. Daesh is an anti muslim organization that mass murders muslims. People sympathetic to Daesh and people who join Daesh are likely anti muslim. Why is Anish Kapoor so soft on Daesh? Why does he appear to be supporting Jihadi Islamist extremist muslims against moderate muslims?
The same questions should be asked of Jeremy Corbyn–who I suspect might be anti muslim.
Scorpion Eater
5 years ago
“Airplanes are becoming far too complex to fly. Pilots are no longer needed, but rather computer scientists from MIT. I see it all the time in many products. Always seeking to go one unnecessary step further, when often old and simpler is far better. Split second decisions are….”
Sometimes Trump talks sense. I agree that there is a proliferation of unnecessary technology all around us.
My personal pet peeve is all these health gadgets like Fitbit etc. To maintain a healthy body all one needs is the willpower to hit the gym regularly. The gadgets won’t make anyone healthy by themselves.
SP
5 years ago
Anish Kapoor is indeed odd. As an artist he’s overrated, and I have a hard time taking his champagne socialism seriously. However, I do respect his standing up for Shamina Begum. It must be one of the quirkier aspects of having an unwritten constitution that a single minister has the the power to strip citizenship even if someone is not a dual national. It seems a rather punitive and ill advised decision on Sajid Javid’s part, and one that will likely be overturned in the courts.
FYI — Begum’s baby died a few days ago. It was completely innocent and Javid has blood on his hands.
I have a tough time mustering any sympathy for Begum, but I do believe in the sanctity of the institution of citizenship. The USA can denaturalize citizens if they acquired it through naturalization, but that doesn’t extend to `natural born’ citizens. I’m wondering if this has precedent in any other western country?
This is with reference to the Dravidian *yATavan[t]u, ‘sheep-[herder] guy’ and IA yAdava linkage suggested by Frank Southworth in the book “Linguistic Archaeology of South Asia”.
I personally fail to see how such a linkage is possible. There is no sound correspondence between the retroflex stop T in the Dravidian form and the dental stop in the Sanskrit form. The Dravidian yATu, ‘sheep’ is usually considered as borrowed into a very old form of Sanskrit (Vedic I think) according to the Turner’s Indo-Aryan etymological dictionary, as eDa and eDaka, both meaning ‘some kind of a sheep’. Now this one satisfies the sound laws quite well.
Edit: The Mayrhofer’s IA etymological dictionary says the etymology of IA yadu is “Unklar”, ‘unclear’ and goes on to list some Indo-European suggestions by other scholars but I cannot google-translate the German present there in time before my editing window is over.
No no I think they are not to be connected in any form at all. I have checked Monier-Williams Sanskrit dictionary just now and the word in question mentioned in the Rig Veda is yadu and not yAdu (there is apparently a word yAdu in Sanskrit also but one which means ‘water’ and that is even more irrelevant for us most probably).
With that short vowel in yadu also, it becomes very difficult to connect it with Dravidian yATu. To address the problem, Frank Southworth suggests that it was actually the word yAdava that was borrowed into IA first and the grammarians/intelligentsia later reverse-engineered a word in Sanskrit which would give rise to yAdava on performing vRddhi and boom, a mythical ancestor yadu was made up. This is a very clever idea if not for the lack of correspondence between the Dravidian [D] and Sanskrit d. Why did Sanskrit not borrow Dravidian [yADavan[d]u] as yADava (and create yaDu from that) and why did it erratically change the D it must have heard in Dravidian speech into d to borrow it as yAdava?
The answer, in my view, is that Sanskrit did not in fact borrow the yadu-related words from Dravidian, at least not the Dravidian yATu. Their etymologies remain unclear at the moment going by what Manfred Mayrhofer notes.
The other two are interesting but I will have to exhaustively vet to my satisfaction and arrive at some picture. Often, many of these things are highly debated and are theoretically unresolvable. For example, Asko Parpola suggests some kind of Iranic origins for Sambara and Michael Witzel suggests Para-Munda. Mayrhofer notes: “Nicht sicher erklärt”, ‘not sure’. I personally cannot evaluate Para-Munda hypothesis regarding this word because I don’t know anything much about Munda languages. I think it may have some kind of an origin somewhere in Indo-European only.
About the kuyava thing I will see later but one small thing is that the older form in Dravidian seems to be borne out of the root *kuc- and not *kuy- going by the Tamil and Tulu cognates which retain the -c- (pronounced [s]) in them. The changing of intervocalic c to y is a South-Dravidian-I (and Telugu in some cases) tendency majorly and likely does not go back to older Dravidian stages (unless it is considered that all these things are parallel sound changes in the north Indian Dravidian contemporary to Early Indo-Aryan).
Overall I believe the Para-Munda hypothesis may not be viable but Witzel’s etymology suggestions for individual words have to be very rigorously checked to see how they do. This is what I have not done and was referring to. Regarding Asko Parpola’s suggestions, I am not aware if his linguistic suggestions lose some amount of worth if his bigger ideas from archaeology plus comparative culture studies, etc. fall apart. For all I know, it may be like what you suggested. But a lot of the times I am personally majorly concerned about the ground-level stuff such as checking sound correspondences, making note of some kind of estimate about the tortuousness, so to speak, involved in typically deriving some of these words in the borrowing languages from the suggested donor languages, etc. etc.
And Michael Witzel does refer to Language X in his writings. Language X is a non-Dravidian, non-Munda, non-Tibeto-Burman substrate identified by Colin Masica that contributed some agricultural vocabulary to Hindi and Witzel believes that his Indus Para-Munda has this Language X as its own substrate, or something like that. The ground-level reality is the existence of evidence for what is called a Language X either in the Gangetic plains or the entire Indo-Gangetic plain combined. Now I am a nothing when it comes to Language X too because I don’t have access to Colin Masica’s original writings on the matter. I don’t know if there is any further research on the subject but my naive view suggests that Sanskrit has also to be researched through the lens of the crumbs of Language X known to linguists (as far as I can search on Google, it appears that Hindi is the language that majorly helped identify this Language X and maybe other languages are not searched very well to find Language X substrate features in them still).
Oh Lord! Thank you very much for pointing me to that source about Indo-Aryan grammar Karan! They have pointed out there that the New Indo-Aryan suffixes have their origins with some entities made from the Sanskrit kR- root. I stupidly used to entertain the view that they were possibly of Dravidian origin. I have got some slow work to do for the coming weeks to see how plausible the native Old-Indo-Aryan-origin hypotheses for the New Indo-Aryan suffixes are (they are probably very much; oh dear! This might even be the standard view in Indo-Aryan linguistics for all I know).
This is what results when an amateurish imbecile with no exhaustive exposure to all of the prior literature in the subject anyway proceeds to make commentary on forums, and with that pernicious and misleading veneer of confidence and cockiness. Oh dear! Oh Lord!
I went quickly through the article. Maybe, there are some correct linguistic niches but there are so many incorrect things and stupidities.
Frequently use of Indo-European without explanation, we don’t know what is the meaning of this.
Old Indo-Aryan and New Indo-Aryan? Who speak these languages? Where are they?
Old Lithuanian, Proto –Lithuanian? How old? 16c AC? What is Proto-L?
Homeric Greek? Classical Greek? What is the difference, how this happened? Was Homer a Greek?
List of Balkan languages without mentioning Serbian?
Bulgarian Language?
What is the significance? -Bulgars are Asiatic tribe which came in 590AC to Besarabia. They got permission to settle in Walachia. In 677 led by karan Asparuh crossed the Danube and came to today’s Bulgaria. Indigenous Serbs lived there. There were tensions until the 9th century when Bulgars also converted to Christianity. Original Bulgars language was not spoken at that time. Serbian language was spoken without much differences until the 18th c. Bulgarians are 60-70% ethnically Serbs.
Albanian language?
What is the significance? Albanians first time stepped on the soil of today’s Albania (it was Serbia) in 1042, got permission to stay and do shepherding on one Serbian mountain, did this for 400 years without contacts with civilisation until Turks came to Balkan.
Rumanian language?
‘East Roman’ project by Catholic Church (1856 AC), executed by French to make an artificial Latin-like language to change the mind of Romanians in order to make them a buffer, separate Russians from other Slovenes and to prepare ground for future invasions of Russia (160 thousand of Romanian soldiers died under Stalingrad). Until 19th c.AC, Romanians spoke a dialect of Serbian and belonged to the Serbian church.
I said yesterday in an episode of exaggerative excitement:
“This is what results when an amateurish imbecile with no exhaustive exposure to all of the prior literature in the subject…”
The sentiment that a person has to be exposed to all existing literature in a subject to make useful and respectable amateur commentary is not helpful and needlessly discouraging. Rather, it can be said that the most important thing here is to have strong knowledge and training related to standard primary-level or first-year-undergraduate-level textbook concepts of the subject one is interested in. From the garvabhaMgaM that I had yesterday, it can be seen how important this is even in the case of a relatively easy subject like historical linguistics. For this subject, the fundamentals which every amateur should know before proceeding to make any sort of claim to possession of accurate knowledge and skills include robust understanding about regular sound correspondence, analogy, following due process when attempting to establishing cognacy and eliminating possibilities of chance resemblances, etc. A next level which is also a must would be to know basic sketches of the grammars and theories about the historical developments of the languages/families one is interested in. None of these I am strong in and I should take an online course or something in this subject. I plan to do so at some point of time in the future.
Santosh
5 years ago
And lol, please don’t mind these kinds of silly etymological discussions on Brown Pundits occasionally. I understand that BP is for bigger things so I will only comment on these kinds of stuff occasionally haha. I also typically comment only when I am bored and typically forbid myself from commenting when it’s majorly due to interest, so please also don’t take my posts seriously at all (not that you are taking them seriously now lol). But I still don’t troll lol. Am not that intelligent haha. I also find the discussions going on in this site way way beyond my intellectual capabilities and the people so extraordinarily sharp, and though I tend to get depressed because of all this, I linger on because I think I require some strong dosage of brilliance every day for some days in the present and coming future. So please don’t cringe very hard when I write some stupid comment dealing with some silly topic in the middle of some great discourses in important topics lol.
As can be seen from the fiasco that took place above, I have no genuine intellectual originality of any kind lol. This has been my observation since my 11th class. I typically tend to function almost entirely based on certain set patterns established by high-IQ giants and all I do is mostly search for, record and regurgitate views of such people. It should be fairly easy for a high-IQ person to think of ways to actively disprove any pet theories of Dravidian-origins for New Indo-Aryan suffixes that the Devil may inject in his/her mind. Such as like ideating to look at data from the Apabhramsha languages. But nope! Never me lol! There is never an insight in my life typically, it’s always a realisation lol! (My father is far more creative and insightful and I envy him like crazy because of this lol! It is also extraordinarily disturbing to realise that you are dumber than your father hahahaha!)
Oh Lord! I did not make any suggestion there that I am a high-IQ person though I might have written so erroneously (I still have a lot of trouble understanding English tenses). What I meant is that ideating such plain things as necessary to solve problems is easy for high-IQ people and that since I am not a high-IQ person, I don’t also semi-automatically ideate important things. NOT that I am indeed a high-IQ person but still I don’t somehow imagine things because of some other unmentioned reason. Oh Lord! Perish the thought! Please forgive my writing errors and sorry for the miscommunication. I become such a messier mess when I become more excited than usual lol. (I also actually realise now through Brown Pundits that my thought is almost always coloured in the background by a certain passion and excitement and an eager intuition as opposed to a more relaxed, composed, measured, industriously slow, and well-disciplined conditioning. If not excitement, it tends to be dominated by outright sloth and psychological aversion and soon the entire mind switches off lol. This might also be why my speech tends to be very babbly and mumbly.)
Llistening to an insitome podcast, I heard you make a disclaimer that you don’t wish to be accused of being a Marcionite. Comedy gold.
Consumers of Hewlett-Packard got agitated!
Hindutva supporters on Twitter are furious about this Holi-themed Hindustan Unilever ad for Surf Excel which shows a Hindu girl helping her Muslim friend. They claim that it supports “love jihad”. Amazing how some people can find a message of hatred in an innocous ad for washing detergent.
https://scroll.in/video/916057/watch-why-are-some-hindutva-supporters-angry-about-this-holi-themed-advertisement-for-a-detergent
Imagine being so sexually frustrated you just start pretending that the reason girls aren’t fucking you is because they are being ensnared in some international Jihad conspiracy.
Savarkarites have become such perfect caricatures of Islamists they used to mock, feels like we are all living in a poorly scripted movie ?♂️ #BoycottSurfExcel
Its a cute ad, if a bit simplistic for my taste:
https://youtu.be/Zq7mN8oi8ds
Savarkarites have become such perfect caricatures of Islamists they claimed to despise, it is not funny any more ?♂️
When I saw the ad they were doing the #BoycottSurfExcel campaign against, seriously wondered for a moment if Congress SM had successfully executed a false flag attack to defame Modi followers. Apparently NOT.
Ad here:
https://youtu.be/Zq7mN8oi8ds
I don’t understand what about this ad is offensive.
Hindus need to stop behaving like Abrahamics and Post Modernist Structuralist Social Justice Warriors.
Well, your fellow travellers hate it. Perhaps you should confirm with them.
That’s the thing about every form of extremism – once you (a powerful majority) are made to believe you are under attack by outsiders, once you buy into that assertion without aggressively questioning the data- only a matter of time before you will fall for transparently ridiculous things such as this campaign.
Here is a convoluted, rambling justification by bottom-feeder Payal Rohtagi:
https://youtu.be/hNtZZNQIq_A
Slightly more sophisticated but equally dishonest and convoluted defense by Savrakarite intellectual (twitter thread):
Why do the Urdu people still insist on using the word Aurat, given its extremely offensive meaning?
Most Urdu speakers are unaware of the Arabic meaning of Aurat. They also can’t pronounce A’in in Aurat correctly. (For that matter they can’t pronounce qaaf, swad, zwad a host of other Arabic sounds correctly either). Most Arabic speakers will laugh at their pronunciation of these beautiful Arabic sounds. However, they still insist on stuffing their language with Arabic words.
Naipual once observed in a deep insightful manner that Arabs must be the most successful colonizer of the world. Long after their rule ended, the conquered people faithfully bow in the direction of Arabia five times a day, and hanker after all things Arabic. European colonizers should learn something from them.
“Arabs must be the most successful colonizer of the world”
Second only to the Aryans, I think .
Urdu is a different language from Arabic. Our pronunciation of certain sounds differs. It is not a question of “correctness”. We are speaking our own language, not Arabic.
This reminds me of the whole Ramadan vs. Ramzan controversy which pops up every year. The Urdu word is Ramzan but more and more people insist on being like the Arabs and saying Ramadan. In my opinion, this is a complete non-issue.
“This reminds me of the whole Ramadan vs. Ramzan controversy which pops up every year. The Urdu word is Ramzan but more and more people insist on being like the Arabs and saying Ramadan. In my opinion, this is a complete non-issue. ”
But it is to some, if not most. On questions of pronunciation (Ramzan/Ramadan) I tend to agree with you. Speakers of a language get to decide themselves what the `correct’ way to pronounce something is. But Aurat is a loan word, with a specific meaning in the language from which it was loaned. Although, it may not be an issue to you, it takes conscious and conspicuous effort to divorce it from its original meaning.
It’s like the whole shahid/ veergati (martyr/ departed warrior) debate that’s recently been raging. Martyrdom is an Abrahamic concept not applicable to the fallen soldiers of a secular republic (or a Dharmic people as some here might state otherwise). One might justify its use by saying that it’s now a Hindi word with it’s own internally referenced meaning, but I think we can agree that that’s a stretch.
Shahids are those who expect 77 virgins at heaven making grandpa Hajj very busy guy.
“Aurat” is simply the Urdu word for “woman”. I doubt many people know what it connotes in Arabic. I certainly don’t.
Santosh
Will keep the linguistic discussion on this thread.
I have looked at the DNA results of the South Central Dravidian (SCDr) tribal groups like the Gondi and the central Dravidian tribes. They are all enriched with AASI and have a much lower Iranian farmer component.
This strongly suggests that their predominant ancestry is not from the last IVC migration (post 1500 BC).
I suspect that the Gondi originally spoke CDr or another language, and then the more advanced Proto-Telugu/SCDr migrants imparted their language onto them post 1500 BC. This exchange probably also led to Telugu absorbing CDr features such as the numeral okaTi.
The loss of the root-initial voiceless palatal stop/affricate c in some etymons probably arose in Proto-South-Dravidian-Telugu (considering that the main speakers of these groups are closer in DNA and from the last IVC migration).
The tribal groups in South Dravidian areas also underwent language replacement following the post 1500 BC incursion.
Well, I also see that kind of an intriguing possibility myself Karan, but I don’t know the extent to which Central-Dravidian-substrate-in-South-Dravidian-II idea is plausible and attractive to Dravidian linguists. While an old-school belief is that Telugu-Kui is a subgroup of Central Dravidian, I personally believe that it is a branch of South Dravidian (the other subgroup within South Dravidian being South-Dravidian-I) (if not the above, then it could be a distinct group directly descending from Proto-Dravidian) as per the classification in the standard textbook by Bh Krishnamurti.
And apparently Gonds and other central Indian and Odisha tribes are very much like Austroasiatic speakers of the area genetically and Gond men even carry the relevant subclade of the O haplogroup in elevated percentages (I don’t know if I am right though; sorry if all this is wrong). The people of those areas may have been subjected to a series of language shifts.
But also, the relationship between South-Dravidian-I and the Telugu stream of language is quite curious. There are very sharp linguistic differences between the two but also some close commonalities here and there. Overall it seems people speaking South-Dravidian-II might have still maintained some kind of moderately strong connections with those speaking South-Dravidian-I in the beginning of their separation from the common Proto-South-Dravidian and Pre-Telugu people probably continued doing it in some ways after Proto-South-Dravidian-II split into Pre-Telugu and Pre-Gondi-Kui, as evidenced by the *c- –> *[null]- sound change that entered Pre-Telugu from South-Dravidian-I fairly recently (mid-late 1st millennium BC). I think the geographical contiguity of the Dravidian languages (and Indo-Aryan languages) makes it very easy for sound changes arisen in one language/branch to spread through diffusion to fairly distinct and distant neighbouring languages, probably beginning in some easy-to-recognise cognate words or something like that.
Yes the Gonds have a large East Asian (Munda) component.
Their history is either:
(1) AASI language —> Munda —> SCDr
Or
(2) AASI language —> Munda —> CDr —> SCDr
https://www.gnxp.com/WordPress/2018/09/21/the-munda-arrived-in-india-4000-years-ago-probably/
Tangential question: if the Munda are not native to Indian subcontinent but only arrived 3500-4000 years ago (not way before the Indo-Aryans did), should they be classified as Adivasi, as they currently are? What makes them indigenous people, as that term implies?
they have among the largest fractions of AASI.
but adivasi is just a political/cultural term. nothing to do with antiquity
“should they be classified as Adivasi”
🙂 Good point. I am pretty sure this will become a demand from some quarters very soon. Adivasi literally means ancient dweller – an aboriginal. Mundas may soon find themselves on the Hindu upper caste side, fencing off attacks to snatch their job reservations and their sons of the soil claims.
“but adivasi is just a political/cultural term. nothing to do with antiquity”
Can you elaborate Razib? The term Adivasi is extensively used in the narrative literature of ancient Arya texts, especially ancient Sanskrit texts and ancient Sanskriti influenced languages texts.
[Telegu, Kannada and Tamil spiritual texts are full of Sanskrit loan words. Many tens of thousands at least. Maybe much more. In this sense I strongly suspect that the term Adivasi has found its way into their literature too. For example the Tamilian Kamban Ramayana. Note that I only read this text in translation. So I don’t know for sure if the word “Adivasi” appears in the original Tamil text.]
Many of the most important religious/spiritual/social/cultural/civilizational leaders of the Arya people are Adivasis. Including saint Valmiki, author of the Valmiki Ramayana and one of the most important characters in the Ramayana story.
In fact I had never heard about “Munda” before reading your work. It took me a long time to associate “Munda” with “Adivasi”. Assume this is a reasonable association?
This might be similar to how fairly distinct dialects within Early Indo-European continued to interact with each other and influenced each other while on the steppe. For example, Balto-Slavic and Indo-Iranian share this satem sound change though it seems they don’t have a common ancestor private to only them and might have each directly descended from Proto-Indo-European (I’m very sorry again if this view is incorrect according to the most current standard thinking in Indo-European linguistics). It seems that it is enough to have a sufficient amount of geographical contiguity and also some amount of close cultural interaction for two distinct language groups to come to share even intimate sound changes through diffusion. (Lol all this might seem so extraordinarily sophomoric to actual linguists; I must pick up some kind of textbook on the theory of comparative linguistics some day.)
What is Balto-Slavic? When it was created? Does BS alphabet exist? Which language was spoken in Europe in 5000BC? What is Proto-Indo-European and what is its relationship with Indo-Germaniche? Pls tell us one PIE word. Txs.
Yes language evolution in these situations is rarely just a simple tree diagram. The split of Tamil and Malayalam is a case in point.
Malayalam retains many of the common grammatical changes that Old Tamil underwent in its evolution into Middle Tamil, suggesting that Malayalam is mainly derived from a medieval western dialect of Tamil.
However, Malayalam also retains many archaisms that are not present in the oldest forms of classical Tamil (which was probably based on an artificial ‘high’ literary dialect of the Pandyan dynasty.)
Diglossia between the spoken and written dialects of Old and Middle Tamil varied throughout Tamilakam.
“Chaliye Tamil ko vannakam”
If i may ask are you really a S-Indian named Karan? Never met anyone with that name south of Vindhyas, always felt it was sort of a common N-Indian/Punjabi name
Spot on about the development of Malayalam! Malayalam’s most conservative features like the Proto-South-Dravidian nature of the initial palatal nasal in the pronoun for ‘I’, [nj]An, etc. were never recorded in the oldest known Tamil which means that technically Malayalam is a descendant of Proto-Tamil-Malayalam and not the Old Tamil known, but then Pre-Malayalam people also maintained intimate contact with the High language of the east called Old Tamil throughout the Old Tamil period into the Middle Tamil period and thus Malayalam has same innovations as the eastern dialects of that period too.
Santosh when do you think proto-Tamil_Malayalam or Old Tamil or ancient proto Malayali first came into contact with Sanskrit?
When do you think Tirumular might have lived? Or phrased differently when do you believe Tirumantiram was first composed? [Not the current edition, but the first draft.]
Agastyar is generally considered to be a much more ancient Tamil linguist . . . but some moderns consider him semi mythical.
AnAn, I don’t know much about Tirumantiram but it may have been composed sometime after 6th century AD possibly. Proto-Tamil-Malayalam was in moderately strong contact with Sanskrit and its ancestors beginning from Proto-Dravidian to Proto-South-Dravidian down to Proto-Tamil-Malayalam-Irula-Toda-Kota-Kurumba-Kodagu had also been in contact with Sanskrit and/or Old Indo-Aryan and Middle Indo-Aryan.
Santosh, can I ask you for two dates then?
When did Tirumantiram stop being edited?
When was the first draft of Tirumantiram begun?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tirumantiram
Wikipedia claims that Tirumantiruam was composed 1000 BC. [Which does not mean it is right! All ancient dates are difficult to place!]
Not arguing with you. Everyone has a right to interpret the data as they choose. Trying to understand your best estimates.
I have a feeling we are entering a phase similar to the whole “1 term president obama” republican phase now for Indian election. Whoever going to win the next term the loser of the next election will not be emasculated enough ( Unlike 2009 ,2014)to accept defeat and this would create the whole “ block them at any cost”. The north vs south/east alienation would be complete. Not of the political parties but of people. The rise of the “ideological” camp, similar to republican/democrat camps in USA. Interesting times for India.
How contestation starts & increases –
I am not trying to defend the Hindutva trolls but want to show how subtly society notices things which later leads to contestations & confrontations. In 2016 a Pakistani ad went viral in India & i checked it out.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I5_XH1ikNsw {Here is Surf Excel’s 2016 ad}
I noticed the lack of any minority in the advertisement & replied –
‘Accha Video Hai par adhura hai, Kaash log dekh paate madad karna hi sacchi Insaniyat hai Ibadat nahi :(’
A person replied back – but in Islam any type of good deed is a type of “ibadat”….
Then i went into my typical mode of explaining –
Let me clarify here taking the above advertisement as an example –
Now change the religion of the person whose trolly got stuck & ask yourself if there would have been hesitation or not on part of other people {Other as they are divided by religion} ? & so in a way religion would have preceded over humanity even if it happens for a moment -_-
I know about Islamic theology too but I would rather talk about humanity than religions.
Now go & watch till Ramzan’s Surf Excel ads since, i have not yet seen minority representation in Pakistan’s Ramzan ad.
Secondly there are many other ways one can read the recent ad controversy like only majority must protect minority but minority does not have any burden of reconciliation.
“Now go & watch till Ramzan’s Surf Excel ads since, i have not yet seen minority representation in Pakistan’s Ramzan ad.”
Well to be fair, you need to have minority in the first place to “show” them in your ad, so…
Deep Bhatnagar,
Thanks for sharing the heart warming (Pakistani?) add. Loved it.
I would love to live in a alternate reality where Kabir and Anan are my parents. ??
Also do Bengalis of Bangladesh share the same disgust (to put it mildly) of Marwadis/Gujratis that Indian Bengalis have? Or is it just a Calcutta thing.
my parents aren’t hateful, but they have told me that gujus are very stingy and would sell their grandmother down the river for $. but they express this with a mix of envy AND contempt.
Saurav, Razib:
Why does the sentiment towards Marwadis exist? I don’t get it.
To a much lesser degree why does the sentiment towards Gujaratis exist? Don’t get that either.
“perhaps something in bengali literature?”
How old is it? Was it there in the 1800s too?
guju merchant groups are really into $. i mean i don’t know much about brownz, but i do know that.
I have long considered Marvadis and to a lesser degree Gujaratis to be India’s Jews.
Because they are criticized . . . I LOVE THEM. Gotta be doing something right 🙂
The Uganda genocide and ethnic cleansing 1972 was against Gujaratis. Gujaratis lost all their assets and wealth. Yet soon became rich again in Europe, other parts of Africa, America etc. Uganda went into a deep depression that Uganda still has not pulled out of.
Thomas Sowell often brings up this example and warns of the dangers of going after the successful and rich.
Yeah so it means its a Bengali thing 😛
Always wondered why. I mean i have Bengali freinds who are totally far right and far left but they share this one thing. Specially towards Marwadis.
perhaps something in bengali literature?
Saurav
It goes back to Jagat Seth.
Read up Saswati Sarkar’s compilation on Indic mercantile collaboration with Islamist and European invaders.
At the grassroots I think many Muslim peasantries of the Indian subcontinent (common among Bengali and Punjabi) have a Baniya hatred because they’re like “you are the reason why we’re katbullah” and their fellow non Muslim peasants also retain some of that sentiment because they literally see the loss of fellow caste folks as loss of power for their own tribe, so Baniya had no skin off their own back because their own Hinduism stayed protected while commoner got sold off…
Bengali bhadralok are not lower caste but are oriented from early age to be pro poor pro nationalistic pro populistic. So that anti Baniya sentiment percolates up, and also ties in with remnant Brahminical anti Baniya sentiment as well.
1940s to 1980s Bengalis hated business people (baniya). I still can’t understand why.
bharatoshontan, saurav:
Jagat Seth was a Marwari Jain (not Hindu in the religious sense) and from my relatively small Rajasthani Jain community.
Saswati Sarkar has some valid points but has descended into ethnic hatred now. Discount what she says (not her facts but her analysis)
I’m not saying it’s absolute truth, but it’s indeed a good compilation and very detailed at that.
It explains the Bengali resentment towards Baniya and Marwari ethos, which in itself is a subjective topic (resentment), not an objective one.
To this day Bhajpa is seen as the Marwari party in Bengal…
Her tweets etc have gone wacko lately, what with accusing Sangh and Swarajya magazine of anti Bengali bias etc using out of context statements. But her actual written work is decent.
Alexander del Val in his book “Bosnia, Kosovo, Chechnya – wars against Europe” dedicated to French readers says that ‘the entire Western policy, the US and EU policies have intention of a complete physical extermination of Serbs’. Exactly – the verb was used that Serbs must be destroyed. Del Val gives an answer as to why this is so. This is, as he writes, due to the fact that America has an incredibly great interest in the Islamic world for which they have to satisfy the appetites of the Muslims. Therefore, in the Balkans, there is remarkable evidence that they can do something for the benefit of the Muslims is Serbia, precisely because it is a small and powerless country. And at the expense of Serbia, the appetites of Muslims can be satisfied. And the result of satisfying Muslims is the disappearance of Serbia.
Below is link to part 1 of the series on Indic merchant collaboration with Islamists and Europeans. If interested in understanding origins of resentment among eastern Bharat ethnic groups (including the peasantry that became Muslim), this is a good source to pore over:
https://www.myind.net/Home/viewArticle/indic-mercantile-collaboration-abrahamic-invaders
Yeah man. Just was curious though. I mean Marwari / Jain are rich in many parts of India. Perhaps the only other folks who can compete there is Punjabis. So there is some sort of latent envy or like soft caricature of them. But this seemed different. It actually was similar to the whole gujju – marathi tensions during the whole maharstrian state formation, of which we still have latent tensions in Mumbai. Never felt that marwadis are that powerful in Calcutta in my visits. Anyway shouldn’t descend into hatred.
Another mission accomplished!
Americans forced to foil the tail: In secret negotiations with the Taliban agreed to leave Afghanistan. Occupied this country for 17 years and now they wrap the capitulation in diplomatic wrapping.
Washington has created a radical Islamist militarized Taliban movement and turned them against the Soviet Union. Later, they occupied Afghanistan and thus turned the Taliban against America, and in recent months they were forced to negotiate secretly with the Taliban and to give it up. The US Special envoy for Afghanistan, Zalmay Halilzad, has just announced that the negotiations – led in Doha – are crowned by the agreement that the Pentagon and US allies from NATO withdraw troops from Afghanistan! Of course, they will together continue the war against the terror and fight to eradicate the poverty in the world. Taliban currently control 60% of territory.
Milan there is no peace deal yet.
There is a major shooting war between the Afghan National Army and the Taliban (the military component of which is a proxy of the Pakistani Army)
Over 45,000 ANSF have died in combat in just 51 months. [only 72 soldiers from the entire rest of the world combined have died in combat during these 51 months.] The rest of the world isn’t that involved in the Afghan War.
The Afghans will fight the Taliban and what they see as Pakistani Army proxies regardless of any deal America makes . . . unless Afghans are party to it.
The Taliban controls areas where less than 10% of Afghans live. They control no major population centers.
A deal would involve the political leadership of Quetta Shura Taliban. If they flip to support the GIRoA and ANSF . . . it would be a larger version of Hekmatyur switching to support GIRoA and ANSF.
However, they have limited influence over the actual Taliban military formations–which are still heavily influenced or controlled by the Pakistani Army.
Will the Pakistani Army support a peace deal? Uncertain.
If they don’t all that happens is that the ANSF and most of QST civilian leadership ally with each other and jointly fight other Pakistani Army proxies and Daesh.
A peace deal while important does not mean peace in the short term.
However a peace deal would be very good news. Post peace deal the Taliban will likely want long term foreign aid and ANSF capacity building on the part of the international community. However several large Taliban militias would be formally incorporated into the ANSF. The Taliban will also want some of their Majors, Colonels and generals added to the ANSF as senior officers. They will likely demand that a few Taliban be added as generals in the ANSF.
From the Afghan perspective the worst deal will be if the US decides to back the Taliban and Pakistani Army against Afghanistan and the ANSF. And if the US cuts off all economic and military aid to Afghanistan and the ANSF.
Do you really think Trump would do this?
just posted new podcast with dr jeffrey long about hinduism on patreon page.
“Anish Kapoor: ‘If I was a young Muslim, would I feel angry enough to join Isis? I would at least think about it'”
https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2019/mar/13/anish-kapoor-interview-isis-shamima-begum-racism
Wow!
What does everyone think about Shamina Begum?
I think that since she was born an English national (assuming this is true) the UK has to take her back and try her for crimes against humanity, hate crimes and any other crimes she committed. It would be immoral for the UK to not take her back and let her harm any more foreigners. She has already done enough harm to the rest of the world.
Her child should probably be taken from her (unless she can demonstrate that she has truly reformed) and raised by the UK state. The UK owes her child that much.
There is no excuse for joining Daesh and helping them knowing they are organizing genocides against “lesser muslims”, “fake muslims” and nonmuslims.
Her one possibly redeeming grace is she joined Daesh in Syria when she was young (maybe only 15) and perhaps she deserves leniency for that.
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Anish Kapoor is odd. Daesh is an anti muslim organization that mass murders muslims. People sympathetic to Daesh and people who join Daesh are likely anti muslim. Why is Anish Kapoor so soft on Daesh? Why does he appear to be supporting Jihadi Islamist extremist muslims against moderate muslims?
The same questions should be asked of Jeremy Corbyn–who I suspect might be anti muslim.
“Airplanes are becoming far too complex to fly. Pilots are no longer needed, but rather computer scientists from MIT. I see it all the time in many products. Always seeking to go one unnecessary step further, when often old and simpler is far better. Split second decisions are….”
https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/1105468569800839169
Sometimes Trump talks sense. I agree that there is a proliferation of unnecessary technology all around us.
My personal pet peeve is all these health gadgets like Fitbit etc. To maintain a healthy body all one needs is the willpower to hit the gym regularly. The gadgets won’t make anyone healthy by themselves.
Anish Kapoor is indeed odd. As an artist he’s overrated, and I have a hard time taking his champagne socialism seriously. However, I do respect his standing up for Shamina Begum. It must be one of the quirkier aspects of having an unwritten constitution that a single minister has the the power to strip citizenship even if someone is not a dual national. It seems a rather punitive and ill advised decision on Sajid Javid’s part, and one that will likely be overturned in the courts.
FYI — Begum’s baby died a few days ago. It was completely innocent and Javid has blood on his hands.
I have a tough time mustering any sympathy for Begum, but I do believe in the sanctity of the institution of citizenship. The USA can denaturalize citizens if they acquired it through naturalization, but that doesn’t extend to `natural born’ citizens. I’m wondering if this has precedent in any other western country?
“FYI — Begum’s baby died a few days ago. It was completely innocent and Javid has blood on his hands.”
So sad. 🙁
May the baby know love and peace. In that special place. The great beyond. Not nothing but “no” “thing” of which we know not.
This is the worst mistake have observed Javid make. The baby was a UK national and should have been rescued by the British people.
+1008
Strongly agree with everything you wrote.
This is with reference to the Dravidian *yATavan[t]u, ‘sheep-[herder] guy’ and IA yAdava linkage suggested by Frank Southworth in the book “Linguistic Archaeology of South Asia”.
I personally fail to see how such a linkage is possible. There is no sound correspondence between the retroflex stop T in the Dravidian form and the dental stop in the Sanskrit form. The Dravidian yATu, ‘sheep’ is usually considered as borrowed into a very old form of Sanskrit (Vedic I think) according to the Turner’s Indo-Aryan etymological dictionary, as eDa and eDaka, both meaning ‘some kind of a sheep’. Now this one satisfies the sound laws quite well.
Edit: The Mayrhofer’s IA etymological dictionary says the etymology of IA yadu is “Unklar”, ‘unclear’ and goes on to list some Indo-European suggestions by other scholars but I cannot google-translate the German present there in time before my editing window is over.
Thanks Santosh. Isn’t it more likely that yAdava < yAdu (RV) < yADu (Dr)?
Also two of the major Dasa chiefs in RV have names like Kuyava and Sambara:
https://dsalsrv04.uchicago.edu/cgi-bin/app/burrow_query.py?qs=kuyam%20(kucam-&searchhws=yes
https://dsalsrv04.uchicago.edu/cgi-bin/app/burrow_query.py?qs=campā&searchhws=yes
Maybe one was a potter, the other a farmer.
Could be a coincidence.
No no I think they are not to be connected in any form at all. I have checked Monier-Williams Sanskrit dictionary just now and the word in question mentioned in the Rig Veda is yadu and not yAdu (there is apparently a word yAdu in Sanskrit also but one which means ‘water’ and that is even more irrelevant for us most probably).
With that short vowel in yadu also, it becomes very difficult to connect it with Dravidian yATu. To address the problem, Frank Southworth suggests that it was actually the word yAdava that was borrowed into IA first and the grammarians/intelligentsia later reverse-engineered a word in Sanskrit which would give rise to yAdava on performing vRddhi and boom, a mythical ancestor yadu was made up. This is a very clever idea if not for the lack of correspondence between the Dravidian [D] and Sanskrit d. Why did Sanskrit not borrow Dravidian [yADavan[d]u] as yADava (and create yaDu from that) and why did it erratically change the D it must have heard in Dravidian speech into d to borrow it as yAdava?
The answer, in my view, is that Sanskrit did not in fact borrow the yadu-related words from Dravidian, at least not the Dravidian yATu. Their etymologies remain unclear at the moment going by what Manfred Mayrhofer notes.
The other two are interesting but I will have to exhaustively vet to my satisfaction and arrive at some picture. Often, many of these things are highly debated and are theoretically unresolvable. For example, Asko Parpola suggests some kind of Iranic origins for Sambara and Michael Witzel suggests Para-Munda. Mayrhofer notes: “Nicht sicher erklärt”, ‘not sure’. I personally cannot evaluate Para-Munda hypothesis regarding this word because I don’t know anything much about Munda languages. I think it may have some kind of an origin somewhere in Indo-European only.
About the kuyava thing I will see later but one small thing is that the older form in Dravidian seems to be borne out of the root *kuc- and not *kuy- going by the Tamil and Tulu cognates which retain the -c- (pronounced [s]) in them. The changing of intervocalic c to y is a South-Dravidian-I (and Telugu in some cases) tendency majorly and likely does not go back to older Dravidian stages (unless it is considered that all these things are parallel sound changes in the north Indian Dravidian contemporary to Early Indo-Aryan).
“For example, Asko Parpola suggests some kind of Iranic origins for Sambara and Michael Witzel suggests Para-Munda.”
Both the above theories have been proven wrong now by genetics. The Dasa were clearly not the BMAC people. And Munda arrived from the east.
It would have been better if Witzel had said language X for the unknown non-Dravidian, non-Arya language.
What do you think about the dative suffix -ko, -ku in Indo-Aryan languages?
https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=6UxRle-M1QQC&pg=PA27&lpg=PA27&dq=ram+aur+mohan+ko&source=bl&ots=wkVnfign0_&sig=ACfU3U3Arfa2e1py0UWYQ3qhcwcB636IRA&hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwjXlLLTkIXhAhUfXhUIHck7BlgQ6AEwBXoECAQQAQ#v=onepage&q=ram%20aur%20mohan%20ko&f=false
It is pure Indo-Aryan, or could it be part of a common Indus Dravidian substrate?
It is not present in Brahui, but I suspect Brahui was out of the core Indus Dravidian region:
https://www.quora.com/Why-is-Brahui-a-Dravidian-language-spoken-in-Pakistan
Overall I believe the Para-Munda hypothesis may not be viable but Witzel’s etymology suggestions for individual words have to be very rigorously checked to see how they do. This is what I have not done and was referring to. Regarding Asko Parpola’s suggestions, I am not aware if his linguistic suggestions lose some amount of worth if his bigger ideas from archaeology plus comparative culture studies, etc. fall apart. For all I know, it may be like what you suggested. But a lot of the times I am personally majorly concerned about the ground-level stuff such as checking sound correspondences, making note of some kind of estimate about the tortuousness, so to speak, involved in typically deriving some of these words in the borrowing languages from the suggested donor languages, etc. etc.
And Michael Witzel does refer to Language X in his writings. Language X is a non-Dravidian, non-Munda, non-Tibeto-Burman substrate identified by Colin Masica that contributed some agricultural vocabulary to Hindi and Witzel believes that his Indus Para-Munda has this Language X as its own substrate, or something like that. The ground-level reality is the existence of evidence for what is called a Language X either in the Gangetic plains or the entire Indo-Gangetic plain combined. Now I am a nothing when it comes to Language X too because I don’t have access to Colin Masica’s original writings on the matter. I don’t know if there is any further research on the subject but my naive view suggests that Sanskrit has also to be researched through the lens of the crumbs of Language X known to linguists (as far as I can search on Google, it appears that Hindi is the language that majorly helped identify this Language X and maybe other languages are not searched very well to find Language X substrate features in them still).
Oh Lord! Thank you very much for pointing me to that source about Indo-Aryan grammar Karan! They have pointed out there that the New Indo-Aryan suffixes have their origins with some entities made from the Sanskrit kR- root. I stupidly used to entertain the view that they were possibly of Dravidian origin. I have got some slow work to do for the coming weeks to see how plausible the native Old-Indo-Aryan-origin hypotheses for the New Indo-Aryan suffixes are (they are probably very much; oh dear! This might even be the standard view in Indo-Aryan linguistics for all I know).
This is what results when an amateurish imbecile with no exhaustive exposure to all of the prior literature in the subject anyway proceeds to make commentary on forums, and with that pernicious and misleading veneer of confidence and cockiness. Oh dear! Oh Lord!
Thank you very much again Karan!
I went quickly through the article. Maybe, there are some correct linguistic niches but there are so many incorrect things and stupidities.
Frequently use of Indo-European without explanation, we don’t know what is the meaning of this.
Old Indo-Aryan and New Indo-Aryan? Who speak these languages? Where are they?
Old Lithuanian, Proto –Lithuanian? How old? 16c AC? What is Proto-L?
Homeric Greek? Classical Greek? What is the difference, how this happened? Was Homer a Greek?
List of Balkan languages without mentioning Serbian?
Bulgarian Language?
What is the significance? -Bulgars are Asiatic tribe which came in 590AC to Besarabia. They got permission to settle in Walachia. In 677 led by karan Asparuh crossed the Danube and came to today’s Bulgaria. Indigenous Serbs lived there. There were tensions until the 9th century when Bulgars also converted to Christianity. Original Bulgars language was not spoken at that time. Serbian language was spoken without much differences until the 18th c. Bulgarians are 60-70% ethnically Serbs.
Albanian language?
What is the significance? Albanians first time stepped on the soil of today’s Albania (it was Serbia) in 1042, got permission to stay and do shepherding on one Serbian mountain, did this for 400 years without contacts with civilisation until Turks came to Balkan.
Rumanian language?
‘East Roman’ project by Catholic Church (1856 AC), executed by French to make an artificial Latin-like language to change the mind of Romanians in order to make them a buffer, separate Russians from other Slovenes and to prepare ground for future invasions of Russia (160 thousand of Romanian soldiers died under Stalingrad). Until 19th c.AC, Romanians spoke a dialect of Serbian and belonged to the Serbian church.
I said yesterday in an episode of exaggerative excitement:
“This is what results when an amateurish imbecile with no exhaustive exposure to all of the prior literature in the subject…”
The sentiment that a person has to be exposed to all existing literature in a subject to make useful and respectable amateur commentary is not helpful and needlessly discouraging. Rather, it can be said that the most important thing here is to have strong knowledge and training related to standard primary-level or first-year-undergraduate-level textbook concepts of the subject one is interested in. From the garvabhaMgaM that I had yesterday, it can be seen how important this is even in the case of a relatively easy subject like historical linguistics. For this subject, the fundamentals which every amateur should know before proceeding to make any sort of claim to possession of accurate knowledge and skills include robust understanding about regular sound correspondence, analogy, following due process when attempting to establishing cognacy and eliminating possibilities of chance resemblances, etc. A next level which is also a must would be to know basic sketches of the grammars and theories about the historical developments of the languages/families one is interested in. None of these I am strong in and I should take an online course or something in this subject. I plan to do so at some point of time in the future.
And lol, please don’t mind these kinds of silly etymological discussions on Brown Pundits occasionally. I understand that BP is for bigger things so I will only comment on these kinds of stuff occasionally haha. I also typically comment only when I am bored and typically forbid myself from commenting when it’s majorly due to interest, so please also don’t take my posts seriously at all (not that you are taking them seriously now lol). But I still don’t troll lol. Am not that intelligent haha. I also find the discussions going on in this site way way beyond my intellectual capabilities and the people so extraordinarily sharp, and though I tend to get depressed because of all this, I linger on because I think I require some strong dosage of brilliance every day for some days in the present and coming future. So please don’t cringe very hard when I write some stupid comment dealing with some silly topic in the middle of some great discourses in important topics lol.
u guys are nerdz
As can be seen from the fiasco that took place above, I have no genuine intellectual originality of any kind lol. This has been my observation since my 11th class. I typically tend to function almost entirely based on certain set patterns established by high-IQ giants and all I do is mostly search for, record and regurgitate views of such people. It should be fairly easy for a high-IQ person to think of ways to actively disprove any pet theories of Dravidian-origins for New Indo-Aryan suffixes that the Devil may inject in his/her mind. Such as like ideating to look at data from the Apabhramsha languages. But nope! Never me lol! There is never an insight in my life typically, it’s always a realisation lol! (My father is far more creative and insightful and I envy him like crazy because of this lol! It is also extraordinarily disturbing to realise that you are dumber than your father hahahaha!)
Oh Lord! I did not make any suggestion there that I am a high-IQ person though I might have written so erroneously (I still have a lot of trouble understanding English tenses). What I meant is that ideating such plain things as necessary to solve problems is easy for high-IQ people and that since I am not a high-IQ person, I don’t also semi-automatically ideate important things. NOT that I am indeed a high-IQ person but still I don’t somehow imagine things because of some other unmentioned reason. Oh Lord! Perish the thought! Please forgive my writing errors and sorry for the miscommunication. I become such a messier mess when I become more excited than usual lol. (I also actually realise now through Brown Pundits that my thought is almost always coloured in the background by a certain passion and excitement and an eager intuition as opposed to a more relaxed, composed, measured, industriously slow, and well-disciplined conditioning. If not excitement, it tends to be dominated by outright sloth and psychological aversion and soon the entire mind switches off lol. This might also be why my speech tends to be very babbly and mumbly.)