Thursday, August 23, 2012

Antiquity of Tamil

This rare Tamil inscription was found in China
It is reported in a recent issue of 'Mirror' published from London since 1903,  that Tamil is the oldest living language.C.Mayo of Rotherdam  asked the following query in the "Question Time " pages .

What is the world's oldest language still spoken today ?

Flora Pulman ,Ivy bridge ,Devon has answered  for the query like this .

"A recent archaelogical evidence suggests  that Tamil spoken in the Indian sub continent could have been the language used by the Indus civilisation and even the sumerians.Reference to rivers that dried up 10,000 years ago are seen in Tamil literature .In fact there is a possibility that Tamil was the root of Sanskrit,in turn the root of all Indo European languages."

There could be some substance in this because "Tamil is considerably independent from Sanskrit in its vocabulary, grammar and literary tradition",accoding to  A.R. Venkatachalapathy, literary historian. Encyclopedia freedictionary.com also mentions about the antiquity of classical languages .It mentions Latin and Tamil were in vogue from 1st century BCE .

Reference http://encyclopedia.thefreedictionary.com/classical+languages

14 comments:

  1. The question was answered by Fiona Parker in question time and not Flora Pulman .

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. The question was not answered by Fiona Parker, but by Flora Pulman from Ivy Bridge, Devon who is a reader of the newspaper.

      Link: http://ctya.org/blog/wp-content/uploads/Question-Time.jpg

      Delete
  2. This is really interesting…
    Rosesandgifts.com

    ReplyDelete
  3. மிக நன்று.ஆனால் தமிழில் இல்லையே,தமிழர்கள் எப்படி அறிவது?????????????

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. tamilin perumaigal matra moligalil irupathu thaan nallathu. appothuthaan matra mozhi, ina makkalum therindu kolla vasathiyagha irulkkum. ethanai naal thaan kundu chatiyil kuthirai ootuvathu

      Delete
  4. What are those rivers referenced?

    ReplyDelete
  5. I have reproduced what was mentioned in 'Question Time ' of the magazine 'Mirror'. If you ask me about the rivers under reference ,I may not be in a position to answer specifically.But I can give reference to a link which elaborated about such a possibility scientifically and also logically . published in 'Yahoo answers '. I have given a link to that . I request you to go through the reply given by 'AALUNGA RETURNS'. More importantly this has not been refuted so far by any one scientifically .

    http://in.answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20110422213500AAHZqRJ

    ReplyDelete
  6. Highly unlikely. The Om symbol, figurines in yoga poses, five swastikas in a row signifying the swasti mantra, clay dolls with vermilion in their parted hair, bangles all along the arm (still seen in the north and tribal folk) show that they are all artifacts of Vedic civilization and there is nothing Dravidian in it. Also Dravida is a Sanskrit word and Sanskrit is a combined language of all languages developed in India during its development from 40000BP to present. Civilization started in India after the ice age caused by the super volcano Toba which exploded in 73000BP and wiped out all living non speaking humans followed by the nuclear winter of about 15000 year duration. Civilization is supposed to have started with less than 1000 people for all of India, living on the coast lines who lived initially on fish. India had an enormous time to develop all Gauda and Dravida languages as well as Indo-European which developed as agriculture spread to Europe from India.

    ReplyDelete

  7. I give below excerpts from the comparative study between Vedic civilisation and Indus civilisation .

    "Till 20th century historians believed the Vedic society was the earliest civilisation of India. However the study done by 2 archaeologists Dayaram Sahani and Raakhladas Bannerji proved that Moahnjo-Dara and Harappa though 1400 kms were part of one civilisation called Indus and was older than Vedic .After the decline of the Indus civilisation a new civilisation grew which was dominated by the Aryans and came to be known as Vedic civilisation."

    Parted hair , glass bangles ,metal bangles and precious stone bangles were worn by Indus valley women also.

    The word Dravida means different things to different people . In Sanskrit the word Dravida meant people living south of Vindhyas. Just becasue the word had a sanskrit origin it does not mean the vedic civilisation pre dates Indus civilisation .This word was a later addition, like many new words that are coined even today. For a Bengali Athropologist 30 % of Bengalis are Dravidans .For him Dravidans are a race. For Caldwel Dravidan meant a group of South Indian languages. The generally accepted view is that Dravida refers to the region south of Vindhyas. If we consider it as a race there are Dravidan people spread across India speaking different languages. The same problem is there with the word Aryans . It means different things to different people. For some people it refers to the people of Indo-Iranian origin .For some others it refers to the people of the vedic period.For some others it refers to religious, cultural and linguistic groups.

    The Toba catastrophe is believed to have thappened 70,000 years ago. There was a genographic project conducted by gentecist and Anthropologist Spencer wells called The journey of Man - A genetic Odyseey in early 2002.

    The recent single origin theory states human ancestors originated in Africa and migrated to various parts of the world. He used ananlysis of Y chromosomes to trace the history of early humans. It is believed all human beings in the world have descended from one single man who lived in Africa 70,000 years ago. As humans migrated out of Africa they all carried a genetic feature of a Y chromosome known as M 168.They migrated to Arabian Peninsula, the Middle East, the Indian subcontinent and into South East Asia and finally to Australia. This branch of human family developed a new marker M130 (Haplogroup C (Y-DNA)) through mutation.

    The first group of migrators settled in south east Asia such as the aboriginal population of the Andaman Islands (around 400 km off the west coast of Thailand), the Semang of Malaysia, and the Aeta of the Philippines.

    The second group of migrators settled in what is now called Syria to sweep to interior Asia, where it split several more times in Central Asia, north of Afghanistan. They carried a marker called M9 (Haplogroup K (Y-DNA)) Scientist were taking samples of people to find the M130 marker all over the world. Surprisingly in 2008 in a sleepy village near Mdurai called Jothimanickam ,an inhabitant called Veirumandi thevar had the M130 DNA gene.Now he is identified as the first ever descendant of the earliest settlers of India. Incidentally he is a Tamil. "M130 is actually present sporadically among the population along the Western Ghats and around Madurai," says Dr Pitchappan, who heads the School of Biological Sciences at Madurai Kamaraj University.This goes to prove the earliest human in
    India was a Tamil -Dravidan

    ReplyDelete
  8. Tamil is more than 2,200 years old and used in Malaysia, Singapore, Sri Lanka and India. It is an official language in Singapore and Sri Lanka. About 68.7 million users are located in India, with 60.7 million speaking it as their first language. In total, it is spoken in 7 countries. Tamil holds the distinction of being the only classical language that survived from antiquity to modern age.

    It is this fact of contemporary utility that makes Tamil the longest surviving language in the world

    It belongs to the Dravidian language family, which consists of other languages that are native to eastern and southern India. Tamil is an official language of Tamil Nadu. Some inscriptions in Tamil were discovered by researchers that were from the 3rd century BCE. The language was used continuously since that time. It continues to develop and is the 20th world language with the highest number of first language speakers.

    ReplyDelete