| 421.4.4: THE IRANIAN LANGUAGES |
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| Two languages
belonging to the Iranian branch of the IE family are spoken
in Pakistan - Afghan and Baluchi. Afghan (Pakhto, Pashto
or Pushtu) is spoken outside of Afghanistan by the Afghans
(Pathans) who live in the North West frontier province
of Pakistan where it was, in 1961, the language of 6.8
million people. The numerous dialects fall into two branches
- the Western and the Eastern (or, Peshawari). It is the
latter which is represented on Pakistani territory. |
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| Baluchi
is spoken by the Baluchis who live mainly in the province
of Baluchistan in Pakistan. In 1961 the number of Baluchi
speakers on Pakistani territory was about 1 million people.
The groups of Baluchi dialects separated by the Dravidian
languages Brahui are distinguished. The Western (in the
South-West of Baluchistan) and the Eastern (in the North
East of the province and in the neighbouring regions of
the Punjab). Baluchi has no written literature but is
rich in folklore especially the heroic epic. |
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| QUESTIONS |
|
- Write a short essay on Dardic languages.
- What are Iranian languages? State their geographical
distribution.
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| 421.4.5: DRAVIDIAN LANGUAGES |
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| The Dravidian
languages are a purely Indian phenomenon spoken by about
107,410,820 speakers, and occupy second place in the country
next to the Indo Aryan. Apart from Srilanka and Pakistan,
beyond the confines of India no Dravidian tongue occurs
as the language of an indigenous population. Dravidian
speakers belong to one of the oldest ethonological groups
in India. It is clear that they lived here before the
arrival of the Aryans. At present the main area of Dravidian
speech in Southern India but there is good reason to believe
that formerly they occupied large areas of Central and
possibly also of Northern India. Evidence pointing to
this is provided by the small islands of Dravidian speech
now isolated among NIA in the forests and mountains of
Madhya Pradesh, Orissa and Bihar, while Brahui is found
as far away as Baluchistan. New evidence suggesting an
original Dravidian presence in North-West India has been
provided in the last two decades by the attempts at deciphering
the Proto-Indian texts discovered in Mohenjodaro, Harappa
and other places in the north-west and west of the sub-continent.
Investigations show that the language of these thexts
is structurally more like Dravidian than anuthing else.
It seems most likely that the mass of Dravidian speakers
were pushed Southwards by the waves of Aryan invaders,
leaving only small groups behind in the most inaccessible
regions. |
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| There is
no agreement on the question whether Dravidian represents
the language of India's aboriginal inhabitants or whether
the family was brought into the sub-continent from outside.
The probability seems to be that like Indo-Aryan, the
Dravidian languages were indeed brought into India from
the north - west and that they displaced older linguistic
strata as they spread southwards. The argument for a Hither
Asia passage of the Dravidians towards India is reinforced
by the linguistic parallels which have been identified
between Dravidian and Elamite. |
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| No such
wealth and variety of material is available to study the
history of Dravidian languages as are found in Into-Aryan.
It is only in the post war period that the oldest written
documents in Tamil which can dated back to 2nd century
A.D., ancient writings in other Dravidian languages have
been systematically studied. The non literary languages
of central and northern India which have retained many
archaic traits which are lost by their Southern sister
languages offer useful evidence for the purpose of historical
reconstruction. Systematic field investigations were also
made in the middle of 19th century for quite a lot of
literary and non-literary Dravidian languages. |
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| 421.4.5.1: CHARACTERISTIC FEATURES OF
DRAVIDIAN LANGUAGES |
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| The short
and long vowels of the same quality are distinguished.
Aspirates are not native to Dravidian. They are introduced
into Dravidian through borrowings from Sanskrit. Dravidian
sounds are the cerebral (retroflex) fricative 'l' and
alveolar rolled 'r' (more obstruent than r). Retroflex
fricative 'l' is retained in Tamil and Malayalam whereas
in other languages it has been lost. nÖ occurs in the
initial position only in a few words and that too only
in Tamil, Malayalam, Kodugu and Tulu. n and n contrast
in spoken Malayalam in doubling. The South Dravidian languages
end in a vowel. Syllabic stress is weak and normally falls
on the first syllable. |
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| Dravidian
languages are of agglutinative type. Nominal parts of
speech are primarily divided into nouns and adjectives.
The latter, which include, beside the small number of
adjectives proper, participles, nouns in the attributive
form and pronominal adjectives, are indeclinable. The
characteristic ordering of substantives (including pronominal
substantives) is into the following two classes. 1. Human
(rational) i.e. the names of persons (including deities)
and 2. Non-human (irrational) comprising all remaining
nouns (often conventionally called the neuter gender).
In the human class, the languages of the Southern group
differentiate between masculine and feminine genders but
in Telugu and in the languages of the central group, the
feminine gender is virtually absent coinciding in the
singular with the neuter and in the plural with the masculine.
In Brahui, there is no grammatical gender, nor are nouns
divided into rational and irrational. Plural forms are
made agglutinatively by affix. The noun stems undergo
a change while forming the plurals. In Brahui, the plural
affix is - ak, -k, which is not obligatory. Some noun
stems undergo a change before taking postpositions indicating
case. Thus they have two forms: 1. Nominative, 2. Oblique.
The 1st person plural pronouns have normally two forms,
inclusive (i.e. including the addressee) and exclusive
(i.e. excluding the addressee). The 3rd person pronouns
and the demonstratives have masculine, feminine and neuter
forms which correspond to regular nominal forms. There
are no relative pronouns. Proximate vs. non-proximate
differences are found in third person and the demonstratives. |
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| A special
feature of the Dravidian verb is the separate negative
conjugation. It usually has one tense and is formed by
adding the present terminations to a negative base. In
Dravidian the tense distinction was originally between
past and non-past. The non-past suffixes in the individual
languages were later specialized for present and future
meanings. The present tense was originally a periphrastic
construction in a good number of languages. Although both
the dental and the labial non-past suffixes were there
in Proto-Dravidian, the labial suffix became more common
in South Dravidian and probably also in North Dravidian
while the dental became more common in central Dravidian.
The word order in Dravidian languages is of SOV type.
The attribute precedes the word qualified. Verb participles
are used to form relative participle construction. |
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