Sanskrit may be explained for some of their occurrences as being the reflexes of Indo-European consonant clusters of certain types. The fact, however, that the later in Indo-Aryan linguistic history we go, the greater is the incidence of retroflex consonants, and the further fact that most of the Dravidian languages and Proto-Dravidian itself have this type of consonant in abundance (the case is not so clear for Munda, but is in all probability similar), can only lead to the conclusion that the later Indo-Aryan developments are due to a borrowing of indigenous speech habits through bilingualism, and to the well-grounded suspicion that even the early development of retroflexes from certain Indo-European consonant clusters results from the same historic cause.1 The same argument applies also to the development of absolutives (otherwise called gerunds) in Sanskrit; this non-finite verb form and its syntactic use are so closely parallel to a feature of Dravidian and so unlike what is found in the other old Indo-European languages that we must certainly posit Dravidian influence here.2 Prima facie, it should have been easy to examine the Sanskrit dictionary for possible borrowings from Dravidian. There were, however, several blocking factors. First and perhaps most important was the assumption, usually but not always only implicitly made and seldom argued or supported by evidence, that the Sanskrit-speaking invaders of Northwest India were people of a high, or better, a virile, culture, who found in India only culturally feeble barbarians, and that consequently the borrowings that patently took place from Sanskrit and later Indo-Aryan languages into Dravidian were necessarily the only borrowings that could have occurred. Indian civilization itself, with its enthronement of Sanskrit at the expense of other languages, taught Western scholars to think this way about Sanskrit. Moreover, the early days of Indo-European scholarship were with out benefit of the spectacular archaeological discoveries that were later to be made in the Mediterranean area, Mesopotamia, and the Indus Valley. It was but natural to operate with the hidden, but anachronistic, assumption that the earliest speakers of Indo-European languages were like the classical Greeks or Romans-prosperous, ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ 1 This doctrine is held by, e.g., Bloch, Jules, Sanskrit et dravidien, Bull. Soc. Ling. Paris 25: 1-21, esp. 4-6, 1925; Some problems of Indo-Aryan philology, Bull. School Orient. Stud. 5: 731-733, 1930; L'Indoarryen du Veda aux temps modernes, 53 ff., 325, Paris, 1934; Katre, S. M., Some problems of historical linguistics in Indo-Aryan, 135 ff., Bombay, 1944; Prokosch, E., A comparative Germanic grammar, 39 Philadelphia, 1939; Wackernagel, Jakob, Altindische Grammatik 1: 165 § 144 (a) Anm., GÖttingen, 1896, with earlier bibliography, Gundert in 1889, Ztschr. deutsch. morgenländischen Ges. 23: 517 ff., having apparently the earliest suggestion. 2 Cf. Bloch, Bull. School Orient. Stud. 5: 733-735, 1930. |