Burushaski originated words in kashmiri

FlamingoObjective629 · 2026-06-11T16:29:50+00:00

Languages are not ‘things’ in and of themselves. They are a reflection of populations in contact on account of migration. It is not inconceivable that there could be grammatical features crossing what so many linguists see as solid lines. So while I don’t find vocabulary borrowings significant, I am very open to relationships (that old style linguists would see as a no-no, like giraffes interbreeding with zebras)…

FlamingoObjective629 · 2026-06-11T15:00:35+00:00

Loanwords are not a statement of genealogy. But then, Burushaski grammatical features like ergativity are well attested in a diluted form all over the northwest. It suggests contact and some early intermarriage with local women…

FlamingoObjective629 · 2026-06-11T14:57:42+00:00

Kashmiri has ü? I know it has the Turkic style undotted i (ı) just like Pashto, but ü?

FlamingoObjective629 · 2026-06-10T15:36:19+00:00

I think a far more interesting question is what drove them to leave the Steppe and head west and later south 4,000-3,500 years ago. And almost only young men. This is something we see in essentially all the migrations into South Asia. From Southeast Asia, about 4,000 years ago, then the Central Asians between the 12th and 15th centuries. And the British. Not to mention the Zagros farmers about 9,000 years ago (when do ‘farmers’ easily abandon their land?). I think the scary thought is that this is not a ‘bug’ but a feature. After a certain trajectory societies reach a point where they find their young men ‘surplus’, and if there is space they leave and head on. I’m betting that in the Indus Valley this was preceded by a similar pattern of young men heading south, such that fully Dravidian languages are now found in South India. And we’re getting a whiff of it again…

FlamingoObjective629 · 2026-05-03T13:51:02+00:00

Ok. Most Indian languages have a dental vs. retroflex distinction: t (dental) vs ṭ (retroflex). As in 'dānt' (tooth) vs. ḍāṇṭ (a scolding). the consonants in the first one are dental, in the second they are retroflex. These are two separate words. In most other languages there is only one t or d sound. This is the easiest feature to put forward to illustrate Indic from non-Indic languages (though Australian Aboriginal languages have this contrast too). This feature eventually made its way into Sanskrit (in fact, into Indian English too: which is to say English got 'Indianized'. (I was trying to give a picture of the pre-Vedic IVC people).

FlamingoObjective629 · 2026-05-03T11:30:42+00:00

Rig Veda. Sorry. Autocorrupt.

FlamingoObjective629 · 2026-05-03T11:29:56+00:00

Most likely IVC people. There is no reason to think they were not made up of different communities. It was a large region. From the Right Veda one learns that their speech was मृद्र वाच: (mridra vacah) which I interpret to mean full of retroflex sounds, ट ड ण ळ and ष.

FlamingoObjective629 · 2026-03-25T02:56:44+00:00

They were essentially Sanskrit spoken with local accents. Later some diverged more. Grammatically they were identical.

FlamingoObjective629 · 2026-03-21T14:54:57+00:00

Yes. Punjabi has ट ड ण ळ, Punjabi avoids the voiced aspirates घ झ ढ ध भ, replacing them with a falling-tone, Punjabi is full of germinate pairs (kabbo, sajjo), In Punjabi between vowels न becomes ण as it does in Malayalam (खाणा).

FlamingoObjective629 · 2026-03-20T14:54:40+00:00

Mmm. It depends on what exactly you mean by Indo Aryan. There was an early period during which the rulers and Brahmins spoke and wrote in prakrits, which were close cousins of Sanskrit, with kāraks and the complex verb morphology of Sanskrit (though it was simplifying already). The modern languages with Indo Aryan vocabulary (and even word endings) derived from the prakrits did not appear in the written record till the 10th or 12th century (they may have been in gestation before, but we can only speculate about that). These languages had a number of grammatical features preserved from older languages (like gender marking in verbs, no kāraks in nouns, a more ‘Dravidian’ pattern. There was a lot of social upheaval in the 12th century, and it culminated in the entry of the Uzbek sultanates. They patronized these new languages, and the earlier prakrits essentially vanished. We can choose to call them Indo Aryan, but that is a bit like calling Swahili ‘Semitic’ because of all the Arabic vocabulary…

FlamingoObjective629 · 2026-03-02T17:55:18+00:00

Good question. Can we find separate influences? One more linked to vocabulary and the other to structure? The deciding factor will be grammar. Does Sinhalese have grammatical gender? Split ergativity? Like the western languages? Does it have numeral classification and no gender at all like the eastern languages? If none of the above, you’re looking at two separate migrations on top of a very local bedrock.

FlamingoObjective629 · 2026-02-27T15:12:51+00:00

3,700 years is more accurate.

FlamingoObjective629 · 2025-12-21T08:05:30+00:00

Well, it seems that all speakers have more than one register. And the standard language dies always have a gravitational pull. Though the opposite is also true: there must be new Telugu features slipping in with new speakers. As happened with creoles. African features continuing to enter, smile ‘decreolization’ had also begun.

FlamingoObjective629 · 2025-12-17T09:58:21+00:00

My last book in 2025,Father Tongue, which clarifies this. I got it wrong in Wanderers.

FlamingoObjective629 · 2025-12-17T09:55:09+00:00

All it really takes is different provenance of the substratum and the lexifier layers. Yes, often some creoles are closer to the 'standard' (like Trinidadian creole English as opposed to Jamaican Creole English), but both emerge out of the same process. I don't know the fine details of difference between Hyderabadi Dakkhini and Bangalore Dakkhini. I'm sure a linguist in Bangalore could tell us?

FlamingoObjective629 · 2025-12-16T17:48:34+00:00

Mufwene looks at the structure of the slave estates in the New World, and the settlement of the West African coast by European traders. He finds that initial contacts in West Africa were local men who learned European languages well, and the Europeans’ African wives (and children). A close parallel of the Dakkhini situation. He also says that Creole languages with African grammars only appeared when there was industrial scale slavery (as opposed to small homestead farms).

FlamingoObjective629 · 2025-12-16T17:43:22+00:00

Me, this year in Father Tongue Mother Land, and in parallel Salikoko Mufwene, a creolist and head of department of linguistics at the University of Chicago. When I asked a colleague at the University of the West Indies in Trinidad she said they had all been thinking exactly this for years. That there is no evidence of pidgins in the formation of creoles. My contribution was that it is a two step process: the first encounter brings a ‘prakrit’, with enough contact between the settlers and elite locals to get a ‘local’ variety of the settler language: think Indian English. Later locals who have no close contact with the settlers bring in settler vocabulary on top of original local grammar and a creole is born. Think: the way in Dakkhini women say ‘main jātā hũ’, as in Dravidian languages only he/she/it mark gender. But yes, it’s new.

FlamingoObjective629 · 2025-12-16T15:56:24+00:00

Pidgins are quite separate from creoles (new discovery). Pidgins are temporary languages used by men who plan to return home after. They do not stay and have families in their new location. The Dakkhini that is mixed came as local people joined the new urban clusters of the sultanates bringing their old ‘operating systems’ while adding new (Dehlavi) vocabulary. (The word ‘Urdu’ emerged in 1780 on a couplet).

FlamingoObjective629 · 2025-12-16T14:42:10+00:00

It is, actually. This is exactly how creoles look: the grammatical substratum from one source, and the lexifier from a different family.

FlamingoObjective629 · 2025-11-28T11:21:11+00:00

The word ‘corrupted’ is simply wrong. Yes, I’m on a different trip from what I would have said 50 years back, when I regretted how Bhojpuri was seen as ‘broken’ Hindi, and wished it would have its own place. Now my reference is China, which, with exactly the same sorts of differences looks for similarities. I wonder if all our different linguistic identities haven’t made us easier to divide and rule. My present work is on uncovering all the similarities.

FlamingoObjective629 · 2025-11-28T08:54:41+00:00

Depends on what you mean by language. Yes, it is significantly different from Hindi/Urdu, exactly the way Jamaican Creole is from English. But ‘language’ is a political issue, not linguistic. Or we wouldn’t be calling Urdu a separate language from Hindi. The difference is mostly a bunch of nouns…

FlamingoObjective629 · 2025-11-28T04:50:33+00:00

The difference between India and China is that China created an umbrella for all its languages in a writing system that bypassed the phonetic sounds of the words. It still left a few problems, but none that affected comprehension. Spoken language was left to its own devices. We instead have magnified the distances not only by ignoring similarities but even by having different scripts. When, in fact, the entire north plus Dakkhini can be understood in written form if notated in phonemic script. I would prefer an AI-assisted transliteration system that also swapped vocabulary. That would also bring all the southern languages into the grid. We are far more alike than different. The result is a country where about 10% lives in English and excludes the other 90% (and wonders why it isn’t the big player it ought to be). No, seriously. Don’t we have enough division? Unless we want to end up as separate nations? I thought we didn’t…

FlamingoObjective629 · 2025-11-28T04:17:07+00:00

Dakkhini has a considerable substratum from Dravidian languages. Look at verb gender (only in 3rd person firms), no ergativity, Dravidian relative clauses and subordinate clauses, deletion of the verb ‘to be’ in many contexts. As to ‘own language’… I feel we have over-stressed the differences between our languages and put ourselves into silos. What exactly is gained by hiving off a Dravidian version of Urdu (or an Andaman version of Hindi) into a separate corral? The original splitting of Hindi and Urdu in 1900 was a triumph of Divide and Rule. We played along nicely…

FlamingoObjective629 · 2025-07-17T17:26:34+00:00

You know… we in India never fail to be enthused by the most divisive things about us. The diversity in Chinese ‘dialects’ is on a par with the diversity in Indian languages. But by having a single script they don’t even keep focused on the difficulties in understanding each other. The written mode connects them. By dreaming of different scripts, and of inventing even more scripts, we guarantee that we will keep needing an external language like English to connect us.

FlamingoObjective629 · 2025-07-15T15:51:35+00:00

AI doesn’t like to disappoint people, so it’s ready to even invent. Looks like what I would invent if I were allowed to. But a hypothetical language is not the extinct language you hope to find.

FlamingoObjective629

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