DISCOVERY OF DRAVIDIAN AS THE COMMON SOURCE OF INDO-EUROPEAN |
Page 86 |
|
In view of the fact that Latin and Greek were taught in almost all grammar schools in Europe, and in view of the fact that nearly all these scholars were well versed in these and some other European languages, it is curious that inasmuch as they were so intimately concerned with Dravidian words while compiling their dictionaries, they did not publish anything concerning the relationship between numerous Dravidian words and their corresponding European words which is not difficult to observe at all. But the fact remains that without their and many other subsequent Indian and Europeans’ painstaking output, Dravidian would have suffered a great loss and therefore, they all have earned and well deserve a share of gratitude of the Indians. Much credit also goes to Sir William Jones who, even though ignored Dravidian, was the first one to startle the European scholars by summarily rejecting their notion of a barbaric India and by setting them on the right track by correctly conceiving and eloquently advocating that not only Greek and Latin, but Sanskrit, Gothic, Celtic, and Persian had sprung from a common source. But the greatest share of the merit and gratitude goes to none other than Sanskrit herself. It is easy to visualize her as an irated Indian goddess because the European scholars who had founded the Science of Linguistics by utilizing the knowledge derived from ancient Indian works composed in Sanskrit had turned around and said that she is not Indian at all! They said that she is an imported language into India. Further, they cut India into two halves and said that northern half of India came within the empire of the Indo-European languages. They also took pains to insist that her mother, Dravidian, is a language of the barbarous southern Indians who were trying to be a little civilized lately, that she may also be non-Indian, and that she is isolated and unrelated to any language or language family in the world and therefore surely as close to being an orphan as anyone can get to that situation. They had not only snatched away Sanskrit from her own mother India's lap, but they portrayed her own European brothers and sisters as unrelated to their mother Dravidian. So, she set them to work for Indo-European which in effect was to set them to work for her mother Dravidian. They promptly proceeded to recognize the phonetic correspondences of Indo-European and the root-words from which all the words in all the Indo-European languages have ensued. These phonetic correspondences were none other than her own mother’s birthmarks which the great mother had bequeathed to them, and in spite of the great span of time that had elapsed since she had sent off her children to the far shores of Europe, she could still illustrate many of them as proof of the umbilical cord that bound them all inseparably. The Indo-European root-words were of course none other than her own mother’s words. Now, all Sanskrit had to do was wait; wait for someone to realize what she had done and make use of the proof which she had wrought out of the very hands of the concerned European scholars. And this is where the present author came in, and the rest is history.
|
|
|
|
|