The Languages of Harappa - People Fas Harvard

languages traceable in South Asia (Kuiper finds similarities with Ainu, for further
connections see now MT 3).
Apart from these languages that have actually survived into modern times, there
must have been a score of dialects and languages that have "not made it". A recent case seems
to be Kusunda which seems to have died out only in the Seventies, and which has been
recorded but very little in the early 19th and in the later part of the past century. But for one
paper by Hodgson in the first part of the 19th cent., and some recent small articles by
Reinhard and Toba (1969, 1971) we would not have known about this important remnant
language.
These facts suggest successive levels of immigration by speakers of the several large
language families involved, the spread of their languages (not always and not necessarily
involving actual movement of people), and a gradual retreat of the older languages and
their speakers into the inaccessible hills and jungles. On the other hand, there also is the
successive taking over of the newly immigrant languages by populations which stayed in
their old habitat.
Not all of the languages mentioned so far are attested early on, and we can only make
reliable comparisons with the loans in the RV when we have established a reconstructed preform
of the words of these languages. To give an obvious example, the modern tribal name
of the Munda speaking in Orissa Saüra (Saora) :: Greek Sabarai :: Ved. Śabara (AB 7.18). The
unattested pre-forms of Munda (*šqawar, Pinnow 1959) allow comparison with Skt. Śabara
(AB), while there is no immediate one between mod. Oriya Saora and Ved. Śabara, Skt.
śabara 'hunter'.
The sections below will indicate that we have to reckon, in addition to the substrate
languages mentioned earlier, with some unknown languages in the Greater Panjab as well.
The inhabitants of a city such as Harappa may very well have been bi- or tri-lingual.
The next question to be answered, then, is how to decide between the languages and
language families that were present in S. Asia in gvedic times. Just as in the case of IE/IA
words (see above), it is root and word structure that comes to our aid.
Dravidian word structure is fairly well known now (Krishnamurty 1998; in the
sequel ə = long or short vowel).
Drav. root structure: (C)ə(C), thus:
ə ẽ 'increase'
əC oy 'to drag'
Cə kå 'to preserve'
CəC pal 'tooth', kål 'leg', nåy 'dog',
Suffixes have the structure: -C, -Cə, -CCə, -CCCə;
after a root -C the vowels -a-, -i-, or -u are inserted , thus əC-a-C etc., and CəC-a-C etc.;
(base final -C is followed by -u, thus CəC-a-C-u): examples include:
CC kår 'to be salty' :: CəC-i kar-i 'salty to the taste'
CəC-əC kar-il 'pungency', kåra-am 'pungency'
Cə-CC kapp-u 'to overspread', (kap-i > kavi 'to cover'), me-u 'to smell' : CC mẽ-u 'height'
(Tamil also peyar > pẽr 'name', muka > mō 'to smell'), etc.
Dravidian words thus can take forms quite different from Vedic ones, cf. Ved. CCə-CCəC-
Cə pra-stab-dha- 'stiff' (from stambh) :: Drav. CəC-a-C-u. Still, words such as pra-mag-and-a
are not covered by Dravidian structure as Drav. lacks prefixes and as pra- and similar