– Original inscription.

See: Hindu civilization as linguistic area: critique of Anthony's 2007 book

“…looking first of all at loanwords in OIA which seem to be from Munda or Austro–Asiatic (AA) languages…Though many of these words do not have specific Munda/AA etymologies, the hypothesis of AA origin is supported by the presence of prefixes of types found in Munda and other AA languages, which are not found in the other known language families of the area. These words appear in OIA texts belonging to the entire Vedic period, indicating the presence of Munda/AA speakers in all the regions associated with Vedic texts, from Panjab to eastern Uttar Pradesh – as well as further to the east, given the connection of Munda with the rest of Austro–Asiatic.” (Franklin C. Southworth, 2005, Linguistic Archaeology of South Asia, Routledge Curzon, London and New York, Section 3.2) http://ccat.sas.upenn.edu/~fsouth/LASAcontents.pdf

Comments (29 December 2008) of Prof. Paul Hopper, Senior Fellow Freiburg Institute for Advanced Studies Albert-Ludwigs-Universität Freiburg Albertstr. 19 D-79104 Freiburg and Paul Mellon Distinguished Professor of Humanities Carnegie Mellon University Pittsburgh, PA5213 :

Thanks for this update.

Are Indus project scholars paying sufficient attention to linguistic typology? For example of word order. While word order typology is far from exact, it may provide a rough guide. For example, if the language is prefixing we would expect the verb to be first, and if it's suffixing, the verb would be last. If mixed (i.e. both prefixing and suffixing), the verb would be second, i.e., between subject and object. Noun compounds would be "head precedes modifier" if verb-initial, "modifier precedes head" if verb final or V2. Obviously these are not universal facts, and there are many exceptions, but when one has practically nothing, to start with something, no matter how unreliable, would surely be recommended.

Are any glyphs (logographs) a-priori more likely to be verbs than nouns, or vice versa?

400 symbols does point to logographs, but to my knowledge all basically logographic writing systems combine logographs with syllable-signs, like Japanese. High frequency items are likely to be affixes.

Response (29 December 2008) of Dr. S. Kalyanaraman:

Thanks a lot, Prof. Paul, for the brilliant insights. I will pose this to the scholars engaged in studying ancient languages and Indus script. Even those decipherers who claim the script to be logo-syllabic have failed to take note of 1) exceptions to the frequently occurring sign sequences and 2) the over 100 pictorial motifs (apart from over 400 signs which are also pictorial glyphs) which dominate the script, dismissing them as 'narrative texts' without exploring the underlying speech which would have contained glosses for such 'narratives'. It is a stretch to assume that a glyph showing a tiger looking back, for instance was just mentally realised as a wild animal (shown also in front of a cattle feeding-trough sometimes! apart from getting ligatured to a woman's body) without any spoken word for the wild animal or the ligatured woman.

Michael Korvink, whose theses are outlined below, suggests the search for loan words of Munda and Language X to decipher segmented 'texts' of Indus script inscriptions.

Limitations of Korvink's approach:

1. The focus is ONLY on 'signs'. The 'pictorial motifs' are totally ignored citing them to be 'narrative' contexts. This is to be juxtaposed to the fact that just as the 'rim of jar' glyph occurs frequently, the 'one-horned heifer' also occurs frequently. What is the narrative in the 'one-horned heifer'? Does the narrative have an underlying speech which the heifer (composite glyph  with one horn and pannier) embodies?

2. The assumption is that a 'sign' has to be syllabic. One possibility is ignored: that both 'signs' and 'pictorial motifs' are glyphs and could be hieroglyphs. It is inconceivable that pictographs such as a tiger, elephant, rhinoceros, alligator, man-perched on a tree branch, a person seated in a posture of meditation, a woman ligatured to a tiger, bull, zebu, buffalo could have been used without recognizing them in as relatable to words of an underlying language. It is clear that over 100 such pictorial motifs apart from about 400 signs which are normalized pictorial motifs (such as rim of jar, wide-mouthed rimless pot, fish, slice, numeral strokes, antelope looking back, tiger looking back, horned-person ligatured to the hindpart of a bull or bovine) embodied speech. There are also composite or ligatured signs. A water-carrier glyph gets normalized as a ‘sign’. Swastika is used both as a pictorial motif and as a ‘sign’ sandwiched between an elephant and a tiger. Thus, the distinction drawn in corcordances, between ‘signs’ and ‘pictorial motifs’ both of which are glyphs is arbitrary.

Comment: Subject to these two major limitations in the reasoned analyses provided by Korvink. it should be possible to identify 'loan words' of both Munda and Language X and read them rebus into the hieroglyphs of Sarasvati civilization (so-called Indus script).

The script is simply neither syllabic nor alphabetic but hieroglyphic and both 'signs' and 'pictorial motifs' are such glyphs read rebus as hieroglyphs.

This rebus reading has been attempted on this web portal and the 15 ebooks presented (see links appended) -- in the context of one FUNCTION served by the hieroglyphs: the repertoire of khanaka (miners) and karmaara (smiths) -- both words repeated in the glyphs. The rim of a jar in Santali is: kanda kan-ka; rebus: kanda 'fire-altar'; khanaka 'miner'; that is, miner's fire-altar (or smelter) possession. A tiger looking back in Telugu is kol krammara; rebus: kol 'tiger'; 'pancaloha (alloy of five metals)'; karmaara 'smith'; that is, smith alloy of five metals.

Thus, if both signs and pictorial motifs are read as glyphs, they can be seen to embody, as hieroglyphs, the language, Mleccha (Meluhha). Evidence for the language Meluhha and the script Mlecchita vikalpa exists in later-day texts. The glyphs continue to be used in mints while punching devices on punch-marked coins of many janapadas, 5 to 6 centuries Before the Common Era 

Dr. S. Kalyanaraman kalyan97@gmail.com 29 December 2008

The Indus Script: A Positional-statistical Approach

By Michael Korvink

2007, Gilund Press, ISBN 0615182399, ISBN-13: 9780615182391, 96 pp.

Since the discovery of the Indus Civilization, the meaning of the enigmatic Indus script remains hidden in its four hundred characters. While many would-be-decipherers have attempted to unravel its meaning with the aid of a presumed underlying language, none of these attempts has proven successful. In response, the approach taken in this work does not preclude an underlying language, but offers an alternate approach where the positional patterns of the Indus signs are investigated in an attempt to segment the character strings.

Conclusion: “Since the discovery of the Indus Civilization, the meaning of enigmatic Indus script remains hidden its four hundred characters. While many would-be-decipherers have attempted to unravel its meaning with the aid of a presumed underlying language, none of these attempts have proven successful. In response, the approach taken in this work does not presume an underlying language, but offers an alternate approach where the positional patterns of the Indus signs are investigated. Consequently, the search for meaning is deferred until a later time. Though the search for meaning is suspended at this point, the use of positional-statistical patterns to segment texts serves as a necessary preliminary step in the search for meaning. Once rough segmentation is achieved, one may begin to speculate on the meaning of the characters by comparing early loanwords of Indian texts to the units segmented from positional-statistical analysis. It is not likely that the continued segmenting of texts and investigating of early Indian loanwords will lead to a full decipherment. However, it does offer us a legitimate method for speculating on the meaning of the Indus inscriptions.”

http://www.flipkart.com/indus-script-michael-korvink-positional/0615182399-11w3fl1cdd#previewbook

"The Indus Script: A New Decipherment Paradigm." SAGAR: A South Asia Graduate Research Journal Volume 12 (2004). http://www.scribd.com/doc/9571765/deciphermentparadigm

The Indus Script: A Statistical-Positional Approach

There is a great difficulty for the researcher of Indus inscriptions as our understanding of the nature of the Indus inscriptions changes. One finds themselves trying to separate, in researching previous decipherment attempts, the observations from the inference of those observations. Often the observation and inference of the observation are so tightly intertwined that one must start from scratch in their own research. For example, Mahadevan and Parpola have well researched the positional-statistical patterns in the script. Yet, much of their articles intertwine linguistic terminology with positionalstatistical terminology (e.g. gender or nominative case suffixes). It is the hard data of decipherment attempts, such as the patterns in placement of various signs that, remain current, while the conclusions of that data may become outdated. Therefore, rather than a coterminous pursuit of meaning and structure, where one is often tempted to force the linguistic structure onto the script, the structure alone must be analyzed. It is only then that one may us other a priori methods in search for meaning. Therefore, in response to this dilemma, this presentation . . .

Presented at the 32^nd Annual Conference on South Asia at Wisconsin, October 2003

http://southasiaconference.wisc.edu/pdf/Abstracts03.pdf 

Conclusion: “Although it is somewhat discouraging that the use of pictographic transparency and the inherent speculation in using it, is inescapable, a much greater impediment in Indus script studies is the dependence on the Dravidian Hypothesis – a hypothesis recently encountering serious criticism…Recent studies however show that in the earliest substrata of the Rg Veda, books 2 and 7, show no Dravidian influence but rather a Munda influence…In addition, J. Elfinbein has discovered phonological differences between Brahui and the Dravidian languages of the South, further corroborating that Brahui was a language of a second post-Harappan wave of Dravidians from outside of India (Elfinbein 1987, 215-233). Evidence from non-linguistic research presents more problems. The argument that the Dravidians were the Harappans fails to explain the total absence of similar archaeological material between the Indus valley and South India where one finds the Dravidian languages…Therefore, with the aforementioned linguistic studies and lak of archaeological finds, one can conclude that insufficient evidence is available at this time to continue to advocate the Dravidian argument as it is presented today. The understanding that Dravidian is not likely to be an underlying language in the Indus civilization has serious implications in the study of the Indus script…If we abandon the Dravidian hypothesis, the approaches of Parpola, Mahadevan, and Fairservis have no meaningful application to the Indus characters (i.e. there is no language proven appropriate of having these methods applied). Therefore, the methods for approaching the script must be updated. An analogous situation can be seen in the decipherment of Luwian Hieroglyphs. A.H. Sayce suggested that the glyphs were the product of the Hittites, but had no successful reading over his twenty years of research (Daniels 2000,89). Significant progress was not made until I.J. Gelb released a cold study of the glyphs in the form of three pamphlets analyzing the structure and segmentation of the texts (Daniels 2000,89). With thirty years of unsuccessful readings with the Dravidian methods, a new, less speculative approach is in order. As with Gelb, a study is necessary in the Indus inscriptions that is based on structural analysis and the positional frequency of various signs, not on a Dravidian presupposition. An examination of I.J. Gelb’s well-known grid of undeciphered scripts will prove helpful (Gelb 1973, 268)…Until further evidence is revealed as to what language the Indus people spoke – not to say that the Indus script ‘encoded speech’ – a Class III script, where both the language and the script are unknown, is a much more viable classification and is likely to produce less speculative results. (While the Indus script does not likely represent language, isolated units may be compared to words of later Indian texts)…For example, a drawing of a peepal leaf simply denotes a ‘peepal leaf’. One can then turn to later Indian textual sources to which this sign can be compared. It is at this point that the question can be asked: what is the most plausible language spoken in the Indus region at this time? Before this however, a word of caution is in order. One need not assume an underlying language in the Indus inscriptions in order to attempt to find comparison between the pictography in Indus inscriptions and words from other languages. Isolated words in Sumerian accounting tables could very well be compared to Sumerian tablets with a narrative function. Similarly, one can confidently compare words in a narrative context with the isolated units from the Indus. With the vastness of Indus civilization, it is not inconceivable that many of their words have survived through later Indian texts. Therefore one hopes that these loan words may have some overlap with the segmented Indus inscriptions. A possible source in which this type of comparison may be executed is the Rg Veda. As stated earlier, Dravidian is not likely to be the language of the Indus Civilization; however there are other linguistic substrata, such as Munda influences in the Rg Veda and Masica’s Language X, that might be candidates in our search for meaning. The Indo-Iranians branched off from the Indo-Europeans before the advent of agriculture. (One of the arguments for this theory is that words, previously not related to agriculture, were later developed to describe agricultural-related items and activity in Indo-European. However, this phenomenon does not occur in the Indo-Iranian branch; rather a number of loan-words (not Aryan in origin) take their place. See Masica 1979, 55-151.) Hence, the Indo-Aryans (a subgroup of the Indo-Iranians) adopted many agricultural-related loan-words from the indigenous people (most likely being the Harappans) (see Masica 1979, 137-138). The earliest books of the Rg Veda, showing no influence of Dravidian, show influence from Munda and a pre-Munda substratum language. The first of these is Munda, a form of Austro-Asiatic. Munda, thought to have been spoken in Eastern India, has often been ruled out by scholars of the Indus script as being too far removed geographically to be the language of the Harappans. Recent linguistic studies however suggest that Munda was likely to originate in or perhaps west of the Punjab.[http://www.people.fas.harvard.edu/~witzel/IndusLang.pdf Mirror: http://www.scribd.com/doc/9572872/Indus-Lang ] This reinstates Munda’s candidacy as a possible Indus language. The second possible source, Masica’s Language X, is a group of Hindi loan words whose origin is uncertain…A comparison of the pictography of the segmented Indus inscriptions to the two linguistic sources may be the method that can lead us to speculate on meaning in the Indus inscriptions…In conclusion, methods for deciphering the Indus script based on a linguistic presupposition cannot be employed at this time. The necessary alternative to the former Dravidian approach relies on the segmentation of texts and its subsequent comparison to loan-words of early Indian textual sources. Such comparisons rely on the pictographic transparency of the segmented unit and are thus speculative in nature. A new paradigm based on segmentation, though having its limitations, offers a much more meaningful analysis than those methods based on the currently wanting Dravidian theory.”

"The Linear Hierarchy in the Indus 'Fish.'" SAGAR: A South Asia Graduate Research Journal Volume 14 (2005). Mirror>: http://www.scribd.com/doc/9571678/Fish-Signs  Conclusion: “…if the Indus fish have a fixed order the fish most likely did not have a syllabic value.”

Thesis: The Indus Script:  Current Methods for Decipherment with an Emphasis on the Rebus Principle and Bilingual Parallels.B.A. in Religious Studies, University of North Carolina at Charlotte, Charlotte, NC-2002

Michael Pieter Korvink  (704) 687-4603 mpkorvin@email.uncc.edu  9201 University Boulevard Charlotte, NC 28223 Faculty: UNC Charlotte, Religious Studies http://www.religiousstudies.uncc.edu/mpkorvin/Curriculum%20Vitae.htm

References

Daniels, Peter T. 2000. “The Decipherment of Ancient Near Eastern Scripts.” In Civilizations of the Ancient Near East. Edited by Jack M. Sasson, 81-93. Peabody: Hendrickson Publishers.

Elfenbein, J. H. 1987. “A Periplous of the ‘Brahui Problem.’” Studia Iranica (16): 215-233.

Gelb, I. J. 1973. “Written Records and Decipherment.” Current Trends in Linguistics 11: 268.

Korvink, Michael. 2004. Starting from Scratch: A Positional-Statistical Approach to the Indus Script. M.A. Thesis, The University of North Carolina at Charlotte.

Masica, C. P. 1979. “Aryan and Non-Aryan Elements in North Indian Agriculture.” In Aryan and Non-Aryan in India. Edited by M. Deshpande and P.E. Hooks. Ann Arbor: Center for South and Southeast Asian Studies, University of Michigan, 55-151.

Combining race and language with civilization? Iravatham’s speech

Dinamalar, Chennai Monday 12, December 2009 (Report translated into English)

Combining race and language with culture? Iravatham’s speech

Chennai Jan. 12. The Roja Muthiah Research Library in Taramani, on behalf of its branch, Indus Valley Cultural Research Centre, inaugurated an ‘Indus Valley Culture’ Exhibition.

The Director of the Library, Sundar invited the audience. The exhibition was inaugurated by Finance Minister Anbazhagam who also presided over the function.

The advisor of the Indus Valley Cultural Research Centre, Iravatham Mahadevan spoke on the topic: ‘Tamil language sayings in Indus script’.

Excerpts from his speech:

It is two years now since the Research Centre was inaugurated. An exhibition is now being held celebrating the second anniversary. After researching for 40 years on Indus Valley civilization, I cannot claim that I have completed the reading of the Indus script. We can’t even say whose civilization it was.

The truth has to be established only by researches.

Last year, in Tamilnadu were found some memories of Indus valley civilization including pot and broken potsherds. In the pot found at Coimbatore Sulur, continuous writing of five signs can be seen which are comparable to the Indus script writings.

In 1960, on the Chennai-Tindivanam road, pottery found in excavations are comparable to the pottery of Indus civilization according to BB Lal.

These writings and indicators have to be researched. In Kerala also, two pots have been found. Similar findings have been unearthed in Mangudi of Tamil Nadu by Archaeology Department.

Putting together such evidences, using the computer I produced a concordance of Indus Script in 1977. There is no mention about language in these inscriptions. That they may relate to Dravidian culture is surmised in 8 research presentations.

There will be a conference in USA about Indus Civilization. People who say that this links with Aryan language will participate in this conference. We have also been invited.

Compiling our evidences, the Director of the Library will proceed to USA and present the compilation in the Conference.

This effort will bring out the true picture of Indus civilization. Foreigners are engaged in enacting a drama by injecting Aryanism and creating confusion.

A civilization cannot be looked at by combing language and race (inam).

Well before Indus Valley civilization was discovered, scholars have left notes that ‘yadavas who worshipped Krishna are the people who came down to the South’.

Indus Valley Civilization people had lived, not only before Sangam age, but also before the Vedic times.

Research on Indus Valley civilization is a task to be proven by multi-disciplinary groups of people joining together.

So said Iravatham Mahadevan.

Central Classical Language Tamil Director Professor Ramaswamy spoke on: “Classical Language Programme and Indus Valley Research”.

Profesor Arasu of the Tamil Language Department of Madras University spoke on: “Dravidianism: Indus Valley Researches.”

This Exhibition will be on display at Taramani Roja Muthiah Research Library upto 31 January from 10 AM to 7 PM.

E-books

The Saraswati: The mother of Indian civilization. Inaugural address delivered on 24 October 2008 by Prof. BB Lal in the Conference on Vedic River Sarasvati and Hindu Civilization held at India International Centre, New Delhi

Sarasvati – Vedic River and Hindu Civilization by S. Kalyanaraman (2008)

Vedic River Sarasvati and Hindu Civilization (ed.) S. Kalyanaraman (2008) – Compendium of Papers presented at the Conference on the same subject held at at India International Centre, New Delhi between Oct. 24 to 26, 2008

The webpage updated with these links: http://sites.google.com/site/kalyan97/Conf-Presentations

http://sites.google.com/site/kalyan97/mlecchitavikalpa

E-books --Vedic River Sarasvati and Hindu civilization 
by S. Kalyanaraman 
Sarasvati -- Vedic river and Hindu civilization (12 Sept. 2008) 89 pages
 
Sarasvati hieroglyph dictionary (Update 31 March 2008) 348 pages
Reading new Bhirrana seals with Sarasvati hieroglyphs (Addenda 2 March 2008)
 
Sarasvati: Vedic river and Bharatiya civilization (March 2008) -- 332 pages
River Sarasvati -- Legend, myth and reality (1999)
Sarasvati (2000) -- 1281 pages

Sarasvati in 7 volumes (2003)
        Civilization Volume 1
        Rigveda Volume 2
        River Volume 3
        Bharati Volume 4
        Technology Volume 5
        Language Volume 6 [lingua franca of Sarasvati civilization. mlecha, meluhha. essential semantic unity of all bharatiya languages]
        Epigraphs Volume 7
Indus script encodes mleccha speech 5 volumes (2008)
Writing (Volume 1) 554 pages
Dictionary (Volume) 2 50 pages
Epigraphica (Volume 3) 202 pages
Language (Volume 4) 367 pages
Lexicon (Volume 5) 5,111 pages [Indian Lexicon. A comparative dictionary of over 25 ancient Bharatiya (Indian) languages]