Because language
contact and geographical displacement imply various kinds of social change, it
is inferred that the contact between "Indus" language and the
Munda/Para-Munda languages was somewhat intense, implying a fairly high degree
of socioeconomic integration. The same was true later, of the contact between
OIA (presumably both the inner and outer varieties) and the local languages,
which presumably included both "Indus" and Para-Munda. In both
cases, if "Indus" and Para-Munda were languages of the Indus
Valley culture (respectively a local language and an interregional lingua
franca), then it would not be surprising if such contact occurred; nor would it
be surprising if early speakers of Indo-Persian interacted with the local
people in similar ways, given the need of pastoralists for agricultural
produce. Interactions between Dravidian and Indo-Persian speakers appear to be
somewhat later, and perhaps occurred first in a place called ‘Sindh’.
In fact Dravidian
languages were present probably by 1000 BCE if not earlier. And Dravidian
place name suffixes are found in Maharashtra, Gujarat, and Sindh, and Dravidian
may have played a role in the southern cities of the Indus Valley culture in
Sindh and Gujarat. Outer Indo-Persian languages probably appeared in this area
by the mid-second millennium BCE or earlier.
Following are
early languages in contact with each other in various parts of the
subcontinent:
The Prakrits provide some suggestions of regional dialect
variation but by end 2004, we have no knowledge of the relationship
between the literary tradition that has been handed, and the actual usage of
the majority of Indo-Persian speakers. Evidence suggests that regional
variation was probably greater, even from the earliest times, than one can
infer from any analysis of the traditional texts. The Nuristani or Kafiri languages, a separate branch of the Indo-Iranian
languages, may have found their way to their current locations a few centuries
earlier. Korku, a North Munda language listed above, is spoken in Nimar District of Madhya Pradesh. And Speakers of outer IA
may also have entered the Kosala/Avadh area from the Narmada across the Vindhya
complex, via the valleys of the Son and other rivers.
But for all its ups
and downs, today (January 2005), Persian is still spoken beyond the
borders of Iran in the northern half of Afghanistan (as Dari, `courtly'), and
beyond that in Tajikistan (as Tajik), famed for its poetry.
Next as we will
see particularly the attractions of the Buddha's teachings caused
the spread of Sanskrit in its path northward, round the Himalayas to
Tibet, China, Korea and Japan (for all we know, Buddha lived in the
fifth century BC, in the lower valley of the Ganges, speaking a Prakrit known
as Magadhi). The faith he founded spread all over
India and §ri Lanka, as well as into Burma, its
scriptures largely written in a closely related Prakrit, Pali, but also, more
and more over time, in classical Sanskrit. Besides the spread to South-East
Asia, the most influential path that Buddhism took was to Kashmir, and back to
the homeland of Sanskrit itself in Panjab and Swat.
Hence in the first
century AD Buddhism, with its attendant scriptures, spread northward, perhaps
here again trekking back up the historic route that Sanskrit speakers had used
to enter India over a millennium before. But past Bactria, instead of turning
left into the central Asian steppes, it turned right and, picking up the Silk
Road, headed into China. Received by the rising Tang dynasty, and ultimately
propagated by them, Buddhism became coextensive with Chinese culture. Thence it
was ultimately transmitted, along with its Sanskrit and Pali scriptures, to
Korea and Japan, its most easterly homes, arriving at the end of the sixth
century.
Other, closer, areas
took much longer to receive the doctrine, borne as ever by its vehicles Pali
and Sanskrit. Nepal had been part of the early Indian spread of Buddhism under
Asoka, in the third century BC; but the first Indian monk invited into Tibet, Sdntaraksita, came in the second half of the eighth
Sanskrit, then, has a far-flung history, and has been in contact with cultures
conducted in other languages all over southern, eastern and central Asia. And
interesting generalisation emerges. Nowhere has this
linguistic contact led t loss or replacement of other linguistic traditions,
even though Sanskrit has always been central to new cultural developments
wherever it has reached. This record makes a striking contrast with the impact,
too often devastating, of languages of large-scale campaigning civilizations,
such as Greek, Latin, Arabic, Spanish, French and English (for the latter see
part 3 below).
In 1979 Victor Sariyiannidis a Greek Archeologist, discovered 20,000
pieces of gold jewelry in Tilia Tepe (Bactriana) in Afghanistan,
and proceed next to investigate what he said was the home of Zoroastrianism. In
2000 BC, tribes from different parts of the ancient world, particularly from
northern Syria, were forced to leave their land because of a major drought that
affected some parts of the world. They arrived at what was then the fertile
delta of the Amu Daria River in southeastern Turkmenistan and settled there.
On the banks of this
river they built their capital, Gonur,
whose palace had an entrance similar to that at Knossos, reported Sariyiannidis. Claimed to be the cradle of
Zoroastrianism, a the temple of water was built on this lakeshore. A
grant by the Greek state in 1996 Greek allowed students to
join in the effort, “but none ever arrived,” said Sariyiannidis
returning back to Greece late 2004.
The origin of
Sumerian is obscure; only some Georgians claim that their language is related,9
but the claim has not been widely accepted. Whatever their previous history,
there was evidently a lively set of communities active in southern Mesopotamia
from the fourth millennium Bc, absorbing the gains
from the then recent institutionalisation of
agriculture, and establishing the first cities. (See part 4 below)
Thus part of
Mesopotamia, had in fact already been dead for another 1300 years when those
documents from Sennacherib's library were written. But it turned out that the
only way to understand Akkadian cuneiform writing was to see it as an attempt
to reinterpret a sign system that had been designed for Sumerian use. The
intricacy, and probably the prestige, of the early Sumerian writing had been
such that any outsiders who wanted to adopt it for their own language had
largely had to take the Sumerian language with it.
This was not too big
a problem in cases where signs had a clear meaning: signs that stood for
Sumerian words were just given new pronunciations, and read as the
corresponding words in Akkadian. But Akkadian was a very different language
from Sumerian, both in phonetics and in the structure of its words. Since no
new signs were introduced for Akkadian, these differences largely had to be
ignored: in effect, Akkadian speakers resigned themselves to writing their
Akkadian as it might be produced by someone with a heavy Sumerian accent.
Sumerian signs that were read phonetically went on being read as they were in
Sumerian, but put together to approximate Akkadian words; and where Akkadian
had sounds that were not used in Sumerian, they simply made do with whatever
was closest.
So Sumerian survived
its death as a living language in at least two ways. It lived on as a classical
language, its great literary works canonised and
quoted by every succeeding generation of cuneiform scribes. But it also lived
on as an imposed constraint on the _expression of Akkadian, and indeed any
subsequent language that aspired to use the full cuneiform system of writing,
as Elamite, Hurrian, Luwian, Hittite and Urartian were to do, over the next two
millennia. It is as if modern western European languages were condemned to be
written as closely as possible to Latin, with a smattering of phonetic
annotations to show how the time-honoured Roman
spellings should be pronounced to give a meaningful utterance in Dutch, Irish,
French or English.
By 260 Bc Persians and Indo-Greeks (first led by Diodotus) in Bactria, had declared themselves independent.
At just about the same time (and possibly caused by this rebellion) the
Iranian-speaking Parthians thrust south from the eastern shores of the Caspian
into the plateau of Iran. A century later, in 146 BC, Mithradata
I of Parthia completed the job, and drove the Seleucids out of the rest of
Iran, taking Mesopotamia for good measure. Ten years later, as it happened, the
Indo-Greek kings of Bactria were overwhelmed by a Scythian (Saka) invasion from
the north, shortly followed by the Kushdna (also
known as Tocharians or Yuezhi) from the north-east.
In 1979 Victor Sariyiannidis a Greek Archeologist, discovered 20,000
pieces of gold jewelry in Tilia Tepe (Bactriana) in Afghanistan,
and proceed next to investigate what he said was the home of Zoroastrianism. In
2000 BC, tribes from different parts of the ancient world, particularly from
northern Syria, were forced to leave their land because of a major drought that
affected some parts of the world. They arrived at what was then the fertile
delta of the Amu Daria River in southeastern Turkmenistan and settled there.
On the banks of this
river they built their capital, Gonur,
whose palace had an entrance similar to that at Knossos, reported Sariyiannidis. Claimed to be the cradle of Zoroastrianism,
a the temple of water was built on this lakeshore. A grant by the
Greek state in 1996 Greek allowed students to join in the effort,
“but none ever arrived,” said Sariyiannidis
returning back to Greece late 2004.
Finally the advent of
the Romans in the west, and the Parthians in the east, in the middle of the
second century BC, meant that Greek was challenged. It responded in different
ways. To Latin, it yielded legal and military uses, but very little else, so
that Syria, Palestine and Egypt found themselves now areas where three
languages or more were in contention. But before Parthian, which was a close
relative of Persian (and whose speakers shared allegiance to the Zoroastrian
scriptures, the Avesta), Greek was effectively
eliminated, while Aramaic had something of a resurgence at least as a written
language. Its use went on to inspire all but one of the writing systems
henceforth used for the Iranian languages, Parthian and Persian (Pahlavi) in
the west, Khwarezmian, Sogdian and the Scythian
languages Saka and Ossetic in the east, as well as for the Avesta
scriptures themselves. The one exception is Bactrian, later to become the
language of the Kushana empire (first to second
centuries AD), written in the Greek alphabet. This shows the lasting cultural
influence of apparently independent Greek dynasties in the
far east, whom the Kushâna supplanted.
Aramaic was by now an
official language nowhere, and a majority-community language only in the
Fertile Crescent. Nevertheless, it remained the predominant language over this
large area for almost a thousand years until the seventh century AD, when a
completely new language overwhelmed it.
This was Arabic,
brought with Islamic inspiration and a fervent will by the early converts of
the prophet Muhammad.
Sanskrit and Ancient Culture in Asia
The Spread of English in Asia plus the Rest of
the World
For updates
click homepage here