Indian Lexicon --Comparative dictionary of over 8000 semantic clusters in 25+ ancient Bharatiya languages (original) (raw)

1 Indian Lexicon: An introduction Discovering the language of India circa 3000 B.C. This is a comparative study of lexemes of all the languages of India (which may also be referred to, in a geographical/historical phrase, as the Indian linguistic area). This lexicon seeks to establish a semantic concordance, across the languages or numraire facile of the Indian linguistic area: from Brahui to Santali to Bengali, from Kashmiri to Mundarica to Sinhalese, from Marathi to Hindi to Nepali, from Sindhi or Punjabi or Urdu to Tamil. A semantic structure binds the languages of India, which may have diverged morphologically or phonologically as evidenced in the oral tradition of Vedic texts, or epigraphy, literary works or lexicons of the historical periods. This lexicon, therefore, goes beyond, the commonly held belief of an Indo-European language and is anchored on proto-Indian sememes. The work covers over 8,000 semantic clusters which span and bind the Indian languages. The basic finding is that thousands of terms of the Vedas, the Munda languages (e.g., Santali, Mundarica, Sora), the so-called Dravidian languages and the so-called Indo-Aryan languages have common roots. This belies the received wisdom of cleavage between, for example, the Dravidian or Munda and the Aryan languages. The lexicon seeks to establish an areal 'Indian' language type, by establishing semantic concordance among the so-called Indo-Aryan, Dravidian and Munda languages. The area spanned is a geographical region bounded by the Indian ocean on the south and the mountain ranges which insulate it from other regions of the Asian continent on the north, east and west. This lexicon is a tribute to the brilliant work done by etymologists and scholars of Indian linguistics, and to a number of scholars who have contributed to unravelling the enigma of the Indus (Sarasvati-Sindhu) Script and to the study of ancient Indian science and technology.