Dravidian

Assembled from 20 blocks · 2 evidence · 19 related

1. Story
2. A family of some dozens of languages concentrated in southern India, with Tamil, Telugu, Kannada and Malayalam as its major literary members and Tamil holding one of the oldest continuous literary traditions of any living language. Two features make it disproportionately important to this Journey. First, it is a well-demonstrated family with a solid reconstruction, standing beside Indo-Aryan in the same subcontinent, which allows contact and inheritance to be told apart: the retroflex consonants and certain syntactic patterns shared across the South Asian linguistic area are widely attributed to Dravidian influence on incoming Indo-Aryan rather than to common descent, and Dravidian loanwords have been argued for even in the oldest Vedic texts. Second, its geography is discontinuous. Brahui is spoken far to the northwest, in Balochistan, hundreds of kilometres from the main body of the family — a distribution read by some as a relic of a formerly wider Dravidian range and by others as the result of a later migration. Proposals that the Indus Valley civilisation spoke a Dravidian language remain unproven, since its script is undeciphered.
3. Knowledge
4. Indo-European
5. Dravidian
6. Connections
7. Indo-European
8. Proto-Indo-European
9. Uralic
10. Trans-New Guinea
11. Dravidian
12. Hittite
13. Sanskrit
14. Jones states the Indo-European hypothesis in Calcutta
15. Hrozný identifies Hittite as an Indo-European language
16. Proto-Indo-European is spoken
17. Phylogeography puts the Indo-European homeland in Anatolia
18. Evidence
19. Supports the general account in this pack of the comparative method, the regularity principle, contact and borrowing, glottochronology and its critics, and the definition of a language isolate. V55 verification basis: this session had no access to any source — WebFetch was egress-blocked for every host attempted and the WebSearch budget was exhausted before authoring — so the cited work was not retrieved, and no page, volume or figure quoted from it was re-checked. No chapter or page is cited, because the book was not opened in this session; the citation identifies the work a curator should check the general account against. This is the source named in the Journey declaration.
20. Supports the description of a conservative, bibliography-linked classification policy that treats isolates as top-level families, and thereby the point that published family counts differ by policy. V55 verification basis: this session had no access to any source — WebFetch was egress-blocked for every host attempted and the WebSearch budget was exhausted before authoring — so the cited work was not retrieved, and no page, volume or figure quoted from it was re-checked. glottolog.org returned EGRESS_BLOCKED in this session, so no version, family count or language count is quoted anywhere in this pack, and the editorial and institutional attribution is given from standing knowledge.