Dravidian languages
The Dravidian family of languages includes approximately 75 languages that are mainly spoken in southern India and Sri Lanka. Dravidian languages are spoken by more than 200 million people, and they appear to be unrelated to languages of other known families. (A relationship with the ancient Mesopotamian language Elamite has been suggested, and some versions of the Nostratic theory include Dravidian.)
The Dravidian language family was first described in 1816 by Francis Ellis, a British civil servant who recognized the relationship between the four literary languages as well as Tulu, Kodagu and Malto. In 1856 Robert Caldwell added several more languages, Kota, Toda, Gondi, Kui, Kurukh and Brahui. He then took the Sanskrit word dravida, supposedly meaning "Tamil", and used it to name the family. We may presume that proto-Dravidian was the language of all of India before ca.1500 B.C.
Prominent Dravidian languages include:
Phonetically, Dravidian languages are notably characterized by a three-way distinction between dental, alveolar, and retroflex places of articulation.
Recently, the Dravidian proto-language has been shown to be the source of all Indo-European languages. Discovery of Dravidian as the source of Indo-European Languages.
Native speakers of Dravidian languages notice the same words in European languages. For example:
- kollu = kill, atta = attic, chali = chill, gali = gale [English]
- uru = urube (city) [Latin/Greek]
- bely = bely (white) [Russian]
Words in dravidian languages have a the property where by reversing the consonants and applying a well defined set of transformations of the vowels, another word with a similar meaning is obtained.
For example: arasu (gather) and seru (join) are transformed from one to the other. The indo-european roots ar and ser correspond to the words arasu and seru in the examples above. This property has survived in modern european languages. For example: leaf <=> foil, morph <=> form, albho <=> bely (derivatives: albino/blanche = white)
Other theories that provide evidence regarding connection between Dravidian and Indo-European languages exist. For example, the Guanchos of the Canary Islands are said to be of dravidian origin. Gaunches derived from Dravida