Postby sudarshan » 07 Dec 2020 00:43
Noob question, which occurred to me when typing away on another thread. Asking from a position of ignorance (but with genuine curiosity), so please go easy.
With these linguistic "proofs" of AIT - would it be worthwhile pointing out the vast difference between Indian scripts, and other scripts the world over, including the Greek one? The difference isn't just in the shape of letters or the letters themselves, it is in the entire paradigm of representing sounds by letters.
The current Greek and Latin scripts (the latter being derived from the former, and the former being derived from earlier Asiatic scripts) - these both have distinct vowels and consonants, which are never combined. Letters don't change shape, and there is a distinction between upper case and lower case letters.
Indian scripts have vowels and pure consonants, and then they have letters which combine a consonant with a vowel. With the use of hooks and other marks to indicate which vowel is being blended with the consonant. Tamil has hooks ("kokki"), "leg" markers ("kaal"), and dots ("pulli"s). Devanagiri has hooks, chandramas, dots, legs (to lengthen "a" sounds to "aa") etc. A vowel-consonant combo (sorry - don't know technical terms here, just making up my own terminology) is a distinct letter by itself. And there is one-to-one correspondence between a written letter and a spoken sound. This is true of scripts all over India (so far as I know - I'm no expert).
All the above is distinct from the current European paradigm. Modern European languages, which have adopted the Latin or Greek script, also have dots, accents, graves etc., but these basically serve to adapt Latin letters to represent sounds distinct to those languages. And most European languages today don't have one-to-one correspondence between written letters and spoken sounds. Vowels are distinct from consonants, never fused to make a new letter. So they get away with using 24 symbols. Whereas Tamil has 247 symbols (not counting other symbols added on to represent sounds which exist in Sanskrit, but not in traditional Tamil - such as "sa," "ha," "sha" etc.).
The other thing about European languages: this letter "h." It softens or modifies consonant sounds. So "t" is softened by adding an "h" and becomes "th," a totally distinct consonant. Or "s" becomes "sh" when the "h" is added. Russian has no "h" per se, but it does have two distinct modifiers, the "soft sign" and the "hard sign," which soften or harden consonants.
To be fair, Tamil has the above, to some extent. In a sense, the use of the "kaal" mark to lengthen an "a" consonant to "aa" is kind of the same thing. On top of that, the "ou" sound (like in "Gouri") - "Gouri" in Tamil can be read as "Gelari" since that letter combination is used to represent that sound. Or the distinct "ayudha ezhutthu" (literally - "weapon letter" - since this looks like the three dots on the face of a shield) - this is often used in combination with the "pa" consonant to represent "f" sounds, which are otherwise not native to Tamil.
Bottomline - the scripts are vastly different, in fact the paradigms on which the scripts are based are themselves different, between India and Europe. Within India, the paradigms are largely the same. Within Europe, the paradigms are again similar. So what "Indo-European?"
I find Samskrith difficult but can understand the gist of a tweet.