Tamil vs. Sanskrit, or Indian ‘official classical languages’, and the first tongue in India (AKA. Indus Valley Civilization language)
August 17, 2007 by 
Indo-European
I have read and heard many stupidities regarding linguistic status and language differences:
- Brazilian is a different language (i.e. not Portuguese), because Galician is a language also (yes, Galician is interestingly enough a ‘language’ which stops in the administrative division between Spain and Portugal - more or less like Valencian and Catalan).
- French is a beautiful language, and because of that many African countries learn it (yes, South-American Indians also wanted to learn Spanish because it was so cool).
- English comes from Latin, as French, Spanish or Portuguese (no comments)…
- Language x (say, Esperanto, Spanish or Polish) is great because it is read exactly as it is written! (yeah, let’s give a value to each letter or pair of letters, or invent new characters, and then invent something great to praise the own language!)
- Proto-Indo-European cannot be reconstructed, because it wasn’t written down, therefore it is, unlike Latin or English, not real (yes; we’ll wait till somebody invents a MET powerful enough to watch chemical bonds, instead of studying all those stupid unproven hypothesis…)
- Basques, Finns and Hungarians will hate speaking Indo-European in the EU (yes, they love to speak English; but a common Indo-European language? that’s colonization and racism!)
- and so on.
Now, only from time to time, there is a question so obviously misinterpreted that nobody seems ‘neutral enough’ to comment on it. Today is the time of the “Tamil question” - I like Indo-European languages, and I’m thus not ‘neutral enough’ for Tamil lovers, but I think it is not important, since everyone has an opinion and mine won’t change anything.
The whole question is summed up here (Wikipedia discussion), where some Tamil speakers are short from calling Tamil the Indus Valley Civilization language. It is not surprising, since N. Kazanas and others pretend that Sanskrit fits that role, being itself almost Proto-Indo-European, and this in turn spoken of course in the Indus Valley some thousands of years before any study can possibly lead us to (Out of India Theory).
Now, Indo-European studies are full of hypothesis, as comparative grammar. In the 20th century, physics and chemistry were disciplines where different hypothesis (their supporters) fought against each other, and nationals got involved defending their scientists. This had a good consequence, namely that normal people were involved in scientific evolution, and that scientists were like today’s football (or soccer) players - well, maybe not so important, but almost so renowned.
Nowadays, due to the neo-romanticism brought back by neo-nationalisms (in which race and genetics is not spoken about so loud, and thus only language remains as a differentiation factor), linguistics is a discipline spoken about by anyone, and linguists are cheered up by politicians and stupid followers alike. If I talk in the BBC about a research paper (whatever its value) on Tamil dating back to 9.000 BCE, I will be the hero of lots of Tamil speakers, whereas if I talk about Sanskrit being the oldest language on earth, Indo-Aryan speakers will lift me up to the category of ‘experts in linguistics worth mentioning in popular sites like Wikipedia or Yahoo! Answers’…
The question here is easy, and is not worth more than a paragraph to solve: roughly, Tamil corresponds to Hindi, Old Tamil to Old Hindi, Proto-Tamil (or Proto-Southern Dravidian) to Late Sanskrit, Proto-Dravidian to Sanskrit, pre-Proto-Dravidian to Vedic Sanskrit, pre-pre-Proto-Dravidian to Proto-Indo-Iranian, pre-pre-pre-Proto-Dravidian to Proto-Indo-European, and so on. The conclusion is simple: language history, reconstructed language, literature’s history, etc. all speak in favour of Sanskrit as the oldest attested language in India, and therefore India’s only classical language - just like Latin and Greek in Europe. The fact that the European Union recognizes in the near future, say, Balto-Slavic or Germanic as “classical languages of Europe” won’t change that fact either.
I could get deeper, but I wrote already about a similar question, “Basque:the oldest language“.
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Posted in Europe, Indo-European languages, Politics, Proto-Indo-European | 
August 17th, 2007 at 6:49 pm
[...] of Nebraska Link to Article yahoo Tamil vs. Sanskrit, or Indian ‘official classical languages’, and the first [...]
August 21st, 2007 at 9:49 am
[...] Tamil vs. Sanskrit, or Indian ‘official classical languages’, and the first tongue in In… [...]
March 5th, 2008 at 2:22 am
Tamil is very structured and has well defined grammar dating older than sanskrit. As a language tamil is influenced by sanskrit in the words that are used. But sanskrit is influenced by tamil in the way the language is structured. So I would say that tamil has more proof that its older than sanskrit and the deserves the title of classical language
March 5th, 2008 at 2:32 am
http://tamil.berkeley.edu/Tamil%20Chair/TamilClassicalLanguage/TamilClassicalLgeLtr.html
June 7th, 2008 at 10:52 pm
I think that you require to do more work than one para. Assuming that proto langusges were never written, why is it that we don’t find any written proof of the so called Vedic Sanskrit and the so called Classical Sanskrit prior to 200 CE?
If Sanskrit was such a “great” language why does it not figure in the Ashoka’s edicts? Why is the first written evidence of Sanskrit in the Gupta script?
Many peple like to talk os Sanskrit as an earth shaking language… but historically it is just a wimper.
June 8th, 2008 at 1:23 pm
I think that the assertion that needs further explanation is the one that contradicts the generally accepted facts. So, if the majority of the scientifical community accepts that Vedic Sanskrit is dated well back before 200 BC, why should we accept your “one-paragraph” assertion that “we don’t find any written proof of the so called Vedic Sanskrit and the so called Classical Sanskrit prior to 200 CE“? Apparently you are contradicting yourself by acceptings such beliefs without proofs, and at the same time requesting (still more) proofs from others… You can begin reading what Wikipedia has to say on the subject, and then counterargument each period assigned to the different language styles of the Vedas after your knowledge… You can also bring some proofs from other researchers, you don’t need to do it yourself; but to come here and just say “it’s not true because I [we?] don’t believe it”…Hmmm, I guess that’s a cool sentence among Tamil hooligans, but not elsewhere.
Your assertion is like those which deny Biblical Hebrew to be a spoken language older than the first writings known to us, when it is commonly accepted to be hundreds of years older. If you want others to believe your assertions on that or any other linguistic/archaeological/historical field, alternative arguments must be given, or at least the old ones must be thoroughly countered. Just saying “I don’t believe it” and having faith in Tamil’s “greater history”, knowing that you are backed by some community of history revisionists, is not enough to counterargument Sanskrit’s long proven history. At least not outside your friends’ circle…
Who talks about “great” languages? And who can say, by the way, that if it doesn’t appear in the Ashoka’s edicts, it wasn’t “great” at that time? is that your only proof of everything?? I think this whole (type of) ‘reasoning’ is a direct consequence of the recent trend of Tamil speakers trying to dismiss Sanskrit historical condition as India’s classical language, for some modern (political or social) interest in developing a “great” history (as you put it) for Tamil and Dravidian languages. In fact, no language is “greater” than other: Sanskrit has more international and national prestige and known history and literature, and it IS the classical language of India, that was and is all that can be said of it. For me Hindi and Tamil are equally “great”, and equally “small”, as are their speakers, whether their parent languages were more prestigious or well-known, or its known history and literature older…It’s not a question of proud, it’s about historical and linguistic facts, which Tamil-lovers try to destroy for who-knows-what-a-stupid-political/social-proud-question, and generally with no proofs at all. All this confrontation is completely unnecessary. But it’s you who enter that game of “which language is greater”, and not we who accept what is known about Sanskrit and Tamil, and it’s you in any case who must bring proofs of your Tamil-greatness or Sanskrit-invention dreams, not we who have to “convince” you Tamil ’supporters’ - if such a thing is possible…
Again, it’s all about Tamil speakers wanting to dismiss historical studies on Ancient and Classical Sanskrit. You can say that Sanskrit is “just a wimper”, if you like, but in any case, then, Tamil and Dravidian languages are still more of “a wimper” in history, prestige, literature, etc. It’s you again who want to play in the “which language is greater” game, and it’s you who are losing your own game since the very beginning. If it were Sanskrit speakers saying “my language is greater because of bla bla”, then you’d only had to say “no language is greater than other”; now, if you deliberately play this game, saying “the language with more prestige, history, literature, etc.” is “the greatest”, and “we want Tamil to be ‘the greatest language’ of India” or “as ‘great’ as Classical Sanskrit”, then you’ve lost that (absurd) ‘match’ already, and you are just entering into the game those who already won it want you to play…
June 22nd, 2008 at 6:07 pm
King solomon in his PROVERBS says, ” A LIVE DOG IS BETTER THAN A DEAD LION”. No doubt when Sanskrit was alive the controversy would have been real, but now that only Tamil lives and Sanskrit is a DEAD ( not extinct) Language, the issue is IMMATERIAL. The issue we should ponder is when did the language die and how to resuscitate it!!! VUYIRUDAN VAAZHGA THAMIZH.
July 30th, 2008 (5 weeks ago) at 6:18 pm
@Zorba: The controversy is about Sanskrit vs. Proto-Tamil (or Proto-Dravidian, or whichever Dravidian dialect corresponds to Vedic and Classical Sanskrit), because the original question was something like “which is India’s Classical language?”. The answer was (and still is) just “Sanskrit“. Some Indians call “officially” Tamil “the other Classical language” because of modern political correctness or just raw nationalism, but those reasons don’t reach us foreigners.
I agree with you in that the question is immaterial, given that there were (and thus are) no other “Classical languages” in India apart from Sanskrit, just many scattered languages - either Indo-Aryan, Dravidian or others. But, that’s what some people like to discuss today, and I don’t mind discussing it…