re: #54 Pip’s Squeak

It’s been a long time.

Nevertheless, Elamo-Dravidian? Unproved. As for (Parpola’s?) notion that the language of the Indus valley civilization was related to Dravidian, this may or may not be, but it is also unproved, as is his possible decipherment of the Indus valley script.

Well, I said that part was less solid than the Indo-European languages spreading into Europe with agriculture. That would have been the 8,000 year-ago group. The article implied that the horsemen from the steppes 4,500 years ago brought the I-E languages with them, and that’s just wrong.

Parpola’s decipherment of the Indus Valley script might very well be baloney—probably is. As for the language(s) the Indus Valley civilization spoke—maybe it/they belonged to yet another family that has completely disappeared, but I think the most parsimonious theory is that the Dravidian languages came in with agriculture, just as I-E in Europe, and were swept aside and forced into the south of India by the Aryans.