The first and foremost point is that the people of the Harappan areas, who were allegedly speaking a totally unrelated (to Indo-European) language, o… - Shrikant G. Talageri

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The first and foremost point is that the people of the Harappan areas, who were allegedly speaking a totally unrelated (to Indo-European) language, or languages, Munda, Dravidian, proto- Burushaski or Language X, completely abandoned that language, or those languages, and switched over to speaking Indo-European (specifically "Indo-Aryan") languages. And this switchover was so total that not a trace remains of the original language (except stray words in Vedic or later Indo-Aryan, which are alleged by certain linguists to be substrate words from those languages, but which, by their nature, would appear, if anything, more to be non-basic adstrate words adopted from neighbour or visitor languages: for example, a word which appears to be undoubtedly of Dravidian origin, the Vedic word kā ṇ a, "one- eyed", from Dravidian ka ṇ , "eye"). This situation is unique, extraordinary and unparalleled in more ways than one: the linguistic transformation was allegedly so complete that even the names of places and rivers in the area were so completely Indo-Europeanized or "Aryanized" that not a trace remains, even in the oldest hymns, of any alleged earlier "non-Aryan" names. ...Therefore, the transformation that is alleged to have taken place in the Harappan areas was absolutely total. It is alleged to have left almost no traces whatsoever of the original "belief, mythology and language", or of the original "complex of material and spiritual culture", other than "complex" clues that scholars like Witzel, and his predecessors and colleagues in the AIT cottage industry, have occasionally managed to dig out for our benefit.

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About Shrikant G. Talageri

Shrikant Talageri, born in 1958, was educated in Mumbai where he lives and works. He has devoted several years, and much to study, to the theory of an Aryan invasion of India, and interpreted the Vedas with the help of the internal chronology of Rig vedic Rishes within Rig Veda with the help of genealogical records Anukramanis.

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A true scholarship would examine, and then either accept or reject, with good reason, any new theory which challenges a generally accepted theory admitted to be full of sharp anomalies. However, this has not been the attitude of world scholarship towards our earlier book. The general attitude has been as follows: there is a school of crank scholarship in India which is out to prove, by hook or by crook, that India was the original homeland of the Indo-European family of languages; and the writers of this school deserve to be firmly put in their place. And the best method of doing this is by tarring all scholars who support, or even appear to support, an Indian homeland theory, with one brush; and then pointing out particularly untenable propositions made by one or the other of the scholars so branded together, to prove that all the scholars so named belong to one single school of irrational scholarship.

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Further, Witzel writes about the word Druhyu: “This word means, literally, ‘the ones who seek to cheat’. Non-linguist as he is, T. missed a great chance for a ‘socio-ethnic’ study based on an etymology!” Witzel, “linguist” as he is, is mistaken in the idea that this is the primary meaning of the word: the word had a positive meaning which became negative particularly in the Vedic and Iranian languages. In any case, why should Witzel imagine that I would want to conduct a “socio-ethnic study”? And to what purpose: to show that the enemies of the Vedic Aryans were “cheaters”? Witzel has clearly not understood my book: neither the general tone of my historical study, nor the specific points made by me in this regard...

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