Yes that’s what happened. Before North Indians (probably from Bengal) migrated to SL circa 500 BC, there were Dravidian speaking inhabitants who entered the island from prehistoric Tamil Nadu circa 1000 BC and introduced civilisation and iron age culture. Before them there were hunter gatherers who had lived on the islands for tens of thousands of years.

Just to clarify the “dental retroflex” is a correspondence, not a thing.

I clarified it via the saMdhi rule: prch + ti = prSTi, i.e. Vedic/Sanskrit speech does not tolerate the primary dental (dantya) consonants in some cases and re-maps them to retroflexes. And that this correspondence holds from the earliest part of Vedic lit.

I agree given the place of articulation, it is simply a retroflex stop. This special correspondence with dental is entirely an Indic thing (evidenced from the time of the Vedas).

Just read this whole long winded thread about retroflexes, and frankly this whole ratholing about retroflexes in sanskrit appears making mountain out of molehills.

Firstly, I don’t even understand what the so called “dental retroflexes” are. There are dental consonants and there are retroflex consonants. Never heard of anything called “dental retroflexes”. Is it possible that you are confusing between alveolar consonants (English t/d -https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alveolar_consonant) and retroflex stops ( Sanskrit T/D – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voiced_retroflex_stop) ?

Similar phonemes can arise in unrelated languages independently. You don’t have tie yourself in knots to seek a deep connection between them.

Secondly, to me the most outstanding feature of Sanskrit is its abundance of aspirated consonants. Dravidian languages scarcely have them, and the most Dravidian of the Dravidian languages, Tamil completely lacks them.

And finally, any one who quotes Witzel must be reminded that this guy is a complete crank. He once came up with a crank theory that IV symbols do not even constitute a script. To seek publicity for his theory he even offered 10 thousand dollars as reward to anyone who would disprove his theory! Have you ever heard of any serious academic offering rewards to disprove their work? Doesn’t it sound like some Bangali Baba proudly claiming- Jhoota saabit karne wale ko dus hazaar rupaiyya inaam! Seriously, Witzel should be kept out of any serious debate.

Isn’t Sinhala considered an Indo-Aryan language? Are you implying that this is a case of language transplant over native population?

“Retroflexion is the linguistic analogue of the genetic smoking-gun of bonafide South-Asianness. ”

You do know that Retroflextion is abundant in Pashto, and scanty in Eastern Hindi, Bhojpuri etc, right? How do you explain this anomaly?

28 is better, last time I looked.

I am not here but coincidentally I saw this reply. Initially, I was thinking that you are genuine but, I confess, you tricked me. Maybe there is a lack of knowledge but it is compensated by high degree of arrogance. And this quasi knowledge is also based on Wiki. It is illusive to comment on anything in your reply because there is nothing there. I see that you are expert for Vinca’s alphabet too, which allegedly is not alphabet, although modern Serbian alphabet, which is probably the simplest in the world, has 27 out of 30 letters from this 7000 years alphabet. And Raseni (Etruscans) who founded the city of Rome (Ruma) used these letters which were also a base for Roman alphabet (and their language, too). But, off course, Wiki does not say anything about this.

I could expect similr things after such dumb construction that some (?) noname people who lived in Ukraine and spoke Proto-somelanguage, somehow changed this to new one, named as Indo-Iranian (?) probably couple thousands years before they actually came (if they came) to SA and became Indo-Aryans, Afgano-Aryans, Tibeto-Aryans, etc…And from this I-I language originated Sanskrit and Avestan? And, they came with new language to SA but the locals made all those epics on their language! Wow, what imagination! Just missing, how Sanskrit (or I-I?) came to Europe. It is similar If I say that I am writing in Proto- Martian because in 1000 years some people probably will be living on Mars.

After such verbal diarrhea we still don’t know who Aryans were and which language spoke but we know about anonymous ‘steppe’, ‘farmers’, cowboys who spoke Indo-Europeans languages, Balto-Slavic (3-4000BC???), etc.

If you think that you are not hopeless (I think you are not), you may take this comment as a referral to Dr Jaggu@Stan and ask him to prescribe you the ‘barki’ medication. It should not only cure the diarrhea, it would tug you form Wiki back to reality.

I thought they were analogues to one another etc

“Old Persian evolved from Avestan”

Still makes zero sense, mate.

“The Hindi ko particle that I’m talking about is a suffix and not a prefix and it is so extraordinarily similar in form and function to, say Telugu ku, which also functions as a suffix and does the same exact function that its Hindi counterpart does: act as the dative case marker.”

Given the linguistic indications that Meluhha was pre-fixing and not suffixing, it seems likely that neither of those grammatical features were derived from it, and that Dravidian and Meluhha were parts of different language families from each other.

The evolution of the oldest version of Sanskrit language in South Asia into the many Indo-Aryan daughter languages such as Hindi took many centuries, during which there was widespread Indo-Aryan exposure to Dravidian languages and there were probably lots of language learners whose first language was a Dravidian one in some place other than the old IVC territory.

I wouldn’t be at all surprised if the suffix feature you describe is a Dravidian substrate in many of the post-Sanskrit daughter languages of Sanskrit.