Is the Mesopotamian world for elephant ‘Dravidian’?

Supplement S1-Section-F directly addresses this question. I don’t know if it’s a compelling answer, but the author tries to directly address this. What are your thoughts?

Reproduced below

Since this paper claims that ‘pīlu’ was one of the most popular elephant-words of prehistoric and historic North-Western India, prevalent at least till 600 A.D., an important question arises regarding the complete absence of ‘pīlu’ as an elephant appellative in both Vedic and Epic Sanskrit texts. Indeed, as a phytonym, ‘pīlu’ has not only secured its place in the earliest Vedic (Atharvaveda) and epic texts (Mahābhārata), but has also managed to remain the most popular common name for the toothbrush tree (Salvadora Spp.) across the Northern half of the Indian subcontinent. But as zoonym it has not been so successful in its survival. There are various possible explanations for this:

i)As Masica (1979, p.124) has observed, “the Aryans, in addition to retaining most of their names for familiar animals, tended to bestow their own names on unfamiliar domestic animals of the new country as well (the water buffalo, the camel, the ass, and the elephant—though the last seems to be a partial calque), rather than borrow them—quite different from their attitude toward plants”. In my opinion, naming an animal based on its physical features or utilitarian aspects is a much easier and tempting job than naming various plants of a new country. For, knowing the herbal qualities and other subtle features of a plant would need a longer lived experience (‘erlebnis’/ ‘erfahrung’). Thus, had Indo-Aryan speakers really come to the subcontinent from outside, they would have been awestruck in no time by a massive animal with outlandish physical features like tusks and a trunk. So, they could easily name that animal using their own language, calling it ‘hastin’ (having a hand i.e. a trunk) or ‘dantin’ (having tusks). But, mastering the special utilities of different plants of a forest, and distinguishing one plant from another based on their herbal qualities and subtle visual differences, are not as easy or arresting, and demand centuries of observation and experiments. As proposed by Jules Bloch and Paul Thieme (in Bryant, 2001 Kindle-Location 1763-1766), among the ‘peculiar’ words found in early Vedic texts, which must have come from Prakrits or other “low” culture vernaculars, “plants and agricultural terms” particularly abound, “since such words would have been the daily subject matter of the tribes and “lower” social groups who tilled the soil” and “gathered the flora and herbs”. Possibly these are the reasons that phytonyms often survive much longer than zoonyms. For example, most of the phytonyms collated and authenticated in Vedic texts, such as ‘aśvattha’ and ‘pippala’ (Ficus religiosa), ‘palāśa’ (Butea frondosa), ‘bilva’ (Aigle marmelos), ‘kharjūra’ (Phoenix sylvestris), ‘tila’ (Sesamum), and ‘śalmali’ (Salmalia malabarica), have survived in India till date with minimal phonological changes. On the contrary, as Masica observes, “the striking thing is the replacement in the course of the later evolution of Indo-Aryan of many of the older Aryan terms (e.g., of aja-‘goat’, avi- ‘sheep’, words for ‘colt’, ‘calf, ‘kid’, ‘lamb’, and, most important of all, asva- ‘horse’) with new terms either internally derived or borrowed, typically with an originally diminutive, pejorative, or otherwise specialized meaning”.

ii)The other reason that the Vedic texts have often avoided indigenous non-Indo-Aryan vernacular words is possibly that “these are sacerdotal hymns describing ritualistic techniques that were preserved by a culturally distinct group of specialists who, like any elite, took pains to isolate their speech from common vulgarisms” (Bryan, 2001 Kindle-Locations 1624-1626). As mentioned in the main article, the “authoritative account of the c. seventh century Mīmāṃsā philosopher Kumārila Bhaṭṭa informs us that ‘pīlu’ meant a tree in the ‘Aryan’ speech, but elephant in the ‘Non-Aryan’ ‘mleccha’ languages (Bandyapadhyay, 1933-1946 p.1336; Pollock, 2011 p.43)”. Thus, sociolinguistic puritanism of the Aryan elites must be the reason that the popular elephant-word ‘pīlu’ could find no place in their religious texts. Moreover, in the Vedic texts, elephants were anyway not given importance at all, and were mentioned only a few times (Macdonell and Keith, 1912a, 1912b).

iii)The present substitution of the Dravidian word ‘pīlu’ by the Indo-Aryan term ‘hasti’/‘hāthi’ in North-India, and its reduced scope of usage in a phonologically closely related word ‘piḍ-i’ that signify female elephant and female hog in various Dravidian languages of present South India, is a trend not unprecedented in the history of unexplained replacement of Indic zoonyms —due to the interchangeability of cerebral ‘ḷ’ and ‘ḍ’ in Dravidian languages and the Proto-Dravidian feminine marker ‘i’, ‘piḍ-i’ is directly related to the root-word ‘piḷ’ (Caldwell, 1875 p.33,59; Krishnamurti, 2003 p.213)—. A similar and greater apparent linguistic anomaly “is the replacement of aśva- ‘horse’, the animal introduced by the Aryans and deeply associated with their communal rituals, by the non-Aryan term ghoṭaka” (Masica, 1979 p.125). Similarly, “in English, for most purposes, the older Germanic ‘dove’ has been replaced by the French ‘pigeon’” (Masica, 1979 p.61). Thus, the other presently popular elephant-words cannot deny ‘pīlu’ its ancient popular stature. As discussed in the main article, the Tamil word ‘piḷiṟu’ means “to roar, as an elephant”. In Sanskrit ‘pīlu’ also means “palm tree’s stem” possibly because it resembles an elephant’s leg (Bandyapadhyay, 1933-1946 p.1334-1337). These words show the prolonged usage of the ‘pīlu’-based elephant-words in the Indian subcontinent.