Linguistic Archaeology of South Asia

Front Cover
Routledge, Aug 2, 2004 - Foreign Language Study - 384 pages
This book brings together linguistic and archaeological evidence of South Asian prehistory. The author depicts and analyses the region, in particular the Indus Valley civilization, its links with neighbouring regions and its implications for social history. Each type of linguistic data is put into its socio-historical context. Consequently, the book is both a description of the unique methodology 'linguistic archaeology' and a treatment of South Asian linguistic data.
 

Contents

1 The scope of linguistic archaeology
1
2 The South Asian linguistic scene
39
3 Prehistoric languages of South Asia
62
4 The social context of linguistic convergence
98
subgroups of IndoAryan
126
6 Historical implications of the innerouter hypothesis
154
7 Palaeobotanical and etymological evidence for the prehistory of South Asian crop plants
193
8 Some aspects of Dravidian prehistory based on vocabulary reconstruction
229
9 Maharashtrian place names and the question of a Dravidian substratum
288
10 Historical linguistics and archaeology in South Asia
322
Bibliography
335
Index
352
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About the author (2004)

Franklin C. Southworth completed his PhD in Linguistics at Yale University. Subsequently, he taught Linguistics and South Asian languages (Hindi, Urdu, Marathi, Nepali) in the South Asia Regional Studies Department of the University of Pennsylvania from which he retired in 1998. He spent over ten years in India doing fieldwork on Indo-Aryan (Marathi, Konkani, Hindi-Urdu) and Dravidian (Tamil, Malayalam) languages. His current research interest is SARVA (South Asian Residual Vocabulary Assemblage), an online dictionary of words of unknown origin in South Asian languages.