Interesting thing I found....

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Kothai
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Re: Interesting thing I found....

Post by Kothai »

Didn't know where to post .. hence posting it here.. Good interview given by Raju Hirani....
http://cms.websiteforever.com/p/2/10671 ... sf_ref=TVE
Raju Hirani explains how conflict, of almost all kinds, is simply a difference of points of view, and how, despite being a bit of an activist at heart, he's not trying to change the world
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Re: Interesting thing I found....

Post by Varma »

Jay,

Here is an article on one of the topics that you talked a lot about, and promised to send me the facts that you have compiled(but never sent) :)

I find these linguistic facts very fascinating.

Tamil-Korean link is age-old


- Varma
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Re: Interesting thing I found....

Post by jayakris »

Thanks Varma. Yes, this is one of the least known things in our history (and Korea's). The Dravidian-Korean connection. I am still of the opinion that these connections are from a period even older than what the historians are talking about. Seeing how the basic language (before Koreans borrowed a lot of Chinese words, probably around the time Dravidian languages started borrowing Indo-Germanic or Sanskritic words) have such striking connection, that it could not have happened after Sanskrit developed in India and Chinese developed near Korea. Tamil and Korean are older languages and the connection comes from those times. There are actually a lot more common words than shown the article and I have personally collected a lot of them in my hobby research. They are all basic words which is the proof that the connection is from possibly the earliest days of civilization. But I am happy to see the topic get some exposure. Incidentally, an American, Homer Hulbert, was the first one to talk about the Dravidian-Korean connection in the 1930s when he was in Korea, after he spent some time in Chennai.
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Re: Interesting thing I found....

Post by prasen9 »

My Korean colleague had told me of the connection. Of course, he used Indian instead of Dravidian. Then, my daughter's Korean piano teacher told me the same with references. So, it may be that in Korea more people know of this connection. (Or at least two random Koreean-Americans do.)
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Re: Interesting thing I found....

Post by jayakris »

prasen9 wrote:My Korean colleague had told me of the connection. Of course, he used Indian instead of Dravidian. Then, my daughter's Korean piano teacher told me the same with references. So, it may be that in Korea more people know of this connection. (Or at least two random Koreean-Americans do.)
It is somewhat known in Korea because Homer Hulbert (whom I mentioned above) published his thoughts on it in Korea and the Chinese-centric researchers in Korea pooh-poohed it (naturally), as the idea that Korean had influences from anything but Chinese is tough for them to stomach. And to be fair, there is much less written evidence on this for academicians to use, as we are talking about old times from much more than a couple of millennia away, and there is much more written material on how Chinese influenced Korean in the last 2 millennia. But the Chinese influence on Korean is no more than Sanskirt's influence on Malayalam, Telugu or Kannada - which is that words (a lot of them, nearly 2/3rd of the vocabulary) were borrowed by completely Tamil-based languages. Absolutely nothing more. Sanskrit couldn't change a thing about the structure or base words of S.Indian languages. Same with what Chinese did to Korean which is an entirely different language with zero similarity to Chinese in structure or base words. The structure of Dravidian languages and Korean are strikingly similar (and in more ways than among other subject-object-verb languages). So are the connection in many base (pre-civilization?) words. But nothing is known in India about the language connection, though the Koreans have heard that something might be there, without details.

But all the Koreans confuse this language connection with a well-known legend (with some 2000 year old written records) of a King Suro and a lady who arrived from India who became his queen. This story is why Koreans think there is Indian influence in their language (you see it mentioned wrongly in the article Varma posted above), but I am of the opinion that it is a later story of no relevance in the language connection. Languages' root words do not get connection just from such singular isolated occurrences, and there is no record of large-scale migration or anything from that period or later that could have caused a language connection, especially when the Chinese language was breathing down their neck from north of Korea. This Dravidian-Korean connection is older and from a time when migrating folks diverged from somewhere in Asia to India and to Korea some millennia before (pre-Aryan times). Interestingly, there is hardly any research on this from historians, fascinating a topic as it is. Mainly because Indians have no interest in Asia (we are slaves to the west, after all, and look down on Asia all the time), and Koreans have no choice because of the massive Chinese influence on them. But at least Koreans respect India a lot and know of us, even if Indians don't care a damn about places like Korea.

Another interesting factoid. Koreans (actually somewhat wrongly) think that Rabindranath Tagore was a big advocate of their freedom fight, because he wrote a poem that was apparently about Korea's glory. "Land of the morning calm" is a usage about Korea that became famous through that poem, which mentioned it (IIRC). Apparently, Tagore wrote it only because he was asked by a writer friend of his, who was a Korean in Japan who was against the Japanese occupation. Tagore didn't have such passionate views about Korea or their freedom fight (well, we had our own going on at that time), but the friend got the poem published in a newspaper at a crucial time in their freedom fight history and the Koreans rallied behind it! Many people later felt highly grateful towards Tagore, and he is revered there. The pen is mightier than the sword, indeed.
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Re: Interesting thing I found....

Post by Omkara »

Tagore wrote about Srilanka and bengal which became their respective national anthem. Something similar happened in Korea and that's news to me.

A friend who works in Korea once gave me his explanation of why Koreans respect Indians. Unlike US and UK, because of language issues only highly edicated Indians moved to Korea and their work was restricted to fields like research. So the general opinion about us is that of a highly educated group. Guess they haven't meet anyone from the interior hindi belt.
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Re: Interesting thing I found....

Post by jayakris »

Speaking of King Suro and the Indian who became his queen, there was a nice Korean drama series a few years ago called "Kim Su Ro". They actually found a Korean actress who could pass for an Indian to do the role, and she did a great job. See below

Image

Image
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Re: Interesting thing I found....

Post by Prashant »

The things you learn at Sports India... wonders never cease.
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Re: Interesting thing I found....

Post by sameerph »

Thanks for that interesting insight, Jay. I am sure almost no one in India knows anything about this language connection. We do not know a lot of things about history.
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Re: Interesting thing I found....

Post by sanjay5goel »

Jay - have you read Breaking India by Rajiv Malhotra?

If not, highly recommended to read it. One thing it debunks the Aryan - Dravidian theory that the British manipulated.
Another is that is well nigh debunks (based on all actual research done on the subject) the Aryan Invasion theory - which was just that - a theory.

Hare Krishna!
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Re: Interesting thing I found....

Post by Omkara »

So who are we?
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Re: Interesting thing I found....

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African.
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Re: Interesting thing I found....

Post by Omkara »

Yet again something different... Hmmm
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Re: Interesting thing I found....

Post by jayakris »

sanjay5goel wrote:Jay - have you read Breaking India by Rajiv Malhotra?
If not, highly recommended to read it. One thing it debunks the Aryan - Dravidian theory that the British manipulated.
Another is that is well nigh debunks (based on all actual research done on the subject) the Aryan Invasion theory - which was just that - a theory.
Hare Krishna!
I never believed the Aryan invasion theory that some civilized group came to India, and never really understood the huge drive to "debunk" it either. I grew up being told by my father that Aryans are some peoples who developed as a civilization in the Saraswati Valley which must be somewhere in the area between Afghanistan and Bengal. This was in the early 70s before NASA images and other research confirmed the exact location of the Saraswathi river as at the india-Pakistan border area. Who cares what the West thinks about it (after all their history was forced to be constrained at some 4000 BC or whenever the universe was created suddenly).

But I absolutely believe that there was an "Aryan" invasion (or spread of culture and language), or waves of it, to the rest of India by people of the culture mentioned in the Ramayana and Mahabharata periods, from near the Saraswati river area. That is the only way that Dravidian languages can retain their non-Sanskritic roots and be overtaken in the vocabulary by Sanskrit words (pretty much for most "modern" concepts, objects etc). And Tamil remains as least influenced by even Sanskrit vocabulary. I do not believe that this is more than 3000 to 5000 years old. There was indeed a period when Dravidian languages covered most of India including areas where Sanskrit developed. In fact there is one Dravidian language that still survives in Pakistan. So there was a pre-Aryan period in India. I am using the word Aryan, straight out of Indian epics, not what the Western and Kerala-Bengali communist historians have written.

And my belief is that there was a period of Dravidian "invasion" (!) before the Aryan invasion that probably did not displace any existing population or their culture. These were people who migrated from Africa, even from before 5000-10000 BC, and went to various parts of Asia including India. They split away into a branch into southern India an east asia, from some place either to the North-west end of Himalayas or from the South-east end, after arriving from Africa and with significant genetic mutation too. The initial spread may have been from the north or south side of Himalayas (more possibly on the south side along the Ganga plain, which was more livable). My totally uncorroborated belief is that this migration split happened in the Bengal-Tripura coastal area with the people spreading into India to the south and west and to East Asia. I believe Bengali is the only Indian language with an exact in-between "a/o" sound (at the start of say "Amaresh") as does Korean (at the start of "eomma" - mother - the equivalent of the Tamil "amma"). The closest genetic markers of people in Kerala actually are probably found among Bangladesis. Well, this was all before Chinese culture/language developed and "Aryan" culture/language developed in the Saraswati valley. Then the spread of the Sanskrit culture and the Chinese culture pushed the initial languages to survive only among people at the tips of the Asian land mass - into South India and into the Korean peninsula. That explains the language connection. All just my theories. Unfounded, but it works. There is a lot more of genetics research into history these days and more will be known down the line that debunks a lot of the crap Western historians wrote about what happened in the world till say 2000 BC. (This theory would require that a proto-Tamil developed possibly in the Bengal-Tripura area way back, but that it was so far back that it couldn't survive at the area where so much cross-migration was happening over many millennia, even if it went away and survived elsewhere in S.India and Korea; I admit that I haven't researched this topic much at all, and I don't know if anybody has made such a theory)
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Re: Interesting thing I found....

Post by Atithee »

Jay, I can't comment on the theories of invasion but I'm glad that our own long lost "Dravidian from Irvine" has resurrected.
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