30 South Asia: Dravidian linguistic history

Southworth, Franklin C.; McAlpin, David W.

doi:10.1002/9781444351071.wbeghm830

Cited by 2 publications

(2 citation statements)

References 7 publications

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“…The evidence from Yanghai in Xinjiang might suggest that the dispersed variety could have been the drug form. Dispersal into South Asia from Central Asia for cannabis drug cultivars is also inferred on linguistic grounds, as argued on the basis of occurrences of cognate terms in Iranian and Indic languages, implying loans into Indo-Iranian, which Witzel ( 1999 , 2005 ), Southworth ( 2005 ) and Southworth and McAlpin ( 2014 ) suggest may have been from a lost Central Asia language: this includes the terms śaṇa and bhaṅgá ( Persian šan and bhanga ). Witzel ( 2005 ) also suggests an original central Asian source * k’an , which would also evolve into ganja , Kirgiz kandir , Old Russian Church Slavic konoplja , and Greek kánnabis.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Morphometric approaches to Cannabis evolution and differentiation from archaeological sites: interpreting the archaeobotanical evidence from bronze age Haimenkou, Yunnan

Dal Martello,

Min,

Stevens

et al. 2023

Veget Hist Archaeobot

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Cannabis grains are frequently reported from archaeological sites in Asia, and hypothesized centers of origins are China and Central Asia. Chinese early cannabis remains are often interpreted as evidence of hemp fabric production, in line with early textual evidence describing ritualistic hemp cloth use and hemp cultivation as a grain crop. Modern measurements on cannabis varieties show distinct sizes between fibre or oil/fibre and psychoactive varieties, the former having larger seeds on average than the latter. This paper reviews the current macro-botanical evidence for cannabis across East, Central and South Asia and builds a comparative framework based on modern cannabis seed measurements to help identify cannabis use in the past, through the metric analysis of archaeologically preserved seeds. Over 800 grains of cannabis were retrieved from the 2008 excavation of Haimenkou, Yunnan, Southwest China, dating to between 1650 and 400 bc. These are compared with other known archaeological cannabis and interpreted through the metric framework. This offers a basis for exploration of the seed morphometrics potential to infer cannabis cultivation and diversification in uses. At Haimenkou, cannabis seeds size mostly plot in the range of overlapping psychoactive/fibre types; we therefore suggest that the cannabis assemblage from Haimenkou is indicative of a crop beginning to undergo evolution from its early domesticated form towards a diversified crop specialized for alternative uses, including larger oilseed/fibre adapted varieties.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Morphometric approaches to Cannabis evolution and differentiation from archaeological sites: interpreting the archaeobotanical evidence from bronze age Haimenkou, Yunnan

Dal Martello,

Min,

Stevens

et al. 2023

Veget Hist Archaeobot

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“…But it could at least be a useful guide against any version with an assumption of a foreign origin from a non-farming population. For example, one account believes that proto-Dravidians originated from Africa and moved to the western part of Iran and the Near East where they also developed Elamo-Dravidian language (McAlpin, 1980(McAlpin, , 1981Southworth and McAlpin, 2013), and from there, they 32 spread to the Indian subcontinent via Balochistan and the Indus Valley, giving birth to great civilizations (Winters, 2008(Winters, , 2012. A slightly different view is that Iran is the birthplace and original homeland of Dravidian languages (Palanichamy et al, 2015;Quintana-Murci et al, 2001).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Post-focus compression in Brahvi and Balochi

Syed

Shah

et al. 2022

Phonetica

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Previous research has shown that post-focus compression (PFC) — the reduction of pitch range and intensity after a focused word in an utterance, is a robust means of marking focus, but it is present only in some languages. The presence of PFC appears to follow language family lines. The present study is a further exploration of the distribution of PFC by investigating Brahvi, a Dravidian language, and Balochi, an Indo-Iranian language. Balochi is predicted to show PFC given its presence in other Iranian languages. Dravidian languages have not been studied for prosodic focus before and they are not related to any languages with PFC. We recorded twenty native speakers from each language producing declarative sentences in different focus conditions. Acoustic analyses showed that, in both languages, post-focus f 0 and other correlates were significantly reduced relative to baseline neutral-focus sentences, but post-focus lowering of f 0, and intensity was greater in magnitude in Balochi than in Brahvi. The Balochi results confirm our prediction, while the Brahvi results offer the first evidence of PFC in a Dravidian language. The finding of PFC in a Dravidian language is relevant to a postulated origin of PFC, which is related to the controversial Nostratic Macrofamily hypothesis.

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30 South Asia: Dravidian linguistic history

Cited by 2 publications

References 7 publications

Morphometric approaches to Cannabis evolution and differentiation from archaeological sites: interpreting the archaeobotanical evidence from bronze age Haimenkou, Yunnan

Morphometric approaches to Cannabis evolution and differentiation from archaeological sites: interpreting the archaeobotanical evidence from bronze age Haimenkou, Yunnan

Post-focus compression in Brahvi and Balochi

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