This lexicon is a tribute to the brilliant work done by etymologists and scholars of Indian linguistics, and to a number of scholars who have contributed to unravelling the enigma of the Indus (Sarasvati-Sindhu) Script and to the study of ancient Indian science and technology. The area spanned is a geographical region bounded by the Indian ocean on the south and the mountain ranges which insulate it from other regions of the Asian continent on the north, east and west. The lexicon seeks to establish an areal 'Indian' language type, by establishing semantic concordance among the so-called Indo-Aryan, Dravidian and Munda languages. This belies the received wisdom of cleavage between, for example, the Dravidian or Munda and the Aryan languages. The basic finding is that thousands of terms of the Vedas, the Munda languages (e.g., Santali, Mundarica, Sora), the so-called Dravidian languages and the so-called Indo-Aryan languages have common roots. The work covers over 8,000 semantic clusters which span and bind the Indian languages. This lexicon, therefore, goes beyond, the commonly held belief of an Indo-European language and is anchored on proto-Indian sememes. A semantic structure binds the languages of India, which may have diverged morphologically or phonologically as evidenced in the oral tradition of Vedic texts, or epigraphy, literary works or lexicons of the historical periods. This lexicon seeks to establish a semantic concordance, across the languages or numraire facile of the Indian linguistic area: from Brahui to Santali to Bengali, from Kashmiri to Mundarica to Sinhalese, from Marathi to Hindi to Nepali, from Sindhi or Punjabi or Urdu to Tamil. This is a comparative study of lexemes of all the languages of India (which may also be referred to, in a geographical/historical phrase, as the Indian linguistic area). The book also provides a useful reference work all on its own with previously unpublished information about the speakers’ ethnic identities and their culturally significant plants, animals, deities, and material culture.ġ Indian Lexicon: An introduction Discovering the language of India circa 3000 B.C. In addition, most entries have an example of usage in a sample sentence, notes on cultural significance, and meticulously studied etymologies. The dictionary book provides a full set of information about entries, including a provenance of which speech community uses the word, its part of speech, and its gloss in English, Nepali, and Kumauni. Jana Fortier presents the first dictionary to document the language of the Raute and Rawat with a dictionary composed not only of word entries, but of the vocabulary of lives lived in close relationship to a forested home, one which may become obsolete in the near future as farming communities convert the forests to fields and pressure the Raute and Rawat to assimilate. Their conservative mother tongues contain a wealth of non-agrarian ideas and concepts which may prove critically important for a better understanding of the early history and migration of peoples living across sub-tropical regions of Asia. Ranging from semi-nomadic to full-time nomads, all the speech communities have not previously had a traditional economy based on farming or pastoralism. Spoken in the central Himalayan region, Raute and Rawat are two endangered Sino-Tibetan languages spoken by forest foragers, people whose economy is based on monkey hunting, yam and tuber gathering, and trade of their wooden carved bowls to outsiders.
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