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You might be interested in David McAlpin’s 2015 paper about Brahui, Elamite and Proto-Dravidian [0]. Some context: Brahui is a language spoken in Pakistan that

You might be interested in David McAlpin’s 2015 paper about Brahui, Elamite and Proto-Dravidian [0]. Some context: Brahui is a language spoken in Pakistan that’s been a bit of a mystery till David McAlpin solved it with the proto-zagrosian hypothesis. Brahui clearly looks like related to Dravidian, but didn’t fit into proto-dravidian or any reconstructed daughter languages of proto-dravidian. Simultaneously, the ancient language of Elamite looks a lot like Dravidian. (sidenote: there are cuneiform tablets written in elamite! Elam shows up prominently in the fall of Nineveh, the capital city of the super power of that era!) The problem was chronology- Brahui is clearly older than the later descendants of Proto-Dravidian. Elamite is far older than the descendants of Proto-Dravidian. The question was how these two languages fit into the Dravidian family tree. McAlpin’s 2015 hypothesis answers this question with a surprising and elegant idea: What if Brahui is related to Elamite instead of Dravidian? He found that the pieces fit really well when you treat Elamite and Brahui as sibling languages descended from a parent language: Proto-Elamite. Next, he finds that Proto-Elamite and Proto-Dravidian cleanly fit as siblings descended from a mother language that he calls Proto-Zagrosian. I’m not a linguist and I don’t know how well accepted this idea is among academic circles - but looking at this from outside, it seems to be a fairly well respected idea that’s being seriously considered by some academics. PS: I did a google search for Proto-Zagrosian and the second result was my own comment on HN from a long time ago. I really wish there was more people writing/blogging about this. [0]. https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C5&q=proto+zagrosian+hypothesis&oq=proto+zagrosian+hypoth#d=gs_qabs&u=%23p%3DksuxNJyhuWcJ https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C5&q=prot...

quadrifoliate 6y ago
That is interesting indeed! I skimmed over the paper, although most of it is too dense for me to understand. A proven connection between Dravidian and Elamite would kind of upend most perceived ideas in India about Dravidian versus Indo-European languages (namely, that Dravidian ones are more indigenous than Indo-European). Also, this is very likely just a coincidence, but I realized that the Tamil word for homeland is...Eelam [1]. ------------------------------------- [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eelam https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eelam
- selimthegrim 6y ago
  I thought that Southworth and McAlpin were kind of out there on their own with this hypothesis.

quadrifoliate 6y ago

That is interesting indeed! I skimmed over the paper, although most of it is too dense for me to understand. A proven connection between Dravidian and Elamite would kind of upend most perceived ideas in India about Dravidian versus Indo-European languages (namely, that Dravidian ones are more indigenous than Indo-European). Also, this is very likely just a coincidence, but I realized that the Tamil word for homeland is...Eelam [1]. ------------------------------------- [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eelam https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eelam

selimthegrim 6y ago
I thought that Southworth and McAlpin were kind of out there on their own with this hypothesis.