Word: dravidian
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...doesn't help that, though long dead, the Harappan script sparks sometimes acrimonious debate in India over the nature of its origins. Scholars from southern India claim it ought to be linked to proto-Dravidian, the progenitor of languages like Tamil, while others think it is related to the Vedic Sanskrit of early Hinduism, the ancestor of Hindi and other languages spoken in India's north. And while cultural agendas within India have stymied collaborative efforts, the enmity between India and Pakistan has impeded archaeological breakthroughs. Ganeriwala, a desert site in Pakistan that possibly holds the ruins...
...pretext for the takeover was that the ousted government of Chief Minister Muthuvel Karunanidhi was guilty of "acts of maladministration, corruption and misuse of power for partisan ends." The more probable cause was the prospect of state elections. In Tamil Nadu's assembly, Karunanidhi's Dravidian Progress Party, a populist movement dedicated to social reform and greater state autonomy, held a commanding majority. The assembly's tenure was due to expire March 21, and Mrs. Gandhi did not want to extend its life. Apparently she feared that any election-state or national-during the emergency might turn...
...improbable wedding of the Middle East and Southeast Asia. The tall, light-skinned Punjabis, Pathans, Baluchis and Sindhis of West Pakistan are descendants of the Aryans who swept into the subcontinent in the second millennium B.C. East Pakistan's slight, dark Bengalis are more closely related to the Dravidian people they subjugated. The Westerners, who eat wheat and meat, speak Urdu, which is written in Arabic but is a synthesis of Persian and Hindi. The Easterners eat rice and fish, and speak Bengali, a singsong language of Indo-Aryan origin...
...party split leaves Indira some 40 seats short of a majority in the Lok Sabha (lower house of Parliament), she intends to try to remain in power. For the time being, at least, she seems assured of sufficient support. She commands the backing of the 25 members of the Dravidian Advancement Party, a regional grouping that seeks south Indian independence. She also has the support of 23 independents. If these pledges hold-as expected-Indira will not have to rely on the Communist votes to remain in power, and her minority government is given an even chance of surviving until...
...Basque language [Sept. 6] has intrigued me ever since I heard of Maurice Ravel's pride in his ability to speak this mysterious tongue. But there now exists a work which offers an explanation of its origin that is as intriguing as the former mystery: Dravidian Origins and the West, by N. Lahovary. The author offers phonetic, lexical and morphological evidence for close links between the Basque language and Dravidian, an Indian language. He concludes that these languages are members of an ancient pre-Hamito-Semitic family whose single origin and single center of diffusion is the Near East...