Tamil as an Indic language

[Richard W]

I've just been horrified to find that Wikipedia and Wiktionary think it is acceptable to regard Tamil (or for that matter, Malayalam) as an Indic language. Is the problem with me?

[Creyeditor]

What does Indic mean? Is it a Sprachbund/linguistic area?

[WeepingElf]

I once met a native speaker of Tamil who claimed that it was an IE language. Apparently, many Tamils assume that their language descends from Sanskrit (from which it has borrowed many words, but that doesn't make it an Indic language any more than the Norman French loanwords make English a Romance language), a misconception which seems to have a long history, and probably exists with other Dravidian languages as well. ("Indic" is a neologism for "Indo-Aryan" in order to avoid the compromised word "Aryan".)

[Linguoboy]

I've just been horrified to find that Wikipedia and Wiktionary think it is acceptable to regard Tamil (or for that matter, Malayalam) as an Indic language. Is the problem with me?

Which Wikipedia and which Wiktionary? I checked the English-language ones and they clearly identify it as a Dravidian language.

[zompist]

("Indic" is a neologism for "Indo-Aryan" in order to avoid the compromised word "Aryan".)

Minor point, but "Indic" is hardly a neologism— Merriam-Webster dates it to 1635. August Schleicher's 1861 diagram, which you can see here, has Indisch for the Indic languages, though he has "arisch" for Indo-Iranian.

Besides being tainted by misuses of the word "Aryan", "Indo-Aryan" is kind of a dumb term: what is the "Aryan" part supposed to contribute that "Indo-" does not?

[Rounin Ryuuji]

I had thought it was a holdover of an obsolete sense of the word meaning "Persian" or "Iranian".

[Richard W]

Which Wikipedia and which Wiktionary? I checked the English-language ones and they clearly identify it as a Dravidian language.

See the Wikipedia disambiguation page https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indic_languages and the Wiktionary definition. Apparently it is also in order to say that Romani is not an Indic macro-language, especially as it probably isn't descended from Sanskrit!

[Richard W]

Besides being tainted by misuses of the word "Aryan", "Indo-Aryan" is kind of a dumb term: what is the "Aryan" part supposed to contribute that "Indo-" does not?

Well it would seem that it contributes Indo-Europeanness, though more precisely Aryanhood. And now it would seem that I must say 'Indo-Aryan language' whereas before I could have said 'Indic language'.

[Travis B.]

Which Wikipedia and which Wiktionary? I checked the English-language ones and they clearly identify it as a Dravidian language.

See the Wikipedia disambiguation page https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indic_languages and the Wiktionary definition. Apparently it is also in order to say that Romani is not an Indic macro-language, especially as it probably isn't descended from Sanskrit!

Wouldn't strictly defining "Indic" as meaning "descended from Sanskrit" exclude at least most of the Indo-European languages of India, as most of them probably are not directly descended from Sanskrit but rather its (largely unattested) sister languages?

[Richard W]

Wouldn't strictly defining "Indic" as meaning "descended from Sanskrit" exclude at least most of the Indo-European languages of India, as most of them probably are not directly descended from Sanskrit but rather its (largely unattested) sister languages?

Yes, though I think that the word 'such as' formally turns the definition into gibberish. I'm now having to think whether Pontic Indic is indeed Indic or rather non-Iranian Indo-Iranian, Nuristani complicates the definition, and I really don't think a cladistic definition such as 'more closely related to Sanskrit than to Nuristani, Avestan or Old Persian' is particularly intelligible to the average reader.

[Richard W]

(Duplicate post)

[zompist]

Which Wikipedia and which Wiktionary? I checked the English-language ones and they clearly identify it as a Dravidian language.

See the Wikipedia disambiguation page https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indic_languages and the Wiktionary definition. Apparently it is also in order to say that Romani is not an Indic macro-language, especially as it probably isn't descended from Sanskrit!

I wouldn't use Wikipedia or Wiktionary as authoritative sources. Linguists are perfectly aware of the Prakrits.

Looking briefly through my linguistic books, I see Indic more often than Indo-Aryan, though Crystal and Ethnologue prefer the latter.

If a linguist uses "Indic" it's not going to mean "languages of India". (Which is more or less admitted by the Wikipedia page-- note that the "languages of India" bit is called colloquial, the IE bit is called scholarly.)

[Moose-tache]

I think Aryan would be a really useful term if it hadn't been ruined (both by Fascists and by linguists who use the term inconsistently). I did some reading and basic conlanging about them a while ago, and was surprised at how annoying it is to keep the two branches and combined branch distinct in writing, especially when using abbreviations. I would love to have I, A, and IA. But noooo, we can't have nice things. We have I, I, and II. Stupid.

[Richard W]

If a linguist uses "Indic" it's not going to mean "languages of India". (Which is more or less admitted by the Wikipedia page-- note that the "languages of India" bit is called colloquial, the IE bit is called scholarly.)

And how much of Wikipedia is an "Indo-European scholarly work"? No original research for starters. I've found the wider sense in use in an article on writing systems.

[zompist]

I would love to have I, A, and IA. But noooo, we can't have nice things. We have I, I, and II. Stupid.

Well, "Aryan" is pretty terrible as a word to distinguish Indic, as the Iranians called themselves Airya, and in fact the word is cognate to Iran.

But we can blame the Greeks for writing Ἰνδός instead of ῾Iνδός. If they'd used the latter, we'd have Hindic, so we could use I, H, and IH.

[missals]

I always assumed it was called Indo-Aryan to disambiguate it from the other languages of India, not to disambiguate it from Iranian. We have the languages of India, the "Indic" languages, primarily consisting of Dravidian and... the other one. The Indo-European one. Indian Indo-European? Indian Indo-Iranian? Instead, Indo-Aryan provides an appropriate disambiguation: The Indic languages that are Aryan; i.e. descended from Proto-Indo-Iranian, in which the endonym "Arya" was used.

[Linguoboy]

If a linguist uses "Indic" it's not going to mean "languages of India". (Which is more or less admitted by the Wikipedia page-- note that the "languages of India" bit is called colloquial, the IE bit is called scholarly.)

And how much of Wikipedia is an "Indo-European scholarly work"? No original research for starters. I've found the wider sense in use in an article on writing systems.

Yeah, it seems popular to use "Indic" to describe Brahmic scripts and from there it's a small leap to using "Indic" to categorise the languages written in those scripts. I guess this would be a bit like using "Latin" for languages written in the Latin script: a bit imprecise, but probably clear enough in context. (I've probably used "Cyrillic" that way in my library work before.)

[Travis B.]

I always assumed it was called Indo-Aryan to disambiguate it from the other languages of India, not to disambiguate it from Iranian. We have the languages of India, the "Indic" languages, primarily consisting of Dravidian and... the other one. The Indo-European one. Indian Indo-European? Indian Indo-Iranian? Instead, Indo-Aryan provides an appropriate disambiguation: The Indic languages that are Aryan; i.e. descended from Proto-Indo-Iranian, in which the endonym "Arya" was used.

I was under the same impression myself, that the Aryan in Indo-Aryan was to distinguish the Indo-European languages of India from the other Indian languages.

Too bad the Nazis ruined the term Aryan for the rest of us.

[Moose-tache]

I would love to have I, A, and IA. But noooo, we can't have nice things. We have I, I, and II. Stupid.

Well, "Aryan" is pretty terrible as a word to distinguish Indic, as the Iranians called themselves Airya, and in fact the word is cognate to Iran.

I assumed Indic + Aryan = Indo-Aryan was the only sensible solution. I guess I should have specified that Indic=Aryan never occurred to me because it's stupid.

[Richard W]

I would love to have I, A, and IA. But noooo, we can't have nice things. We have I, I, and II. Stupid.

Well, "Aryan" is pretty terrible as a word to distinguish Indic, as the Iranians called themselves Airya, and in fact the word is cognate to Iran.

But wasn't arya the Indo-Iranian ethnonym, even if Āryāvarta was restricted to the domain of the Brahmins, and ārya specialised to 'noble'?

But we can blame the Greeks for writing Ἰνδός instead of ῾Iνδός. If they'd used the latter, we'd have Hindic, so we could use I, H, and IH.

What, more sinning over Sindh?