Is Punjabi 5500 years old?

[GurjantGnostic]

Fantastic bro. This makes so much sense. Great find and great share. 

[GurjantGnostic]

[shastarSingh]

Another wonderful book by pyara Singh Padam

https://sikhbookclub.com/Book/Gurmukhi-Lipi-Da-Itihas

https://archive.org/details/GurmukhiLipiDaItihas

[dallysingh101]

Quote

The first Chapter deals with deciphering of symbols of Harappa people inscribed on different pots or on walls. Dr. Mayell gives 11 reasons for Punjabi to be 5,500 years old:

If he really has deciphered the symbols it's significant. No one else has managed after trying for a long time. 

[shastarSingh]

On 2/7/2022 at 9:59 PM, shastarSingh said:

The oldest use of Panjabi language is the Rig Veda. Cerebral sounds in Rig Veda are found in no other indo European or Indo Aryan languages, like ਟ, ਠ, ਡ, ਢ, ਣ, ੜ. Therefore Rig Veda is considered the first Panjabi literary creation of the Aryans. Though I can’t fully agree to that but it cannot be denied that Panjabi language was prevalent in Panjab before the advent of the Aryans and that Panjabi greatly influenced Vedic languages. There is also a lot of influence of Dravidian languages over Panjabi who share common words with Panjabi, example ਮੀਨ which means Fish, ਡੌਲਾ meaning shoulder, ਠੁਠ meaning thumb, ਢੂਈ meaning back have all been taken from Dravidian languages. An ear ring is called Muruk in Dravidian languages while in Panjabi it’s called Murki ਮੁਰਕੀ. [1]

The ਲ਼ is totally lost in modern Sanskrit but Tamil, Telugu, Kannada, Malayalam and Panjabi still use it. The words ਪਕੌੜਾ and ਵੜੇ are found in both Tamil and Panjabi. Some might argue that it’s same in Hindi but the Hindi language has no sound as same as Panjabi letter ੜ. As shown below the Hindi corresponding letter has a Ń sound than Ra sound. [2]

So much so that Panjab University in its bulletin (page 3–5) in 1968 claimed that Panjabi is descendant of pre-aryan and Porto-Dravidian languages and is thus the oldest language of India. The language of Rig Veda is similar to Avesta, which is a language of Iran during 2500–3000BC. Some Philologists claim Avesta to be the derivation of the Vedic languages. The similarity between the two languages can be seen below:[3]

Name of some gods and rivers can be found in both languages like Indra, Vayu, Mitra. Both Rig Veda and Avesta literatures name some of the languages of the then current languages of Panjab, out of which Dravidian is the one. Vedic language or Vedic Sanskrit had 39 consonants and 13 vowels, three genders, three numbers and five tenses. The sentence structure was similar to present day Panjabi. At one time Rig Veda was the spoken language of Panjab but soon it’s literary form was forbidden to ordinary people especially Dravidian by Brahmins, who started calling it Sanskrit (refined or perfected language). While the language of the normal people was called Paishachi (hateful or vulgar). As Dr. Chatterji says: [4]

“It is an interesting possibility that the Panjabi language is not Aryan in its content but its source lies in the language which was spoken in these areas before the advent of Aryans”

 

Modern Panjabi has reduced consonants to 35, the vowels are 13, the Gender and number are 2 and tenses are 3, but there are thousands of words in Rig Veda which Panjabi has faithfully retained since last 5000 years and are being used even now. [5]

The Uvular ਲ਼ is only found in Rig Veda although it’s frequency is not same as other sounds, and isn’t used in Sanskrit at all, but surprisingly is a common in Panjabi like ਬੋਲ਼ਾ meaning deaf, and many more like ਕਾਲ਼ਾ , ਸਾਲ਼ਾ, ਕਮਲ਼ਾ, ਰੌਲ਼ਾ etc.

 

There is also great similarity between Vedic language and Panjabi in terms of names of body parts and near relatives. [6]

 

Dally Singh veerji

What do you say about the Punjabi sounds in rig Veda?

[dallysingh101]

1 hour ago, shastarSingh said:

Dally Singh veerji

What do you say about the Punjabi sounds in rig Veda?

Bhai ji that topic is well over my head. I do think that Panjab, as evidenced by Harappa, was likely a cradle of civilisation long before many other places though. 

[proactive]

On 2/7/2022 at 2:57 PM, shastarSingh said:

 

Its interesting but I doubt we would be able to prove that Punjabi as a language is 5500 years old. Probably the best we could do is to push it back to 500 AD or thereabouts. That would make it 300 years older than English the world language and this would be a great achievement. But what it does show is we have allowed ourselves to be propagandised by others and we have allowed their biased perception of Punjabi being a crude language to persist for many decades. Also the eagerness with which we have allowed the two foreign scripts such as Shahmukhi and to a lesser degree Devanagari to be considered Punjabi scripts has been downright criminal on our part. For Shahmukhi we allowed the falsehood that before Gurmukhi, Punjabi was written in Shahmukhi script by the Sufis. Nothing could be further from the truth, for instance the first written copies of Waris Shah's Heer in Persian script on the orders of a former Durbari in Maharaja Ranjit Singh's court in the 1850s. Prior to that there are copies of the text in Gurmukhi. The Sufis were an oral tradition and their compositions were memorised and recited and not written down. Probably the first ever writing of a Sufi was Baba Farid's Bani in Gurmukhi in the Guru Granth Sahib. 

During the British times, they recorded literacy according to language by knowledge of it's script. Gurmukhi was tied to Punjabi, Nastaliq with Urdu and Devanagari with Hindi. They never considered there was such as script as Shahmukhi and the very name imitating the name Gurmukhi shows it is of recent vintage. This acceptance of Shahmukhi script has led to Punjabi being one of the few languages in the world to have two mutually unintelligible scripts. 

[dallysingh101]

@shastarSingh

You asked repeatedly, so I'll give you my opinion. 

Is Panjabi 5500 years old? 

I can't say for certain, but I don't think so. Here are some of the reasons. 

Languages can change vastly within even a few centuries. Look at how english was for instance in Chauncer's Cantebury Tales compared to now. Even William Shakespeare's stuff in largely unintelligible to modern working class english readers.

If you look at many old manuscripts from ye olde england, they are the same. 

And this country has had infinitely less invasions than Panjab. Languages are really subject to change and adaptation. Even more so through repeated periods of tumult. But even without this they naturally seem to change.  We can see with the language of Baba Nanak ji's Jap ji Sahib, which is Panjabi, how different it is to modern Panjabi.  

BUT, if we are saying some phonemes (i.e. elemental sounds) of the language of that time (5500 years ago) have survived and are preserved in the Gurmukhi alphabet - then I think that is more plausible. I think that is perhaps what the article is saying? 

One thing is certain though, just judging from the structuring of the Gurmukhi alphabet script (and indeed other similar Indic scripts), the knowledge of sound and linguistics was shockingly advanced in ancient India. By this I mean how they structured the alphabet so concisely in term of aspiration, voiced sounds, nasal sounds etc.      If they could preserve Sanskrit so reasonably well over such a time period, they could have easily done the same for Panjabi. 

[shastarSingh]

34 minutes ago, dallysingh101 said:

BUT, if we are saying some phonemes (i.e. elemental sounds) of the language of that time (5500 years ago) have survived and are preserved in the Gurmukhi alphabet - then I think that is more plausible. I think that is perhaps what the article is saying? 

Veerji

I had a talk with a nice nirmala scholar some time back.

He told me that Sanskrit of Vedas is very very different from Sanskrit 1500 years ago and present day Sanskrit is very different from Sanskrit 1500 years ago.

But still all these three versions belong to the same language called Sanskrit.

Same way Punjabi spoken before rig veda must be very different from present day Punjabi but still both are versions of the same language called Punjabi.

May be some nice linguist can tell what parameters actually define a language.

No doubt ALL languages change over time but some finish off while some survive.

I personally feel Punjabi existed before rig veda and Punjabi is a great language.

[dallysingh101]

13 minutes ago, shastarSingh said:

Veerji

I had a talk with a nice nirmala scholar some time back.

He told me that Sanskrit of Vedas is very very different from Sanskrit 1500 years ago and present day Sanskrit is very different from Sanskrit 1500 years ago.

But still all these three versions belong to the same language called Sanskrit.

Same way Punjabi spoken before rig veda must be very different from present day Punjabi but still both are versions of the same language called Punjabi.

May be some nice linguist can tell what parameters actually define a language.

No doubt ALL languages change over time but some finish off while some survive.

Yeah, veer ji. That's why I was reluctant to answer before. I'm under no illusion, I don't have near enough knowledge of this topic to give any solid answer. I don't know if anyone has? 

I think the question we need to ask is maybe a different one? 

What were the people who inhabited the region now know as Panjab like centuries/millennia ago? 

The Harappa script is characterised thus: 

The Indus script (also known as the Harappan script) is a corpus of symbols produced by the Indus Valley Civilization. ... He also found that the average inscription contained five symbols and that the longest inscription contained only 26 symbols.

 

• Harappan Script was pictographic in nature.
• This script is very confusing and it has not been deciphered yet.
• It is also the earliest known script of the Indian Script.
• This script had illustrations/symbols, representing ideas,objects and words.

 

It doesn't seem to be precursor to the Indic scripts we have now? People with serious brains put them together - that much is evident.