The Origins of Indians : Version 3.2

The Phallic Worship:
In one of my previous posts, I had argued that phallic worship could have been originated from Sino-Tibetan/Austro-Asiatic people present in India's north-east and east. My argument stems from the fact that neither Dravidian tribes nor IE tribes practice phallic worship and it's observed among Sino-Tibetan people of Nepal and north-east India. Now I suppose its presence among Austro-Asiatics could be because of contact with Sino-Tibetans.

However, genetic studies hardly show the presence of Sino-Tibetan marker O3a5 among Indians.

I was trying to find the etymology of liGga (phallus). I found many of the Sino-Tibetan languages have the term for penis starting with 'li' or 'le'. I thought that is close enough if we consider the phallic worship is borrowed from Sino-Tibetans.

When I was going thro' some of the branches, 'Kiranti', covering the people of Nepal, caught my eye. I suppose Kirantis are identified with non-Vedic tribes called Kiratas. What surprised me is the branches named 'Tulung, 'Kaling' under Kiranti. Who are these people? That Tulung is close to 'Telang' and 'Tulu' Dravidian groups of South India. Kaling is close to Kalinga (Orissans) of east India.

I tried to recollect Kannada terms for penis. tuNNe, kuNNe, cummi, bulli are the ones I know of. Off these cummi, I suppose, means genital. But I guess bulli is a borrow from Telugu. As the online dictionary shows 'bulla' is observed only among Telugus. Interestingly, Tulung term for penis is 'ble'. Now, how close it is to Telang 'bulli'? We have to remember again, core Dravidian words in Telugu would always show initial 'v' sound and not 'b' sound. I have already argued that any discrepancy for this rule must be viewed from foreign origin angle.

Probably, I need to change Austro-Asiatic over lordship of Dravidian tribes with Sino-Tibetan ones.

But how did these Sino-Tibetans become so successful in spreading their phallic worship to Hinduism? Of course, success in religious sphere need not necessarily mean success in spreading their genepool. However, what was the strong feature that is responsible for this phenomenon?


Request to readers: If you know anything about Tulung and Kaling tribes of Kirantis then please drop few words.

Notes on Dravidian Words - iiia

I have to make a major correction in the sound changes that I discussed in my last post.

Coastal Dravidian route:(Tulu->Malayalam->north-western Tamil Nadu)
alveolar approximant r -> alveolar trill/tap r (Tulu)
alveolar approximant r/alveolar trill/tap r -> retroflex approximant r/retroflex palatal approximant r -> palatal approximant y (Malayalam,Tamil, few other SD-I tribal languages)

Correction to the following:

During SD-I and SD-II split, alveolar approximant r, might have given rise to an allophone alveolar plosive d. Which became retroflex plosive in SD-II languages. But I think this should have happened with a big chunk of SD-I speakers too.

alveolar approximant r -> alveolar plosive d -> retroflex plosive D

I think it should be;
alveolar approximant r->retroflex flap r->retroflex plosive (another group of allophones)

On a side note, this is what I found about Burrow, Emeneau and Krishnamurti's Dravidian etymology Dictionary.

Our understanding of Dravidian is strongly related to the Dravidian etymological dictionary of Burrow and Emeneau (1984 and online). However, this is very Tamil-centric and the literature constantly confuses its head entries with proto-Dravidian (e.g. Krishnamurti 2003).
-Roger Blench

My understanding is that Tamil literature might have preserved the words that would have lost in other languages. Also, it might have preserved the cases and other grammatical structures that are no longer used. However, when it comes to consonant sound changes(vowel sound changes aren't all that important), the old Tamil literature cannot be referred as the sounds are native to a geographical region.

Acknowledgments:
Commenter Varttik (who doesn't agree with this anyway).