“A language is not just words. It is a culture, a tradition, a whole history that creates what a community is.” So said the linguist Noam Chomsky. This article attempts a few linguistic notes. Linguistics — the systematic study of languages — is a rigorous, exact science. I am not a linguist. I have no training in the field. The little I know is confined to research related to Kerala’s history. So, take the following words with a generous heaping of salt.
Malayalam is a relatively new language, perhaps even the newest among all the Dravidian languages of south India. The popular notion is that Malayalam is a mixture of Tamil and Sanskrit, with a sprinkling of a few loan words from other languages. This fallacy arose mainly because the first known literary texts from Kerala’s history (ca. 300 BCE — 300 CE) were penned in Tamil, whereas the earliest written record in Malayalam (as recognized today) was found only later, from a few copper plates dating to 849 CE. A Proto-Dravidian language, preserving some archaic elements not found in Tamil, is believed to have existed prior to 800 CE, from which Tamil and Malayalam evolved separately according to some scholars. Other scholars suspected that Malayalam originated independently from this Proto-Dravidian at a very early stage, having an existence independent of, and different from, Tamil since its earliest history.
Nevertheless, it is undisputed that Malayalam was reforged into Sanskritized form between 1300 and 1500 CE. Just prior to this period, native Malayalam evolved from its enigmatic roots into two types: one, called manipravalam was a mix of vernacular and Sanskrit, employed chiefly for poetic literature; and another, called pattu was a mixture with Tamil for less scholarly pursuits. Manipravalam borrowed heavily from Sanskrit, including its lexicon and grammar, and became the new face of Malayalam sometime after 1300 CE. Thunchath Ezhuthachan put the finishing touches around 1500 CE, completing the transformation of the language from its non-Hindu, non-Brahmanical roots to its present form.
Along the way, Malayalam lost many of its native phonemes to Sanskrit. Yet, as in other living languages, some words in Malayalam have persisted stubbornly with little change since ancient times. Such words find no compatriot in languages of neighboring regions, nor in Sanskrit. What is remarkable is that many of these orphaned words find a home in ancient Egyptian.
How can that possibly be considering the long passage of time that froze Egyptian and changed Malayalam? In stark contrast to Malayalam, ancient Egyptian is merely fossilized record; it is more than dead: it is extinct. There is no one alive who knows with certainty how words were spoken in everyday speech, nor how hieroglyphs on ancient temple and tomb walls, papyrus scrolls, and other archeological finds were pronounced, especially around the 3000–2000 BCE. Compounding the problem, a majority of vowels were not penned in hieroglyphs, leaving modern-day Egyptologists to fill in the gaps with sounds that suited their respective native tongues.
The written language of the Old Kingdom (ca. 3000–2200 BCE) was the oldest form of the Egyptian language. The majority of written materials surviving from this period are highly formal stilted language of monumental texts carved in stone (the Great Pyramids were built during this period). Documents on papyrus, more likely to reflect the language used on an everyday basis, are restricted to administrative texts, legal texts, and a few letters. Middle Egyptian, which followed after the Old Kingdom, was considered the classical language later on. These older forms, ca. 1700 BCE and earlier, are clubbed into ‘Old Egyptian’ in this article. Subsequent forms, called ‘Late Egyptian,’ deviated considerably from this classical form, although the hieroglyphs remained more or less unchanged until they disappeared after the Roman era between 400–600 CE. Vestiges of old Egyptian survive today only in the liturgy of the Coptic Church.
Yet, a cursory comparison of ancient Egyptian and Malayalam brings up several interesting patterns, among which are certain recurrent sound and consonant correspondences of Malayalam with Old Egyptian, but not its later forms. Such recurrent correspondences demonstrate relatedness of languages, suggesting a genealogical relation among them. For example, [m] in Egyptian corresponds to [m] in Malayalam; Egyptian [k], [q] and [kh] correspond to Malayalam [k]; Egyptian [ḥ] (a consonantal voiceless pharyngeal fricative sound) corresponds to Malayalam [zh]; and so on. I have collected many examples of these sound correspondences and since it is not possible to satisfactorily fit them all into one short commentary, I will be writing about them in several forthcoming articles.
Another linguistic parallel is the consonant correspondence within Egyptian that has been carried over into Malayalam. An example is [k]:[ch]; in other words, [k] corresponds to [ch] in certain synonymous words in both languages. Thus, in Egyptian, chrd ‘child’ was also khrd; in Malayalam, cheri ‘assembly’ is also keri; kera, a version of Kerala, is also chera, from which the name of the Chera dynasty derives. Another correspondence is [s]:[ch] in Egyptian, an example in Malayalam being sevakan and chevakan, ‘servant.’ Yet another is [th]:[ch], as in Malayalam words thittu and chittu, ‘document;’ pithala, and pichala, ‘brass;’ [th]:[s] as in tuchi and suchi, ‘needle;’ [th]:[ss]:[ch], for example, thiru: ssiru ‘revered;’ ssathan: chathan, ‘ghoul;’ arassu: arachu, ‘king.’
There is also slurring of certain consonants in Malayalam — such as [k] pronounced as [g];[t] or [th] pronounced as [d] or [dh] — which is not allowed in Sanskrit but ties to certain synonymous words in Egyptian having the slurred consonant. For example, some words pronounced with a [b] in Egyptian, e.g., bn, ‘palm tree,’ corresponds to synonymous words pronounced with [p] in Malayalam, e.g., pana, ‘palm tree.’ In another example, kfa ‘taxes’ in Egyptian and kappam ‘taxes’ in Malayalam, with the additional of a Sanskrit inflectional ending [-m], an example of samskritikrita — Sanskritizing native words (kappa is an example of a word also found in three major south Indian languages-Tamil, Telugu, and Kannada). Sd ‘cut’ in Egyptian may be cheth ‘cut’ in Malayalam; grg ‘snare’ in Egyptian may be kuruk ‘snare’ in Malayalam, and so on.
What about words that not only have phonetic similarity and sound correspondence but are also semantically identical, suggesting the same lexicon? One such example — a microscopic segment — from among the many I have collected are words formed by two consonants [p] and [r]. Malayalam (along with other Dravidian languages) and Old Egyptian have an abundance of words with different phonetics and semantics formed of these two consonants, a few of which are presented below.
And last, but not least, perumal ‘king’ in Malayalam probably derives from pr-aal ‘king’ in ancient Egyptian, but this last analogy is controversial and requires a whole another commentary on the vulture hieroglyph 𓄿!
Thus, behind the relatively thin facade of Malayalam’s fresh, ever-shifting face could lie an ancient tongue, among the oldest in the world, its words preserved almost intact like a living fossil, containing therein the roots of man’s earliest civilized history. At the risk of sounding sentimental, in the names of Kerala’s towns, in the words used to describe its past administration, society, and people, in the rhetoric of its politicians today, one can hear, if one listens closely enough, the language of the ancient pharaohs who built the Great Pyramids.
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