- An important scholar in the comparison of Sumerian and Dravidian languages
I have come to know two important scholars and each of them had 500 words for the purpose of comparing two languages.
The first of these was Prof. A. Sathasivam, about whom Prof. T. Burrow of the University of Oxford’s Oriental Institute said in 1965: “Connections between Dravidian and various other linguistic families have been proposed from time to time, but Dr. Sathasivam breaks new ground in seeking to relate Dravidian with Sumerian.” The method employed was to compare items in the Dravidian Etymological Dictionary with Sumerian words, and some 500 of them had been selected for comparison.
The second important scholar was Prof. Susumu Ōno of the Department of Japanese Language and Literature, Faculty of Letters, Gakushuin University, Tokyo, who proposed that there was a deep relationship between ancient Tamil and Japanese languages. In a paper presented at an international conference and seminar in Madurai, India in 1983, he too chose some 500 words for comparison. Prof. Sathasivam was my teacher at the University of Ceylon from 1959, while my wife and I worked with Prof. Ōno in Tokyo from 1983 onwards to prove his hypothesis.
Dr. Caldwell has noticed certain affiliations between Dravidian and some world languages, but he has not mentioned anything about the Sumerian language. As early as in 1912, scholars had forwarded theories linking Sumerian with Dravidian.
Prof. Sathasivam noticed that Sumerian and Dravidian were agglutinative languages, and he also found that the Sumerian language as described in Sumerian grammar had identical features with those of prehistoric Tamil.
These features encouraged him to research the close relationship between the Sumerian language of Mesopotamia and the Dravidian languages of South India.
The research was carried out at the University of Pennsylvania and the University of California in the 1964–’65 period, during which he wrote the following research papers:
- ‘Sumerian – A Dravidian Language’
- ‘The Dravidian Origin of Sumerian Writing’
- ‘Affinities Between Dravidian and Sumerian’
- ‘Studies in Sumero-Dravidian Phonology’
These historically important papers have been edited by a person who has translated the Sumerian ‘Epic of Gilgamesh’ into Tamil. Dr. Siva Thiyagarajah is a multi-disciplinary academic who has specialised in prehistoric DNA studies. His connection with the Sumerian epic has given us an appropriately well-qualified academic to edit these papers and produce a book titled ‘Proto Sumero-Dravidian: The Common Origin of Sumerian and Dravidian Languages,’ published in 2017 by the History and Heritage Unit of the Tamil Information Centre in the UK.
In his paper ‘Sumerian – A Dravidian Language,’ the author has listed Dravidian cognates or correspondences for 501 selected Sumerian forms. It is amazing that some of those Dravidian cognates correspond neatly with Sumerian forms. I shall demonstrate just five examples in the given table, with Sumerian words in the first line and the corresponding Dravidian words in subsequent lines.
In the paper, Prof. Sathasivam has painstakingly collected more than 500 Sumerian lexical items and their corresponding Dravidian cognates. It is a goldmine for young researchers who are interested in comparative linguistic studies, and it is a pity that he did not live long to complete this valuable project.
When we started the research study on the Tamil-Japanese relationship, Prof. Ōno collected more than 500 Tamil-Japanese correspondences. He also had a team of researchers, namely, University of Madras Vice Chancellor Prof. Pon. Kothandaraman, Dr. S. Manonmani of Gakushuin University, and University of Jaffna Professor of Tamil A. Sanmugadas, to continue with the research. For Prof. Sathasivam, however, there were no academics to assist him continue the research project.
Prof. Sathasivam had been compiling an etymological dictionary of Sumero-Dravidian words from 1980 onwards, yet it was not completed on account of his untimely death and no one has undertaken to continue it thus far. Had that dictionary been completed, it would have guided many researchers to continue work on Prof. Sathasivam’s hypothesis.
Thirugnaneswar Sathasivam, wife of the late Professor, is the copyright holder of all of her husband’s writings. If someone or a team of researchers wish to continue with the etymological dictionary and complete it, she must grant permission to do so. Such a team would require at least one individual who is specialised in Sumerian.
My wife and I were Prof. Sathasivam’s students at the University of Ceylon. As much as we are interested in the Tamil-Japanese relationship, we are also interested in the Sumero-Dravidian relationship. We pray to Almighty God to give us a few academics who could undertake this work and prove Prof. Sathasivam’s hypothesis.
(The writer is an Emeritus Professor of Tamil of the University of Jaffna)
(The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the writer and do not necessarily reflect the official position of this publication)