Sunday Times 2
Prof. A. Sathasivam’s Sumerian–Dravidian scholarly legacy must endure
View(s):By Prof. A. Sanmugadas
I have come to know two important scholars, and each of them had 500 words to compare two languages. The first one was Prof. A. Sathasivam, about whom Prof. T. Burrow of the Oriental Institute of the University of Oxford 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 is to compare items in the Dravidian Etymological Dictionary with Sumerian words, and some 500 of them have been selected for comparison.
Prof. A. Sathasivam
The second one was Professor Susumu Ohno of the Department of Japanese Language and Linguistics, Faculty of Letters, Gakushuin University, Tokyo. He proposed that there is a deep relationship between ancient Tamil and Japanese languages. In his paper presented to the 5th International Conference held in Madurai, India, in 1983, he too chose some 500 words for comparison. Professor Sathasivam was my teacher at the University of Ceylon from 1959, but with Professor Susumu Ohno, my wife and I worked with him in Tokyo from 1983 to prove his hypothesis.
Dr Caldwell has noticed certain affiliations between Dravidian and some of the world’s languages. But he has not mentioned anything about the Sumerian language. As early as in 1912, scholars have forwarded theories linking Sumerian with Dravidian. Prof. Sathasivam noticed that Sumerian and Dravidian are agglutinative languages, and he also found that the Sumerian language as described in Sumerian grammars has identical features with those of prehistoric Tamil. These 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 from 1964 to 1965. He wrote the following research papers during this period:
1. Sumerian: A Dravidian Language
2. The Dravidian Origin of Sumerian Writing
3. Affinities Between Dravidian and Sumerian
4. Studies in Sumero-Dravidian Phonology
These historically important papers have been edited by a person who has translated the Sumerian epic Gilgamesh into Tamil. Dr Siva Thiyagarajah is a multidisciplinary academic who has specialised in prehistoric DNA studies. His connection with the Sumerian epic has given us an appropriate, well-qualified academic to edit these papers and to bring out the 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 on “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 am giving just five examples (Sumerian words are in the first line). Corresponding Dravidian words are given in all other lines:
Prof. Sathasivam has painstakingly collected more than 500 Sumerian lexical items and their corresponding Dravidian cognates. His findings are a gold mine for young researchers who are interested in comparative linguistic studies. It is a pity that he did not live long enough to complete this valuable project. When we started the research study on the Tamil-Japanese relationship, Professor Susumu Ohno also collected more than 500 Tamil-Japanese correspondences, and he had a team of researchers, namely, Prof. Pon. Kothandaraman (Vice Chancellor of the University of Madras), Dr S. Manonmani (Gakushuin University), and Prof. A. Sanmugadas (Professor of Tamil, University of Jaffna), to continue with the research. For Prof. Sathasivam there were no academics to assist him to continue the research project.
Prof. Sathasivam had been compiling an etymological dictionary of Sumero-Dravidian words since 1980. Because of his untimely death, it was not completed. So far no one has undertaken to continue the project. If that dictionary had been completed, it would have guided many researchers to continue to work on the Sathasivam Hypothesis.
His wife, Thirugnaneswar Sathasivam, is the copyright holder of all his writings. If someone or a team of researchers wants to continue with the Etymological Dictionary and complete it, she has to grant permission to do it. And the team must have at least one who is specialised in Sumerian. My wife and I were Prof. Sathasivam’s students at the University of Ceylon. As we are interested in the Tamil-Japanese relationship, we are also interested in the Sumerian-Dravidian relationship. We pray Almighty God to give us some academics who can undertake this work and prove Sathasivam’s Hypothesis.
(The writer is Emeritus Professor of Tamil, University of Jaffna.)