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COMPARISON
OF THE DRAVIDIAN * AND
GUANCHE LANGUAGES [Contacts] ----Please CLICK on underlined categories for detail [to search for Subject Matter, depress
Ctrl/F ]: Introduction
Guanche Toponyms & Theonyms Nyland's Comments In his
book, Linguistic Archaeology, Edo Nyland compared the Dravidian
language with that of Guanche. He
stated that, “Guanche is the name of the language
which was spoken by the native population of the Canary Islands until the
Spaniards came and massacred a large number of the inhabitants around 1,500
A.D. Mr. Arysio Nunes dos Santos discovered a relationship between Guanche
and Dravidian, similar to what the eminent linguist Dr. N. Lahovary had
described between Basque and Dravidian in his book: “Dravidian Origins and
the West. What we are likely dealing with in these languages is remnants of
the original language spoken in the Neolithic Sahara. This happened at the
time of the disastrous desertification of that part of the world (see Climate), which had scattered the population to almost all ocean shores
of the earth. That original language is not the same, of course, as the
Basque spoken today, but a much earlier form of it, without the invented,
formulaically enhanced VCV vocabulary added in. “ Nyland
also noted that a few linguists have identified a large number of languages
which also belong to this group: Numidian, Tuareg, Western Berber (Zenaga),
Northern Berber (Tamahac), Southern Berber (Tamazheq), Eastern Berber (Siwa,
Awjila-Sokna, Ghadames), Atlas (Shilha, Tamazight), Kabyle, Zenati (19
dialects) several of them still spoken. To this Neolithic group must also be
added the large group of Dravidian languages spoken in India by some 160
million people, the Ainu language of Northern Japan with 17,000 speakers and
Ancient Egyptian (extinct), including Coptic, which is still spoken as a
liturgical language. Even the Polynesian languages seem to fit in this group.
Nyland
found that Arysio Nunes collected as many Guanche words as possible and then
compared them with Dravidian. Dravidian equivalents were obtained from “A
Dravidian Etymological Dictionary” by T. Burrows and M.B. Emeneau (Oxford
1984). Arysio added that one should pay attention to the phonetic
correspondences only, disregarding the actual spelling, because of the
Dravidian alphabet being different from the Roman one adopted for the Guanche
language. It must be assumed that he did his work well, because Nyland was
unable to verify it. The condition
for using Arysio’s material is that the following address be cited:
Guanche
Toponyms and Theonyms (Interpretation in Dravidian) “The Dravidian etymologies for these names are tentative and are
offered as evidence of the explanatory power of that language.”
Nyland continued that “A similar
Guanche-Basque list could easily be made, e.g. achimencey (king’s relative)
relates to atxikidura (family relation), achaman (heaven) comes close
to akabu (death, supreme), ara (goat) and Basque aragi (meat),
kara (goat) and Basque kara (in heat), Arautapola (capital of the
Taoro kingdom) and Basque arautu (to legislate) etc. It looks to me
like Guanche is derived from the original, unmanipulated Saharan language,
just like Basque, Berber, Tuareg and Ainu.” EDO NYLAND’S
ADDITIONAL COMMENTS “Arysio Nunes dos Santos, the
author of the above word comparisons, expresses amazement at the fact that
Guanche and Dravidian, separated by such a huge gap in both time and space,
still resemble each other so closely. He attributes this to the fact that
both races were fairly well sheltered from alien contact and influence, the
Dravidians down to the present, the Guanches down to the extinction of their
culture at the end of the 15th century. He goes on to speak about
the relationship to the Aryan languages, which is where he and I part ways.
He is convinced that the Guanches were blond, blue-eyed people, just like the
Aryans and that they came from Java or Sumatra in Indonesia. Having been in
both these places, I can assure the reader that there are no blond, blue-eyed
and tall tribes in Indonesia that even remotely resemble the blond people of
Europe. “ “ I find it very hard to believe
that any of the original Guanches was blond and blue eyed. Virtually all
blond people are Rh-positive. The Berbers from Morocco are Rh-negative and
they have been sailing this part of the ocean for well over 12,000 years. The
nearest blond people were the Shardana from Cyrenaica (Kirru-unai-ika) in
eastern Libya and they concentrated their activities in the Black Sea, not
the Atlantic ocean. There is no evidence of these two very different races
mixing in the Canaries until the blond Spaniards arrived. It will take some
convincing to believe that the original Guanches were blond. Until then it
would be best to consider that they were dark-featured Berbers.” |
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For further detail, please
refer to:
Nyland, Edo. 2001. Linguistic Archaeology: AnIntroduction. Trafford Publ., Victoria, B.C., Canada.
ISBN 1-55212-668-4. 541 p. [
see abstract & summary]
Nyland, Edo. 2002.
Odysseus and the Sea Peoples: A
Bronze Age History of Scotland Trafford Publ., Victoria,
B.C., Canada. 307 p. [see abstract & summary].
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