Dr. Madhusudan Mishra
Dr. Madhusudan Mishra
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ABOUT
THE AUTHOR |
By the writing of the 3rd part, the body of the language of the Indus inscriptions was recognised. It was as lively as more than 5000 years ago, being nothing more or less than the syllables of the Mahesvarasutras with all the vowels and possible ligatures, without any trace of grammar or morphology. With such a simple and primitive language, the Indus people administered the whole empire. The cases could be recognised by the position of the words and the tenses and moods through the context. It was a wonderful language of the wonderful people in the wonderful country. We can imagine the extent of the empire whose inscriptions have been found even as far east as Vaishali in Bihar. By the time of the writing of the inscriptions, the language had gradually moved to the agglutinative stage by the appearance of at least three affix elements. There are three scripts used in the inscriptions. The writing started with the animal figures, gradually moved to the geometrical figures and, when the qualities and the places of utterance of the sounds were exactly determined, the artificial numeral script was invented. The same number, 2 e.g., appear in six forms, namely 87, 99, 100, 101, 294 and 313 for six types of phonemes, namely ra,Ha,ka Da,Na and i respectively, which is a wonder. The language presents clauses of a few kinds : s + v, s + o +v, oblique-case + s + v. and their manipulations, all not attested. For example, gA (goes) va (into the stable), also known to the Sanskrit grammarians (who said : gacchati iti gauH),is not attested. From gAva-, there was the dual gAva-ha (becoming gAva-h,then gAvA) and the pl. gAva-Sa (becoming gAva-s,then analysed as gAv-as in Sanskrit). Of course, these facts are not included in the 3rd part. It is an after -thought. Some of the texts read and interpreted are the following : ta na Sa , va Na Sa, sha ma yo Sa,ca na Sa, and some other doubtful ones. The Indus syllable gra 8 reflects in many English and German words beginning with gl-. In Sanskrit, it is kra- and in Latin cl-. This led to the identification of 47 dha and 48 dhe or dhi; 134 i is used diacritically in 41 ri. Some rare vedic words are also seen in the Indus texts. Then 127 bha,155 gha,186 pa and 74 ta were recognised. Mahadevan has treated 174 and 175 sha as two signs. They are just variants. Similarly, 347 and 258 ka, 261 and 373 ca are variants. 267 and 391 ci are duplicates. |
 BOOKS ON DECIPHERMENT |
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INDUS SCRIPT 2001-02 Site Concept By Sumit Mishra |
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