You also find all these sounds in most variants of Norwegian and Swedish. Most of them are a contraction of rt, rd, rl, rs. But this does not hold for all instances, and these combinations are not contracted to retroflexes always either. By the way, in many variants of English you can hear the same, for example in words like hard, heart, smart, without the r being pronounced separately.
Pashto acquired certain retroflex sounds from contact with Lehnda, over the past millennium. It only native developed n and r retroflexes. It’s also not an Indian language, it’s Eastern Iranic and is derivative of Avestan.
Yes there very much are. Some Australian Aboriginal languages tend to have quite a few, depends on the language but they often have /ɳ/ /ʈ/ /ɭ/ /ɻ/ Russian and some other Slavic languages have two retroflex fricatives - /ʂ/ and /ʐ/ (represented in Cyrillic with ш and ж). Standard Chinese has four, /ʈʂ/ /ʈʂʰ/ /ʂ/ /ɻ~ʐ/, represented in Pinyin with zh, ch, sh, r. Though in some areas these have merged with alveolar sounds. Swedish and Norwegian have them when r combines with another typically alveolar consonant, where they both combine to make one single retroflex sound. Some American and Irish English dialects have [ɻ] as their realisation of the "r" sound. There are probably many more examples, these are just the first that come to mind. One notable aspect though is retroflex plosives and nasals seem cross-linguistically more rare than retroflex fricatives and approximants outside of South Asia and Australia.
i like how no one thinks about how the categorization of languages in the first place into aryan and dravidian was wrong and all indian languages have common roots.
In my accent of somewhat northern swedish accent words ending with r often merge with the first letter of the next word. So "är det bra" often becomes " Ä-ɖet bra", and "jag ser träd" becomes "jag se-ʈräd". I think that is pretty cool
1:42 amazing to think that Burushaski, a language spoken by a small population in north Pakistan can possibly have such an incredible and profound influence on all south asian languages. This language is one of the few remaining languages which still retain the features of retroflexive affricate sounds.
Very nice. Who cares about such how "risible to the Western world" it might appear (7:05)? Better to avoid such statements and just stick to objective readings of the rich and fascinating history of South Asian languages.
There isn't anything "weird" about retroflex consonants, except inside the head of racist European anthropologists who just perceive those sounds that way and deliberately wanted to attribute them to a "Dravidian substratal influence". To Indians, excessive usage of fricatives as in the Semitic languages sounds extremely ugly - that doesn't mean that all fricatives in all languages anywhere in the world are a "Semitic influence". It's mostly nonsense - this entire paradigm of Western linguistics is full of racist BS. And I say this after having followed this pseudoscientific field for over 20 years. Except for the field of phonetics, Western linguistics is pure bunkum. The actual linguistics is of Panini (पाणिनि) and Bhartrhari (भतृहरि), who studied the origin of sounds and their inter-relation with other aspects of human existence.
The old Pathan substrate, which I would like to call pre-Haraxvati substrate, also probably had retroflex sounds and extended to Bactria and Margia, through which the early Indo-Aryan speakers very likely travelled in their journey from the southern Ural/northern steppes to Punjab/Saptasindhava.
Pathan and other Iranian languages are much younger compared to Indo-aryan languages, even if from the same source. But, Iranian languages have undergone a significant amount of changes unlike Indo-aryan languages, from its parent source.
I can't follow your reasoning when you say "If Indo-Aryan did gain retroflexes from Dravidian, then the retroflex sibilant must've been the feature that was copied". That seems to come out of nowhere. I recognize that you're comparing a few different hypotheses but the chain of reasoning isn't clear. Regardless of whether the internal changes generated the retroflex sibilant, isn't it more likely that IA copied the 4 Dravidian retroflexes? When you refer to the hypothesis of Dravidian "catalyzing" IA retroflexes, where is the mechanism? In the scenario where the internal changes generated a retroflex sibilant and that "triggered" the other retroflexes, that seems to a purely IA-internal development without any involvement of Dravidian.
On a separate point, you show the IA retroflexion zone in a certain range of North India in contrast to the location of Dravidian in South India, as if it were an argument against areal transfer from Dravidian to IA, but I understand that to be an argument for such transfer, not against it, given the most likely scenario that Dravidian moved to the south from IVC and had a large presence in north india for a period before those populations shifted from Dravidian to IA. Additionally, the relative absence of Dravidian in the northeast also matches the relative absence of retroflexion in the northeast.
Assamese has lost it cuz the Assamese language was spoken, developed by people who speak *Tibetan-burman* languages as their mother tongue and use Assamese as their lingua of franca.
@@ashutosharora5885 nagamese is just a cerioal dialect of Assamese ( used by the the naga tribes as lingua of Franca ) just like how Assamese is used as lingua Franca by the Tibeto-burmanese tribes of assam. Also Assamese so not a ethincity in first place it's just a umbrella term for different communities.
FASCINATING! really enjoyed this. love your English orthography, too. :) the way the lower case "f" blends with the next character is beautiful and unique in my experience.
Nice. I'm very interested in historical linguistics and genetics too. I think retroflexion originates from the AASI, as both Andaman Islanders and Aboriginals have it, whilst Elamite does not (Distant Dravidian relative). Also Burushakshi, an isolate has retroflexions. So it seems the original foundation of the AASI gave it to the later superstrates. Most mtdna lineages in south Asia are AASI, whether north or south.
