My Facebook post dated 7 July 2024

 Indo-European language families are broadly classified into two groups - centum and satem languages. Anatolian, Tocharian, Greek, Italic, Celtic and Germanic belonged to the "centum" group while Indo-Iranian, Baltic and Slavic belong to the "satem" group. Proto-Indo-European, of which Greek is the closest living relative, is believed to have been a "centum" language. So, a process of palatisation of the initial velar *c (pronounced "k") must've taken place in "satem" languages turning it into a *ch and eventually to a sibilant *s. Now, it is possible to observe such changes in languages of non-Indo-European language families, too. The intial *c in Tamil, for example, must've undergone a change in the reverse direction into the Kannada *k, as in *cevi (ear) to "kivi" and *cedalu (termite) to "geddalu".


Now, the linguist David Mcalpin who has championed the theory of Elamo-Dravidian family of languages proposes the idea that Brahui language evolved from an eastern dialect of Elamite with a *s to *c shift distinguishing the two. He derives the Brahui word *kar (shore, bank) from Elamite *sar, *kul (water, spring) from Elamite *zul, etc. Also, the word for wheat (cholum) changes from *solum in Elamite to *kolum in Brahui.

Bibliography

* McAlpin, David (1981), Proto-Elamo-Dravidian: The Evidence and its Implications, Philadelphia: The American Philosophical Society.
* McAlpin (2022), Modern Colloquial Eastern Elamite.

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