Talk:Mleccha

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Further, there is evidence that Indians of the Vedic period actually had contact with people outside of the subcontinent, namely the Persians. The Persians, who ruled over the Indus river valley during this time (522-486 BC) were not designated as mleccha, perhaps because they did not interfere with the brahmanical way of life.[33]

This statement from the article is patently false. The Persians (पारसिकैः/pārasikaiḥ) are referred to as one of the mlecchajātayaḥ (along with the yavana-s, kāmboja-s, etc.) in the bhīṣmaparva of a Javanese recension of the mahābhāratam:

उत्तराश्चापरम्लेच्छाः क्रूरा भरतसत्तम् यवनाश्चीनकाम्बोजा दारुणा म्लेच्छजातयः सकृद्रग्रहाः कुलत्थाश्च हूणः पारसिकैः सह तथैव रमणश्चिनास्तथैव दशमालीकाः

The madhyamakahṛdayakārikā of the bauddha-s also classifies the persians as mleccha-s. The only reference I can find in any Hindu scripture in which the pārasika-s are grouped differently from the mleccha-s is in the yājñavalkyadharmaśāstrasya vyākhyānam (aparāditya's bhāṣyam of the yājñavalkya smṛtiḥ), which states that if one touches a bhillaḥ, pārasīkaḥ, mlecchaḥ, caṇḍālaḥ, pāpī, etc., they should bathe with their clothes on (to prevent being "contaminated"). Jdhaliwal175 (talk) 22:35, 31 July 2014 (UTC)[reply]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sanskrit#Coexistence_with_vernacular_languages has pretty clear sources saying that sanskrit IS NOT the root language of other indian languages and always existed alongside prakrit. Can someone clean this up to reflect that? The second paragraph under Language has a few factual errors. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 72.227.175.56 (talk) 03:34, 1 April 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Sanskrit#Sanskrit and Prakrit languages doesn't actually say that. By 250 BC, when there are the first undisputed and datable texts in Prakrit dialects, there is no doubt that the language of the common people were Prakrit dialects, and (Classical) Sanskrit an essentially artificial language. However, that doesn't mean that a language like Sanskrit wasn't spoken at some point: it certainly was about 1000 years earlier, as confirmed by the Mitanni evidence (and also the Old Iranian texts, with their obvious similarity to the language of the Vedas). When the Rig-Veda was composed, around the same time, its language was certainly based on a spoken dialect, or dialects. Classical Sanskrit as codified by Panini was not a pure construction – it was based on the language of the Vedas, in addition to the Prakrit dialects, which certainly had some influence too.
The situation is much the same as in Medieval Europe, where (Medieval) Latin was very much analogous to Classical Sanskrit in Ancient India in its role, and the Romance languages like Old Occitan, Old French and Old Italian were the analogue of the Prakrit dialects. Latin, too, was once a spoken language, used as a natural language by the common people, too, at the time of Caesar and Cicero. Medieval Latin was not spoken by the common people and was not really a natural language, but largely artificial. But it wasn't invented out of whole cloth. It was based on Caesar's and Cicero's Latin. The language spoken by the common people at the time of Caesar and Cicero is also the ancestor of the Romance languages, just like the language spoken by the common people at the time of the composition of the Rig-Veda is the ancestor of the modern Indo-Aryan or Indic languages like Hindi, Bengali and Sinhala. To some extent, people appear to have perceived Sanskrit as a way to write and pronounce Prakrit "correctly" and Latin as a way to write and pronounce Romance "correctly", thinking of them not as wholly distinct languages. So I can see how the idea can arise that Sanskrit and Latin are not the "root languages" but artificially constructed or refined on the basis of the languages of the common people.
And strictly speaking, it is true that Sanskrit as in Classical Sanskrit is not the "root language". Classical Sanskrit was never the language of the common people, always (since it existed) coexisted with Prakrit, and Prakrit is not descended from it. What the Prakrit dialects are descended from is called Proto-Indo-Aryan, technically, spoken c. 1500 BC. (Mitanni Aryan did not directly descend from Proto-Indo-Aryan in the strict sense, but was an extremely close relative.) There are some differences between (reconstructed) Proto-Indo-Aryan and the language of the Rig-Veda, which is a little more recent, but they are very few and subtle, and overall Proto-Indo-Aryan is extremely similar to the language of the Rig-Veda – which is technically speaking a dialect of Old Indo-Aryan, as opposed to the Prakrit dialects, which are also known as the Middle Indo-Aryan dialects. So, yes, it is true that Classical Sanskrit coexisted with the language of the common people, the Prakrit dialects – but that doesn't mean that this situation had always been the case, since deep prehistory; because after all, obviously it changed later, and human evolution being the way it is, must have changed at some point before, a point that can't be very deep in the past since natural languages spoken by the common people change comparably rapidly, whenever we can observe them, and do not stay the same over several centuries, let alone millennia.
The disagreement is actually about something else: in (say) 250 BC, did anyone actually speak (Classical) Sanskrit? It's entirely possible that learned people actually did, just like Medieval Latin was spoken by some scholars and clerics at least. I do find it difficult to imagine philosophical debates conducted in Prakrit rather than the obvious choice, Sanskrit, true, especially considering that Prakrit must have lacked a lot of technical vocabulary, at least at the time (it eventually underwent a similar refinement as Sanskrit had experienced – though influenced by Sanskrit –, as the language of the common people in turn again developed away from Middle Indo-Aryan). And the common people may well have understood Sanskrit to some extent. --Florian Blaschke (talk) 21:15, 9 July 2019 (UTC)[reply]

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Brahmanas vs brahmanas vs brahmins (?)[edit]

I have a nagging suspicion that in some cases it should be not the Brahmanas but the brahmins. And in others, while correct, the capitalization is wrong.
1. The Brahmanas place mlecchas outside the varna system - probably fine.
2. in order to perform sacrifice and ritual in the religion of the brahmanas - brahmins?
3. "The best experts of the sacrificial art were undoubtedly the various families of the brahmanas who, placed in a hierarchy within the Indo-Aryan social system, became the upholders of pure and best speech" (a quote!) - brahmins?
4. which would ultimately be judged by the brahmanas - brahmins? Brahmanas?--Adûnâi (talk) 17:52, 23 January 2019 (UTC)[reply]

I have changed 3 and 4 to "Brahmins". I am not sure about 2. -- Kautilya3 (talk) 18:06, 23 January 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Franklin Southworth's derivation[edit]

There has been consistent removal of Franklin Southworth's derivation of the word. He postulates that its derived from a Proto Dravidian word for language that was borrowed by Indo-Aryan speakers to indicate anyone who speaks an unintelligible language. Kanatonian (talk)

@ThaThinThaKiThaTha: You have been removing fully cited sentence, giving spurious reasons, Please indicate why you feel the citation is wrongly attributed ? Kanatonian (talk) 16:33, 8 February 2021 (UTC)[reply]
I already explained in edit summary. The citation doesn't refer to Mleccha, it's referring to Tamil. That's not a spurious reasoning! Have you read the source? Show me the full quote! ThaThinThaKiThaTha (talk) 16:58, 8 February 2021 (UTC)[reply]
@ThaThinThaKiThaTha: This is what he says "name mleccha comes from miḻi- "speak, one's speech", derived from one of the Dravidian languages and related to the etymology of the word Tamiḻ" This exactly from the citation. You are removing a fully cited sentence based on your opinion of the citation, you dont have access to the citation, it looks like. This qualifies as WP:Vandalism. Kanatonian (talk) 17:07, 8 February 2021 (UTC)[reply]
Of course I've no access to that journal, nobody has. You would have to purchase it in Kerala. You are using a quote from a 3rd party, Srinivasan Kalyanaraman, a well known history revisionist's, webpage. If the quote was true, we would see this derivation in linguistic non-journal sources. Have you originally added this material in the article? ThaThinThaKiThaTha (talk) 17:16, 8 February 2021 (UTC)[reply]
I added that in 2012 and at the same time I also added the citation to the etymology Tamil article in 2012, so this is after 9 years, and this is not going go away just because you decided to delete the fully cited citation. Kanatonian (talk) 17:29, 8 February 2021 (UTC)[reply]
Assuming that this book is the one in question, I have requested it through my regional library network and should have it within the next 14 days. Please ping me if I don't get back to you two by then. M Imtiaz (talk · contribs) 17:34, 8 February 2021 (UTC)[reply]
@M Imtiaz: I have that book, its not that book in question, its the journal article. Kanatonian (talk) 17:36, 8 February 2021 (UTC)[reply]
Ah, oopsies. I will now request that article through my university; it should be ready within a day or two. M Imtiaz (talk · contribs) 17:39, 8 February 2021 (UTC)[reply]
I would be really surprised if your university had this journal paper, but thank you very much for your dedication.ThaThinThaKiThaTha (talk) 17:45, 8 February 2021 (UTC)[reply]
I had access to the paper in 2012, I will get it again Kanatonian (talk) 18:04, 8 February 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Well, good news: the article has arrived! Bad (?) news: I could not find a single paragraph in it that comes anywhere close to mentioning the term mleccha. Kanatonian, are you sure you didn't accidentally cite the wrong article in 2012? M Imtiaz (talk · contribs) 15:28, 11 February 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Its possible, can you email me the article. I can forward you my email to your account. Kanatonian (talk) 16:58, 11 February 2021 (UTC)[reply]
We should remove that sentence, but I found another citation, Aloka Parasher, ‘Mleccha-A possible Proto Dravidian Etymology”, Proceedings of South Indian History Congress; Tirupati, 1984. Until I source that, we should remove Franklins citations. Kanatonian (talk) 17:16, 11 February 2021 (UTC)[reply]
Footnote #6 on page 131 of Southworth (snippet on Google Books) - "This word has been implicated by several scholars in the origin of OLA mleccha' barbarian, foreigner, non - Aryan". 192.131.249.235 (talk) 17:22, 11 February 2021 (UTC)[reply]
Thank you for that, for a second I thought I was loosing my marbles, so its there but in the foot note Kanatonian (talk) 17:33, 11 February 2021 (UTC)[reply]
Journals are not the highest quality sources. I still don't think, that the source directly supports the statement in the article. If you feel, it's supported, feel free to keep the sentence in the article as is.ThaThinThaKiThaTha (talk) 17:55, 11 February 2021 (UTC)[reply]
Er, my bad, sorry for not noticing that footnote, Kanatonian. ThaThinThaKiThaTha, if journals are not the highest-quality sources, what are? As far as any discrepancy between the source and the sentence as present is concerned, I think the solution is to change "comes from" to "is related to", which is a better representation of the wording of the footnote in my opinion. M Imtiaz (talk · contribs) 19:02, 11 February 2021 (UTC)[reply]
Journals are basically like newspapers for scientists, where papers are presented very roughly to a larger audience. In the case of "Mleccha" a well formulated and reasoned text presented in an academic work on the Sanskrit language, peer-reviewed and with good reputation, would be considered a high quality source. ThaThinThaKiThaTha (talk) 19:16, 11 February 2021 (UTC)[reply]
Are we conflating academic conference publications with Academic Journals Kanatonian (talk) 22:34, 11 February 2021 (UTC)[reply]

I didn't realize this was still controversial. The deriviation is also given Southworth's book:

mleccha ‘barbarian, foreigner, non-Aryan, stammerer’ FB; mlecchati ‘speaks an ununderstandable language’ FB (cf. Pali milakkha, Pkt miliccha etc.) ← PD *muzi/mizi ‘say, speak, utter’; *muzankk ‘make noise, speak’ DEDR 4989; see dravida in 3.22(4). M53: MIA variations point to a foreign word or tribal name as the most plausible source, M86: unclear. (But see Witzel 1999b: 38.)

"PD" means "prot-Dravidian". I will add a citation to the main page. -- Kautilya3 (talk) 14:18, 12 February 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Thank you Kanatonian (talk) 22:08, 25 February 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Suspicious edit by User:Aman.kumar.goel[edit]

https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Mleccha&diff=prev&oldid=1115448401 Batlonsh7 (talk) 07:25, 12 October 2022 (UTC)[reply]

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