Some context: Brahui is a language spoken in Pakistan that’s been a bit of a mystery till David McAlpin solved it with the proto-zagrosian hypothesis.
Brahui clearly looks like related to Dravidian, but didn’t fit into proto-dravidian or any reconstructed daughter languages of proto-dravidian. Simultaneously, the ancient language of Elamite looks a lot like Dravidian. (sidenote: there are cuneiform tablets written in elamite! Elam shows up prominently in the fall of Nineveh, the capital city of the super power of that era!)
The problem was chronology- Brahui is clearly older than the later descendants of Proto-Dravidian. Elamite is far older than the descendants of Proto-Dravidian. The question was how these two languages fit into the Dravidian family tree.
McAlpin’s 2015 hypothesis answers this question with a surprising and elegant idea: What if Brahui is related to Elamite instead of Dravidian?
He found that the pieces fit really well when you treat Elamite and Brahui as sibling languages descended from a parent language: Proto-Elamite. Next, he finds that Proto-Elamite and Proto-Dravidian cleanly fit as siblings descended from a mother language that he calls Proto-Zagrosian.
I’m not a linguist and I don’t know how well accepted this idea is among academic circles - but looking at this from outside, it seems to be a fairly well respected idea that’s being seriously considered by some academics.
PS: I did a google search for Proto-Zagrosian and the second result was my own comment on HN from a long time ago. I really wish there was more people writing/blogging about this.
[0]. https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C5&q=prot...
A proven connection between Dravidian and Elamite would kind of upend most perceived ideas in India about Dravidian versus Indo-European languages (namely, that Dravidian ones are more indigenous than Indo-European).
Also, this is very likely just a coincidence, but I realized that the Tamil word for homeland is...Eelam [1].
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Even though the link seems to imply that it's more Elamitic than Dravidian, the case of Brahui [1] is very interesting as an instance of a Dravidian-linked language that's very different in origin from its geographical neighbors.
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[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brahui_language