I don't know the actual history of the term 'Indic'. However, I know pieces of it and why it's a bad idea to use the term.
1. The languages spoken in India are from very diverse language families with very different origins. The biggest group as of now is the Indo-Aryan subfamily of Indo-European. Dravidian languages are the next most spoken family of languages. Other languages belong to Austro-asiatic and Tibeto-Burman families. Some languages are language isolates.
2.
The reasons why the term Indic would have been applied are the following (I speculate here):
a) due to a number of cognates that exist due to centuries of substratum and ad stratum influence or false cognates that exist in any two languages, people mistakenly think of them as one family.
b) there's a prevalent mistaken belief about Sanskrit as a mother language of all languages (in India and elsewhere!). Saying Bengali came from Sanskrit is like saying chicken came out of crocodiles. Saying Konkani came out of Sanskrit is like saying whales evolved from sharks.
c)
there's one genuine reason, which is that, aside from the evolution of the languages themselves, scripts evolved in a more convergent fashion (not 100%).
3. Why is it not good to refer to all languages spoken in India as Indic languages?
a) The term Indic specifically referred to a certain sub family of languages.
b) People then tend lump together tools. The biggest casualty so far is the way unicode inherited inscript and messed up Tamil and Malayalam scripts for once.
4) Wherever possible, the accurate and unambiguous phrase "languages spoken in India" shall be used.
- Sundar
"That language is an instrument of human reason, and not merely a medium for the expression of thought, is a truth generally admitted."
- George Boole, quoted in Iverson's Turing Award Lecture
From: Vishnu t <visdaviva@gmail.com>
To: Wikimedia India Community list <wikimediaindia-l@lists.wikimedia.org>
Sent: Thursday, February 14, 2013 2:14 PM
Subject: Re: [Wikimediaindia-l] additions - Indian Languages question
Dear Tejaswini and Friends,
It is an interesting and pertinent issue. I do completely concur with Tejaswini on the problem of 'using philological classifications and terminology'. However, it will be interesting to track the history of how we have ended up with the term 'Indic', in the computing context. Do friends on the list know of any history of computing terms and how 'Indic' has come to be used?
Would be useful if any body can shed light on this and let us also put this up on Wikipedia.
The Wiktionary entry for 'Indic' is here
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Indic
Look forward to more conversations on this.
Regards,
Vishnu
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