India, Feb. 20 -- There was human habitation in India for thousands of years prior to the emergence of Sanskrit, and it is known that various languages existed; but we have no record of the languages that can help reconstruct the entire linguistic past. The earliest records of oral texts date to about 35 centuries before the present (BP), and the earliest records of writing date to 24 centuries BP.

While scripts had been in use in other parts of Asia, west of India for 50 centuries BP, why the Indian subcontinent took so long to get into lexical modes of expression has not yet been fully investigated. Undeciphered so far, the sign system of the Indus Valley civilisation makes any historical narrative of Indian languages incomplete and te...